cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/27733087
Social networking startup and X competitor Bluesky is working on subscriptions. The company first announced plans to develop a new revenue stream based on the subscription model when detailing its $15 million Series A back in October. Now, mockups teasing the upcoming Bluesky subscription, along with a list of possible features, have been published to Bluesky’s GitHub.
While a lot of us hate ads and subscriptions, I have the unpopular opinion that they are generally still viable considering the state of how we use the internet today.
The thing is, I think that if there are ads, there should be the ability to pay to remove them, and if there is a subscription, there should be an ad-based tier as an alternative.
Let your users choose, respect their preference for funding model, and allow them to choose if they want to support a given monetization policy.
Of course, seeing as how they raised $15m from VCs, I doubt this will be nothing but what will inevitably devolve into a pay-for-reach scheme similar to Twitter Blue (or, sorry “X Premium”) that just leads to those with wealth getting more engagement, and a louder voice.
I’ve never seen an ad-based tier on a Mastodon instance and they do just fine 🤷♂️
Server hardware isn’t free. At the end of the day, SOMEONE has to pay the bills. Either you are the customer, or the product. If you insist on being the product, you don’t get to be surprised when platforms focus on the actual customers that actually pay the bills, by enshittifying the platform.
Among every server that “do just fine,” there are more instances that are just gone for not having proper funding, especially for non-Western instance where paying for social media in not a common thing. I’m from Indonesian, and almost every Indonesian instance are cease to exist except for Misskey.id.
While Mastodon does not support ads, other fediverse software like Misskey support it. Misskey.io, the second biggest fedi instance after Mastodon.social, runs ads and subscription simutaniously.
Their ads is merely community ads. Letting their community promote their indie games, manga serialization, artbook release, online event gathering, etc. I think that might be replicatable for Western instance like Mastodon.art or Pixelfed.art.
However I don’t see blue sky following this model, I do support user funded content and It’s infuriating that we as an open source community have to recreate it time and time again. Large corporations buy up the social media and monetize it and mine it for metadata and AdSense. Meta, alphabet, Microsoft and to a greater sense now OpenAI.
Because most mastodon instances are running off donations, and have a relatively small user base.
The kind of people who use Mastodon are substantially more likely to be heavily invested in the technology and the vision, and thus more likely to donate.
Expand that out to the billions of people who use social media, and you have a funding problem.
Not to mention the much lesser need for moderation due to more homogeneous and well-intentioned micro communities and substantially lower rate of bots, which all means less “staff” you have to pay too.
It’s not a matter of minimum viability, it’s a matter of scale.
Ads and monetization have ruined the internet compared to what it was. Early Internet was completely without ads, and things were run by people who were actually interested in the content presented, not in profits.
I have donated a couple of times to Lemmy.world, because servers and work is needed for it to work. But I refuse to accept any ads anywhere. Ads do NOT improve content IMO, it merely concentrates content with commercial sites.
How early are we talking here? If you mean pre-Web, in the Usenet era it was standard practice to pay a subscription to join a Usenet server. If you mean the early Web, ads were already everywhere by the mid-90s.
There’s distinction between targeted ads and community ads.
Mainstream internet is bad for targeted ads and for-profit site that plaster ads as maximum as possible.
Fediverse instance like Misskey.io runs ads, but all of them community ads. Letting their community promote their indie games, manga serialization, artbook release, online event gathering, etc.
The early internet also couldn’t provide most of the larger sites and platforms we now use. As it grew, it had to monetize in order to actually operate. If you want something outside the scope of a passion project, you need funding outside the scope of a passion project. The early internet did so well with people who actually cared because they didn’t have to operate platforms that couldn’t just care. They were operating things like personal sites and chatrooms, not social networks, document editors, or newsrooms.
Federated servers with donation-based models can function as of now, but you’d have a hard time covering hosting costs if every normal social media user began using federated platforms. There’s simply too many of them.
I’m not saying ads improve content, I’m not saying they’re the best model, and if you refuse to accept ads anywhere, that’s fine, but sites simply can’t all provide services for free, and if we want sites with the same functionality we have today, they need to monetize somehow.
Donations are definitely an option (I mean, hey, look at Wikipedia) but it isn’t necessarily viable for every online venture. For a lot of platforms, monetization must be compelled in some way, whether it’s by pushing ads, or paywalling with a subscription. The best option a platform can offer if it’s not capable of just running off donations alone is to let users choose the monetization they prefer to deal with.
There is no larger site the internet wouldn’t be better without.
Google, Meta, Twitter, Youtube are all part of the monetization disease.
The internet scaled on the back of subscribers, not big monetization, which frankly suck performance with tracking and ads rather than adding to it.
We are on Lemmy, and lemmy would obviously work even better without competition from big monetized platforms.
Communities doing passion projects serve the project. Without youtube we could have alternatives that worked better, because Youtube wouldn’t be there to attract all the attention.
Back in the day we had indexing sites, fora, and also search before google. All things that helped finding interesting sites. The interesting sites of passion projects have become rare. And almost the entire internet is now driven for profit instead of interest and passion. I tell you, I can really see the difference, there is 100 times more irrelevant noise for the same amount of content.
You’re targeting the larger sites as they exist, not the concepts and underlying functionality.
If you want social media, no matter if it’s Lemmy or Reddit, it costs a hell of a lot of money to host that. If you wanted social media, even a federated model like Lemmy or Mastodon to actually scale to all the people that are otherwise using other sites like Meta’s, you have to fund it somehow, and those funding models change at scale.
I’m not saying needing money like this is good, but it’s simply objectively difficult to fund any platform, for any purpose, when handling so many users. The only reason Lemmy and other federated platforms are funded so well right now is because they can be done at a hobbyist level, for a hobbyist cost, in most cases.
Once you scale up to the whole world, your funding model simply has to change. Donations can work, but they’re much more difficult to get working than either ads or subscriptions in terms of securing long-term funding at scale.
The problem is that today ads are against privacy so the ad-tier are really invasive in term of tracking and because their services tracks you when using ad-tier they will when using noad-tier. For example if you pay YouTube premium you’ll not have ads in YouTube but your consumption habits will serve google ads services to serve you ads on all almost all sites of the world
True, but that’s a matter of technical implementation that I believe should be changed along with any proposed change to monetization models like I’d previously mentioned.
For instance, the site should delay ad loading until you pick “yes, I want to see ads,” or if you pick “I have a subscription” and sign in, it shouldn’t load them at all.
This isn’t impossible to do, it’s just something they haven’t made as an easy implementation yet, since things like Google’s ad services auto-load when a page is loaded, since no site really has a mechanism to manually enable or disable the core requests to Google based on user input.
You’re right, I fought that people are exasperated of seeing ads but when they are not present BUT their system is tracking you the same way, so people are okay with it as long as nothing pop on their screen. Loading trackers in the background or not.
One of the big problems with the 2 tier system you describe, is the most valuable users to advertisers are the ones with the type of money to pay for a subscription to not see ads. So by having an ad free version, you are devaluing your platform to advertisers. I’m not saying the 2 tier system can’t work, it does for plenty of things, but it is why a lot of websites don’t offer it, or avoid it for as long as possible.
Where have you heard about that?
I can think of a counter example in how Netflix is boasting about the revenue of its cheaper ad tier.
The problem with ads is advertisers want to be able to target specific groups of people, which means the platform needs to violate your privacy to get that information.
It’s not violating your privacy when you agree to let them access all your data in the EULA. That’s why they exist.
Those EULAs aren’t enforceable in the EU