[shirai]

Forgot to answer the question.

Feels like we have two options for making money.

1. Focus on the viral aspect and charge for upgrades like backup, long version control history, more templates, more pages, PDF conversion, larger file uploads, etc.

2. Focus on the enterprise and make it like an Enterprise wiki. Make features more suited for Intranets. Make it a pure pay product. We feel we have a big win in this field for the typical user because of our obsession with ease of use.

Sunny

[maukdaddy]

Forget enterprises. They have too many wants/needs/requirements (usually they don't really need the features, but I digress...). Focus on consumers and users that are willing to pay for upgraded features.

[nl]

Don't go enterprise. The sales cycle will kill you.

If this was my service I'd do the following: 1) Everyone runs ads, you get the revenue (no revenue split) 2) Charge $5/month to take ads off 3) Charge $10/year for custom domains (make you you get a good affiliate deal for domain name reg, too) 4) Charge $XXX/year for large traffic sites (where XXX gives you a good profit on your costs)

Nice job, BTW.

[famousactress]

3. Let users make money off ads on their page and take a cut?

[shirai]

Thanks, that's a great idea and something we are considering as well. It would be nice if we could make money off of premium features but the ad-sharing would let us at least pay the bandwidth costs.

Sunny

[nl]

Make your first premium feature the ability to take ads off it.

[qbert]

I agree more with nl who posted above. Run ads on all sites by default, no rev split then charge users to remove ads.

A former company of mine did this. Many users hate ads on their personal sites and will gladly pay a reasonable amount to have them removed. Many also have no interest in making money off their sites. Besides doing a rev share complicates things a lot more.

[VMG]

helloooooo spammers

[webwright]

The wordpress.com model is pretty tried and true (and making huge money), but it only works at pretty tremendous scale, I think. http://en.wordpress.com/products/

From what I understand, ads perform pretty poorly on blog sites (very little intent). That being said, you COULD try to go niche (say, make the best "blogging about products" platform and intent of the reader might be radically different).

[runT1ME]

> more templates, more pages

Golden. Imagine every startup company that will sign up for a free site, then they get a bit more successful and want more than three pages or whatnot.

Same with the people who go from casual blogging to putting out a ton of posts.

[jakecarpenter]

What about education & higher ed? Seems like an enterprise wide (or district-wide, or campus-wide) tool for making dead simple webpages would be a killer way to spice up any class.