194: louise (online monetizing)

everyone monetizes. everyone. everything you see on the internet, every aspect of the internet dedicated toward social media, it’s all waiting to monetize. maybe it takes six months, maybe it takes a year, maybe it’s like tumblr and it takes ten years and a takeover by yahoo, but it happens. and i’m always shocked at how surprised people are when it happens. everything needs money in this country to survive. it’s america’s life blood. it’s our ambrosia. you can’t just run a website without any income. advertising has been the backbone of the internet since its mass inception. no matter what you log into, at some point it’s going to try to sell you something. every website is a salesman and it’s already got its foot in your door. so the question here is: when? do you monetize up front? that carries the risk of an inferior product and steep decline in usage. many social media sites go free at first, then introduce advertising later on. others give a subscription service; pay per month and we’ll get rid of ads. which works best? the answer is: none of them. ad space on websites is now removed via ad-blocking apps. subscription models only work if the client likes the site enough to actually want to subscribe to it, which is a different proposition in this day and age. people don’t just buy cable, you know what i mean? you got netflix and hulu and amazon and HBO and all these places offering subscription packages. too many, really. people just want good shows, not a whole channel with two good shows on it and a bunch of other crap. anyway. i’m saying all this because if we’re going to launch this site we have to know how we’re going to monetize it, and we have to have that code implemented before we launch. so you’re going to have to understand that no matter how much you want people to “connect,” we also need their money. figure out how to get their money. you’ve got until 9am tomorrow.