Monetization & Commercial Projects in Web Revival

[Kallistero]

In our subculture here, there's a soft rule, an etiquette, which states that "Most are sick of the monetisation" prevalent on the Web of today. Trying to run monetized projects in our space is generally bad form. However, there's an elephant in the room 

Neocities, NekoWeb, MDN Web Docs, W3Schools, services we rely on to provide the canvas, the brush, the techniques, and the venue for our creations cost money to run. As long as the communities they appeal to remain sufficiently small, though, or the site content remains sufficiently centered around static material, the webmasters can pay that bill out of pocket. If the community grows, though, they may ask for donations in the hopes that it'll scale with server costs, as NekoWeb does, which seems to be the limit of what's widely acceptable as monetization in this space. Neocities uses a freemium structure and is legally a private commercial for-profit business. Comprehensive learning resources for webcraft that are kept up to date, like MDN Web Docs, have (often minimal) ads on them if viewed without an ad blocker.

There is currently another thread about how ads fit into our idea of a yesterweb, and while that topic includes discussion about site design & the content of advertisements themselves, I want to focus more on that boundary of where monetization itself is & is not acceptable. So, here are a few questions that might be difficult when squaring the values of Web Revival:

• If, one month, Nekoweb was brought into a public spotlight and suddenly became very popular to the general public overnight, to the point where there was a sudden uptick in traffic & a many-thousand-dollar added bill they couldn't pay (with the expectation that they might also get another large bill next month), what should they do? 
• If another highly useful creative-Web service arose that did a lot of backend database & high-bandwidth things that can get costly to run, like Newgrounds does for its hosting of many different mediums of art, do the ads become more acceptable because the site heavily aligns with other values like being creator-first, discovery-first, or otherwise giving the Web to the people?
• What if YOU made a web service was specifically FOR Web Revival, but it would just be unsustainable if run for free? Is it just not meant to be? Is there a set of conditions that would cause you to go ahead and seek monetization, like if it was beloved in the community or if it even began to seem necessary to guarantee a future for revival? Or is there some other path you might take? 

I have my own thoughts on these, but I wanna know what you think 

[lakes]

I think it depends. It's an ad that's similar to alternative open source search engines, then I think I'd be fine with it, where it's related to what you're looking at like you said in a previous post.
But the problem is that it leads to a lot of advertisers prefer putting in trackers and such because it supposedly makes more money. With trackers and fingerprinting, even if you don't get money directly from the customer, you still get it by selling their information.
That said, I think customers prefer relevant and non-intrusive advertising. Speaking for myself, I miss when Youtube used to have those little ad banners on videos. I also miss the fact that more commercials tried to be funny. If I'm watching free streaming with my dad and without an adblocker or even just the TV, I've noticed that a lot of ads are just generic slop content and the few that do try to be funny have celebrities in them for some reason.

[Noah_S]

In early stages I considered ads on my website to pay for the hosting.

I didn't find any modern day ad provider that met the non-negotiable requirements I had. They were

1. Non intrusive text ads, no animation. This used to be the standard for google ads.

2. Advertising based on the content on my site, not based on the visitors' browsing history or text message writing on phone history. This also used to be the standard.

Good luck with these requirements today. The in app ads I'm currently getting on my phone are based on something I wrote about my health history on my google keyboard. As a side note for anyone with a history of anorexia, be careful writing it on your phone, I'm currently being bombarded with calorie and exercise tracking ads. And this practice is a prime example of why I have the second requirement when considering ads. The first requirement is self-explanatory. What pushed me from a passive state of hating modern ads to having the second requirement was hearing from someone who's baby was stillborn and everywhere they went online was filled with "buy this cute thing for your baby" ads. I decided that I rather not have a website than have any part in doing that to someone.

W3Schools already offers premium membership with non essential features. I think that's a good model.

[mortaki]

I think, perhaps, you may be asking the wrong questions. If the current model doesn't fit the ideals we are aiming for or if it doesn't scale to the size we are aiming for, then clearly we need a different model.

To answer at least one of the questions, any web project that I wanted to build but struggled to make sustainable on my own I would most likely make it a community project. And I do not mean community in the sense of Melonland as a community. I mean more of a close-knit group of friends or neighbors. Splitting costs among a group where everyone contributes is probably a better long-term solution to web hosting, server costs, etc. than depending on a free service like neocities. Don't get me wrong, neocities is great and an excellent way for people to be introduced to the concept of running their own site. But it shouldn't be the goal either. We shouldn't stop there.

Eventually, I want to get a group of friends together and buy the hardware for us to host our websites mostly or entirely independent of any service. Yes, that's probably difficult. No, I don't yet know everything that entails. But it's something to work towards. Once I have done that, I want to make guides and how-to's to encourage others to do the same. The idea is to take pressure off of introductory/freemium services like neocities and nekoweb and enable the indie web to stand on its own merits.

Oh, and I suppose to get off my soapbox and answer another question, I have no problems with some monetization on sites that host themselves so long as it isn't tantamount to begging. I'm not so naive as to think there should be no money involved with the indie web ever. That's not realistic and not sustainable long-term if we're looking to "take back" the web. To use myself as an example, if I were to sell my writing in some way on my site (which I won't ever; my writing is under a sharealike license), that would be fine. Same if I were doing art commissions, or selling stickers, or handcrafts, or my skills as a programmer. In fact, I'm always happy to see people running their own spaces with their own rules for things like that. I'd rather see that than ads, which come with a whole other set of problems.

[lakes]

I think, perhaps, you may be asking the wrong questions. If the current model doesn't fit the ideals we are aiming for or if it doesn't scale to the size we are aiming for, then clearly we need a different model.

To answer at least one of the questions, any web project that I wanted to build but struggled to make sustainable on my own I would most likely make it a community project. And I do not mean community in the sense of Melonland as a community. I mean more of a close-knit group of friends or neighbors. Splitting costs among a group where everyone contributes is probably a better long-term solution to web hosting, server costs, etc. than depending on a free service like neocities. Don't get me wrong, neocities is great and an excellent way for people to be introduced to the concept of running their own site. But it shouldn't be the goal either. We shouldn't stop there.

Yeah, this was one of the reasons I took my XMPP buddy on his offer to have my site be hosted on his server.

Eventually, I want to get a group of friends together and buy the hardware for us to host our websites mostly or entirely independent of any service. Yes, that's probably difficult. No, I don't yet know everything that entails. But it's something to work towards. Once I have done that, I want to make guides and how-to's to encourage others to do the same. The idea is to take pressure off of introductory/freemium services like neocities and nekoweb and enable the indie web to stand on its own merits.

Oh, and I suppose to get off my soapbox and answer another question, I have no problems with some monetization on sites that host themselves so long as it isn't tantamount to begging. I'm not so naive as to think there should be no money involved with the indie web ever. That's not realistic and not sustainable long-term if we're looking to "take back" the web. To use myself as an example, if I were to sell my writing in some way on my site (which I won't ever; my writing is under a sharealike license), that would be fine. Same if I were doing art commissions, or selling stickers, or handcrafts, or my skills as a programmer. In fact, I'm always happy to see people running their own spaces with their own rules for things like that. I'd rather see that than ads, which come with a whole other set of problems.

Yeah, I think part of the reason more people don't do this is they're either worried about the cost, or if they do have money to pay the freemium services, they're worried about beginners not having the space to experiment with it if they don't support it. I agree that the indie web costs money. Hell, even piracy can cost money. I have a whole post about it on my blog. But basically piracy can involve paying for a DVD/streaming service/TV/etc to rip the media from, paying for a Usenet provider, paying for seedbox, paying for a media server provider, etc. We live in a society where even the truly free things aren't truly "free" in a sense.

[oro_junestar]

I guess the main factors of what makes monetization acceptable/unaccceptable are how much the monetization interferes with the user experience, how much money they're taking from each user, and how urgent the need for monetization is. The advertising we're sick of fails at each of these because of the many scummy tactics they use:

Interfering with user experience - Relentless video ads, either one every minute or multiple unskippable ones back-to-back. Deceptive tactics like fake close buttons and falsified footage. Scam ads. Ads that expose minors to adult content. Ads that cover up important functional parts of the UI. Important content that's locked behind paywalls. Payments that give paying users an overly unfair advantage over non-paying users. Trackers that intrude on the user's privacy. Sites that block you from accessing content if you're using an adblocker.

How much money they're taking - Constant subscription models everywhere. Auto-repaying subscriptions. Cancellation fees. Virtual currencies the user buys with real money. Psychologically manipulative methods such as FOMO. Multiple separate payments for different features (or functionally-the-same features).

No need for these tactics - You are a multibillion dollar company. You don't need to keep shoving another video in our faces for every mansion you own.

Acceptable monetization methods don't use these tactics. They ask for just enough money to keep the service running and they respect the user as a human being.
Here are some methods I'd consider acceptable:
-Freemium models where the paid benefits are merely neat bonuses instead of important content
-One or two ad containers that are off to the side, not covering up anything important
-An easily skippable message asking for donations
-Selling merch
-Asking users to turn off adblock with a skippable message, instead of blocking off content

uuh ya :P idk how to end this post