MDN Plus

The only 3rd party requests I see on their pages are Google analytics and a CDN'd js lib. Hell yes I'll throw them some cash if they'll keep their core product free for folks who don't use it often/can't afford it. I'd love to see them get rid of google analytics even, but compared to most it's pretty clean.

What pisses me off is when someone like a newspaper will start charging AND keep 4 TB of tracking garbage every single page load. Get lost.

The only good offering here is available as part of the $10/month "Supporter" plan, a "direct feedback channel to the MDN team." The video describes that as "regular chats with MDN engineers."

Shockingly, this isn't even listed as a featured bullet on the plan list. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/plus#subscribe The only bulleted advantages of paying $10/month are, "Early access to new features" and "Pride and joy."

As others have noted here, none of the "Plus" features are very useful: Collections, Notifications, and Offline support. Collections are just bookmarks, which all browsers do for free. Notifications are pointless, because all of the pages are on Github; you can subscribe to notifications there (but why would you even want to??). And I approximately never need to use MDN when I'm offline.

We know how to do this "correctly." MDN Plus should be a VIP pass to access the MDN team, via a private forum and/or chat room. Talk to (survey) the paying users for what new material they're interested in, and provide that.

This is how basically all Patreons work. People buy those subscriptions like hotcakes, they have excellent margins, and the subscribers are reliably very satisfied with the result.

EDIT: Buyer beware, I just signed up for the plan, and all it does is add a "Feedback" menu item that links to https://github.com/mdn/MDN-feedback … but that's a public repo. Anyone can file an issue there. I certainly did, and I'm not happy about it. https://github.com/mdn/MDN-feedback/issues/43

There's no Discord, no forum, no mailing list, no scheduled upcoming fireside chat… just a public Github repo where you can file an issue and hope for a response.

Nice, now can they finally stop taking money from Google? :)

"The new search deal will ensure Google remains the default search engine provider inside the Firefox browser until 2023 at an estimated price tag of around $400 million to $450 million per year."

"Mozilla's long-term plan is to build its own revenue streams from subscription-based services and reduce its dependence on the Google search deal" [0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/sources-mozilla-extends-its-go...

Currently seems paying market rates and not getting competent leadership, so something seems amiss.

Donations are all fine and dandy, but there are some problems:

- Getting people to donate in a recurring fashion is exceedingly hard. Not impossible (as some patreons prove), but still hard.

- Getting businesses to donate at all, let alone in a recurring fashion, is even harder.

mdn needs money, not just for content, but to keep the lights on. Their content is furthermore aimed largely at "professionals" (and some enthusiasts), meaning convincing businesses to give money is even more important than e.g. is the case with wikipedia or your random youtube content creator.

Businesses are easier to convince to spend money if you offer them something in return. Doesn't really have to be much or something particularly valuable, just something, anything really, that then can be used to justify the expense to management/comptrollers/legal/owners as a "valid" expense.

I personally had people contact me in the past, on more than one occasion, saying they made good use of some code I open sourced in their commercial stuff, and they'd like to gift me something, but they cannot get permission from their employer to transfer any funds unless I formally enter a "consulting" contract (and NDA and yadayada) or officially sell them something. So the best they could do is offer me some company swag and/or a small donation out of their own pocket. So now I own a bunch of T-Shirts and coffee mugs from various companies :P (and I am OK with that, since I never had the intention to profit from that code).

So creating some easy "premium features" may indeed enable mdn to collect more money, especially from businesses, compared to them just asking for donations.

It remains to be seen if that will work for mdn, and if mdn will then use the money "wisely", but I really cannot fault them for their approach so far...