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Ask HN: How would you monetize a dubious website (e.g. 4chan)?

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Re: Ask HN: How would you monetize a dubious website (e.g. 4chan)?

#11

Post by ben1040 »

tlholaday wrote: post #6

SomethingAwful's solution: membership & service fees. Sell badges. Sell archive-power, e.g. for US$0.10, you can prevent this thread from being pruned for ten minutes.

SA is pretty brilliant in how they charge $5 for changing your avatar image, something which 99% of other popular forums let you do for free. For $10, you can change another user's title. If you get in a flame war with a guy with ten bucks to spare, he can buy you an embarrassing title/image. You have to either live with that or cough up the $5 to change it back.

Re: Ask HN: How would you monetize a dubious website (e.g. 4chan)?

#12

Post by HNer »

ben1040 wrote: post #11
tlholaday wrote: post #6

SomethingAwful's solution: membership & service fees. Sell badges. Sell archive-power, e.g. for US$0.10, you can prevent this thread from being pruned for ten minutes.

SA is pretty brilliant in how they charge $5 for changing your avatar image, something which 99% of other popular forums let you do for free. For $10, you can change another user's title. If you get in a flame war with a guy with ten bucks to spare, he can buy you an embarrassing title/image. You have to either live with that or cough up the $5 to change it back.

This idea is actually very clever. This is the basic concept to make money from free, 1st you solve a problem and generate plenty of traffic, 2nd you indirectly or directly create a secondary problem for your users. This is the part you monitise. According to the variables and the ticks you use to create the secondary pain, will adjust the revenues you make.

Re: Ask HN: How would you monetize a dubious website (e.g. 4chan)?

#15

Post by joshu »

mishmash wrote: post #2

4chan likely makes much more money than is reported.. with moot putting forward this broke-kid image, I would think he becomes a much smaller target for the various entities, laws, and copyrights they trample on. It's sort of like how the IFPI used the "profitable" motive in it's arguments against the Pirate Bay. Poor people make poor lawsuit targets.

This is not correct. It is very expensive to host, which chews up the profits.

Re: Ask HN: How would you monetize a dubious website (e.g. 4chan)?

#16

Post by fragmede »

pinksoda wrote: post #8
fragmede wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arguable, poor people make great targets because they're less likely to be able to defend themselves.

Those people are "judgment proof" because even if you get a judgment that says they owe you a billion dollars, you'll never collect a dime.

That's step 1.

Step 2 is using the billion dollar judgement as a precedent when suing people with a little bit of money.

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