[tombert]

I don’t think it would necessarily have to be six bucks a month.

Something Awful is a one time fee of ten bucks (a few bucks more to get rid of ads).

I wouldn’t really mind a one-time fee for a lot of sites if it meant that they didn’t have to do a bunch of advertising bullshit,

[flax]

Yes, but the Awful registration fee is more like a speedbump to make banned behavior at least a little expensive to the offending users. Most of the revenue comes from completely optional aesthetic purchases: avatars, avatars _for others_, smilies, etc. I suspect it's a whale based economy.

[tombert]

True, I think it was more sort of a natural filter than explicitly revenue for the website.

Still, I would be willing to pay a bit more for a website that I actually like if it's a one-time fee; I actually paid for the "Platinum" membership for Something Awful so that I would have access to search, and a custom icon, so I think the total damage was around $30.

Dunno, I guess I just feel like people will pay for things if those things don't suck. I think the fact that the only way that companies can really compete for people's time is giving it away for free [1] is a testament that most stuff on the internet is actually kind of shit.

[1] yeah I know something something you are the product something something.

ETA: I hate self-promotion but a friend of mine told me I should mention that I did write a blog post talking about this very specific example: https://blog.tombert.com/Posts/Personal/2026/02-February/Peo...

[IAmBroom]

> whale based economy

Please explain this term. Google was not useful.

[pixl97]

Also look up K shaped economies at the same time and you get a better answer.

But the gist of it is, companies do free to play systems that support themselves by a very small portion of their user base spending a very large amount of money. The free/low paying users find themselves with poor/no service as the companies do anything to attract more whales.

K based economies are somewhat related as you see a very small portion of the participants in an economy make a huge amount of money while everyone else gets poor.

[autoexec]

Whales are the tiny percentage of users who spend large amounts of actual money on bullshit non-products offered by mobile apps and online platforms. AKA suckers.

[account42]

Or addicts and people with other mental issues that make them easy to prey upon.