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I run an old collaborative writing (roleplaying) forum populated mostly by teens that's paid for by a banner ad.

When I read HN comments about ads, I see people who are forgetting what ads have actually gotten us: more people able to create more things that are available to everyone for free.

HNers like to say "well, then adapt your business model," but look at the incredibly friction that exists for getting people to take their wallet out. On the frontpage of HN as we speak, there's an entire thread of people who justify why they won't even pay Spotify $10/mo. Where does that leave the rest of us who offer something much, much less than a ubiquitous, unlimited music-streaming platform?

Let's be more concrete and look at the forum that I run. I grew up on roleplaying MUD servers and forums, and it helped me develop the passion and habit for writing early on in my life. I started a forum as a teen to continue the interest, and eventually it was popular enough for ads to pay my rent through uni while running a community for young writers.

These days, my banner ad barely breaks even with server costs. It now makes less than 1/15th of what it did at the peak of its ad revenue with about the same traffic.

I'm left with a decision: can I afford to run the site as a charity?

How would the HN champion of "adapt or die" address my scenario? Ads are a middle ground between being a charity and paywalling your website, and the vast majority of websites don't fall at either extreme. Suggesting that this massive chunk on the internet doesn't deserve to exist, like my forum that gets teens into writing, seems incredibly extreme.

The writing is on the wall, though. Just seems like a damn shame.

I've run a similar role playing style site since middle school. It introduced me to more than just a habit of writing. It also introduced me to programming at a young age and in a community and school system where that would not have happened otherwise.

I run mine as a charity now. Its less than 200 dollars a year. The ads just aren't even worth keeping up. Before and during college, when I couldn't afford the 200, I solicited donations from former users who had used the site as a teen but since grew out of it. That worked really well.

Good luck.

The problem isn't ads per se, it's all the crap around them:

  * invasive, industrial grade stalking
  * wasted screen real estate 
  * trackers
  * page load time 
  * bloated third-party garbage
  * blinkenlights
  * dark patterns
  * bandwidth hogging
  * CPU hogging
  * drive-by-malware potential (compromised ad network is an incredibly powerful attack vector)

And so on. Quite a long time ago I actually wrote down what I consider the minimum standard for acceptable ads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10521930 ; anything more intrusive is as good as toxic waste.

People love to complain about giving up money when they don't understand the value they'll get from something. Make it clear what you're selling and why it's worth $10 / month, and people will pay you. It's not as big of a problem as you think.

We can still create a world of free products that enable what your forum has -- it just needs a simple business model like, Hey, do you enjoy writing here? Send me $5! Then subsidize your free users with paid ones. If you have a day job, you can consider it a success when the servers are paid for every month.

There is nothing inherent about the internet that says it must be run on ads. That's just what ad-powered platforms want you to think, to justify their own terrible existence. Get creative, put on the tiniest of marketing hats, and just ask people. There is no quick and easy lunch, but I think you'll be surprised by what you find.

> Make it clear what you're selling and why it's worth $10 / month, and people will pay you. It's not as big of a problem as you think.

If only all buyers were as rational as you. IMO the problem is bigger (by far) than just make a case and people pay.

I guess my point was that parent shouldn't assume defeat based on some HN comments and the fact that "everybody just does ads." My statement is a simplification of what it takes to sell a product, yes, but IMHO this still isn't a big enough obstacle to justify the idea that "ads are the only way."

What are some of the bigger problems you see?

>I run an old collaborative writing (roleplaying) forum populated mostly by teens that's paid for by a banner ad.

I know this is going to sound like heresy nowadays, but you could always just run your forum and pay for it out of pocket. Believe it or not, once upon a time, a huge portion of the web was made up of labors of love like that!

As a question of curiosity, roughly how much traffic does your site get and how much are you paying for your servers? I run a few sites to do various minor personal things. None of them get much traffic, and my monthly hosting costs are in the neighborhood of $20 or so, and that's probably using servers that are more powerful than what's really needed.

My problem is that even with a sold, demonstrable value-prop and 100s of solid references it's not trivial to get paid by clients. Getting customers is Hard Work(tm).

I hate intrusive ads but totally see why some folks "need" that for their revenue, selling is hard, dropping bulshot ads on my site is trivial.

For my own blog/content I've generated more revenue selling consulting labour from prospects finding my blog than from ads.

Facebook ads are among the most reasonable of ads. They appear like normal content and are easy to scroll past. You can even hide ads that aren’t relevant or that you don’t like seeing. You guys are crazy.