This post has a very naive understanding of online advertising. Here's a breakdown: - If you're thinking of advertising in terms of just slapping on some Google Adsense then you need high amounts (millions of users per month) of traffic to make reasonable money. - If you're thinking of specific kinds of targeted advertising, this can be very powerful depending on your niche. If you can hire a sales team to push adver…
I have a site that has around 4-5m visits per month, yet all attempts to monetize it have failed. I'd love to use Amazon's referral program or Google Ads, but I can't because the site's content is somewhere between reddit and 4chan - deemed too shady for anything else than porn ads. So, the site still remains a hobby project - exactly as when I launched it 6 years ago.
Require passing a CAPTCHA in order to post.
Allow users to buy a code that will let them post without passing a CAPTCHA.
Accept bitcoins to avoid payment providers' prejudices and help users remain anonymous if desired.
Of course, you want to add some limits to discourage people from publishing their codes. For example, a rate limit on posts (with a slightly more generous burst allowance, e.g. you get 10 CAPTCHA-less posts / hour, but if you don't use them, up to 100 CAPTCHA-less posts are automatically "saved" in your token's reserve). Or a limit on the IP addresses, e.g. whenever a code is used on more than one or two unique IP's within a short time, lock it out. And of course the gold standard: Manual monitoring for spam, illegalities or other ToS violations, punished by account cancellation (and referral to law enforcement for extreme cases).
You could sweeten the deal with custom markup: Make posts by paying users be a different color or something, to show they support the site. Or if users have a traditional forum account (as opposed to anonymous posting), add an icon or something to their profile.
If I was implementing this, I'd have three tiers: The "cheap tier" (around $5) for just CAPTCHA-less posting. The "medium tier" (around $15) for CAPTCHA-less posting and a note in your profile that you're a supporter. The "high tier" ($40-$60) for different-colored posts.
If you want to know why I suggest three tiers, Joel on Software has a post that explains it very well [1].
[1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckie...