WanderLemmy is CEO-proof. After Digg, Reddit and Twitter, that term should be a thing
RobOne thing that’ll need serious consideration:
I feel like it’s inevitable that Lemmy will get an advertisement module that admins can enable. Alternative monetisation methods can also work, such as subscriptions. But users will have to realise that servers aren’t free.
If you’re an admin for a small community and are willing to carry the burden: great. If you’re hosting a community that can support itself by donations: also great. But sooner or later we’ll need some ways to make servers sustainable.
(Not a fan of advertisements and would prefer to be a paying user, but as Lemmy takes off we shouldn’t look down on admins trying to mitigate their expenses).
croobatI will tell this nonstop, online advertisement (as a form of monetization) is pretty damn dated nowadays. You could give them literally a dollar every year and they would make more from you than serving you ads.
Unpopular opinion: I kinda feel like a reason ads are so popular nowadays is because it gives the user a way of feeling they are supporting a product/creator by doing pretty much anything.
I think pitching in a dollar every year is preferable. Heck, I even pay much more to Youtube to get rid of advertisements. But it does pose a significant threshold for new users.
A hybrid model doesn’t sound too bad to me, where you can pay for an ad free server.
Get a VPN to India or Turkey (there are likely a bunch of other countries too). It’s a lot cheaper: I pay around £1.50 (RS129) a month
The ad industry is really secretive in general. There aren't many studies proving that targeted advertising even works. If the data was even slightly in the ad industry's favor, they'd release it. Their entire job is spinning things to look good.
I suspect that targeted advertising was invented to justify the existence of advertising companies as middlemen. Take for example the ExplainXKCD wiki. They just serve their own ads which are usually for tech products trying to reach Sysadmins.