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by promiseofbeans 1042 days ago
Immoral, but profitable:

- Put ads on the site

- Force people to give you their email to see results, then sell the mailing list

- Collect as much information about the user as you can, compile it with the photos of them that they've given you, and sell it

- Add amazon affiliate links to anti-balding products (least immoral of the lot)

Not immoral, but won't make you much money:

- Paywall

- Beg for donations

2 comments

Thanks for the list. Affiliate links for anti balding products is ok imo, my moral sense allows me to do it at least haha.

I contribute to open source and by experience begging for donations does not work much unfortunately.

Rest assured, if you make money from it, someone will accuse you of immorality.

"Good people" are supposed to give it all away for free and then feel bad about being "lazy" when they can't pay their own bills. ;)

Good people sell good products without telling someone they look like crap.
>- Put ads on the site

I don't think this is immoral. Ads are a perfectly legitimate business model.

This feels like a situation where the ads could be highly targeted. Highly relevant ads can be pretty helpful.
It gives a bad incentive to the operator to exaggerate baldness risk. "Early stages of balding buy this hair product!" Probably sells more product than "you're perfectly fine, congrats".

I agree it's not unethical to honestly sell ads though.

Affiliate links for fancy hair care products if it doesn't come up balding?
Yea I mostly agree. I am thinking about adding affiliate links.
Affiliate links are fine too as long as they're disclosed as such.