| Micropayments are not an option right now due to the friction: no one is
going to give you their payment information. It requires a large amount
of trust. One particular advertising model I like is internal advertising. I've
been brainstorming a business model to compete with a webcomics ranking
service that removes the need to rely on external advertising services
(Project Wonderful, Google AdSense, etc.). In my opinion, this is the
least intrusive monetization strategy. Since your ideal users would be generating content, with the intention
of having as many people as possible view and interact with their
content, you should use this to your advantage. Instead of
advertisements, you have "curated content". Since you have a wealth of
internal data (from, say running Piwik analytics) and can categorize
the content on your service, content creators can pay to have their
stories presented to users, beyond whatever free presentation they get. Meanwhile, you can return some of that overall money to reward content
creators based on the number of users they've generated, or perhaps
users returning on a normal basis. This should incentivize better
content. The downside to this model is that you already need a sizeable
viewership for any creators to pay for sponsorship. You'd have to invest
heavily in your service before you get any returns at all, especially
since you have to attract quality content creators. In the first 6 months or so, I'd imagine any "rewards" would have to be
given out of your personal finances, since you won't have people
throwing money at you until the rewards for purchasing sponsorship are
tangible. Advertising isn't much better in terms of income, however. You make almost no money
when your userbase is small, and the adverts tend to make users think
less of your site (and not come back). (Disclaimer: I have never tried this before, although I intend to. I
also doubt I'm the first to think of this model.) |