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2M users but no money in the bank

exercism.org

251–260 of 367 posts

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#251
> The one area we have had some promising success is in advertising on the site. But the effort it takes to find advertisers and manage them, and my general desire not to flood Exercism with adverts, has meant that I feel this isn't a very sustainable strategy.

To me that begs the obvious question... what about trying some automated advertising like Google Ads? Probably not the most theoretically optimum use of their ad space, but minimal effort is involved.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#252

I was doing some Exercism tasks the other day and then saw this so if only felt right that I make a donation. Looking at some of the comments there seems to be a number of people who have also just made a donation. Given the state of every service becoming subscription based, I can definitely see a lot of subscription fatigue. Maybe an alternative route you could try is the annual wikipedia "We want to keep this free…

Subscriptions are a pain for sure, but I think a big reason for that is that they are always something like $10-20 a month. For something that people might only use occasionally that's just too much. If they were instead maybe $20 a year and easy to cancel, I think a lot of people would sign up.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#253
post #251

> The one area we have had some promising success is in advertising on the site. But the effort it takes to find advertisers and manage them, and my general desire not to flood Exercism with adverts, has meant that I feel this isn't a very sustainable strategy. To me that begs the obvious question... what about trying some automated advertising like Google Ads? Probably not the most theoretically optimum use of their…

so basically letting google be their business???

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#256
post #251

> The one area we have had some promising success is in advertising on the site. But the effort it takes to find advertisers and manage them, and my general desire not to flood Exercism with adverts, has meant that I feel this isn't a very sustainable strategy. To me that begs the obvious question... what about trying some automated advertising like Google Ads? Probably not the most theoretically optimum use of their…

That probably requires investment in good content moderation and monitoring the account. There are people out there who like to report anything that violates T&C or create such violations themselves and then report them. Either for the kick or could be done by competition.

What I am trying to say, there is no free lunch.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#258
I've completed Exercism courses and they are great.

One thing that was obvious to me is that if you want to focus on a specific topic the $15/month subscription is too cheap, you can pay, take the course, cancel because you are done with the course, all within the month.

The other thing that is challenging is that the majority of programmer is either too cheap or "too broke", $15 USD is a meaningful amount of money in other countries with weaker currency, and in countries with strong currency I've met people paying thousands for a university diploma, doing a well paid internship that "could not afford exercism". That's though, I hope I never have to build a business for software developers.

All of that shared experience comes from 3-4 years ago, so prices, models might have changed since that, but if they go under it's sad, their UI and their UX was so clean, fun, interactive, pleasant, etc, it was a joy to study using their material.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#259
Exercism looks really cool! Have you thought of reaching out to philanthropists, particularly in tech? Just a wild guess but I believe there would be at least 1 wealthy individual out there willing to donate money for this cause.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#260
post #252

I was doing some Exercism tasks the other day and then saw this so if only felt right that I make a donation. Looking at some of the comments there seems to be a number of people who have also just made a donation. Given the state of every service becoming subscription based, I can definitely see a lot of subscription fatigue. Maybe an alternative route you could try is the annual wikipedia "We want to keep this free…

Subscriptions are a pain for sure, but I think a big reason for that is that they are always something like $10-20 a month. For something that people might only use occasionally that's just too much. If they were instead maybe $20 a year and easy to cancel, I think a lot of people would sign up.

Yeah that's a fair point. A modest annual fee is probably the way to go, especially since exercism is a service you dip in and out of (at least I do).
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