Community Monetization

[Nomad]

What are your thoughts on community monetization? If you are positive about monetization, what are your preferred ways to monetize your community?

Well, as far as I am concerned, I give much preference to community monetization. In fact, all of my communities are monetized. Well, it can be really difficult to make money from your community but if you have a monetized community, it is very likely that it will become self sustaining. 

[JoelR]

If you are an independent self-hosted site, in general, I think it's important to monetize to at least cover your base costs.  This makes your community self-sustaining, which is important for the long-term.  

At the end of the day, it comes down to your personal financial preference.  How willing are you to pay for your site / hobby / interest?  

[Toni]

Community monetization is important as it can help you with costs such as hosting and license renewals if you use paid forum software. 

I have often heard of people dragging down those who choose to monetize their community and I have never understood why they do that. It makes sense to get your forum paying for itself in a way. 

[Nomad]

18 hours ago, Toni said:

Community monetization is important as it can help you with costs such as hosting and license renewals if you use paid forum software. 

I have often heard of people dragging down those who choose to monetize their community and I have never understood why they do that. It makes sense to get your forum paying for itself in a way. 

I believe even when you are running a community as a hobby project it makes sense to monetize it because it is better to run a self-sustaining community instead of a community you end up maintaining from your funds. I have also met people online who do not like monetized communities. Maybe they can afford to run their community through personal funds, but I cannot.

[Maria]

I think it depends on your personal choice. If you can afford to run your community from your pocket it is fine, and if you want to monetize it and make it self-sustainable that's also fine. You cannot criticize someone just because he is running ads in his community. However, generating revenue in communities is not easy.

[Shortie]

If you own a community which is self-hosted, it can sometimes be difficult to keep up with the payments to keep the community going and it makes sense to monetize your community so that it pays for itself later down the line. 

I had always been in many cases reluctant to monetize but the more I looked into it and the more people I spoke to, the more it made sense to monetize when I could.

[Kane]

On 12/12/2023 at 8:25 PM, Mariya said:

I think it depends on your personal choice. If you can afford to run your community from your pocket it is fine, and if you want to monetize it and make it self-sustainable that's also fine. You cannot criticize someone just because he is running ads in his community. However, generating revenue in communities is not easy.

Agreed. I have used communities that have been monetized with multiple monetization options and also used communities that are not monetized. In my opinion, if you want to grow your community, it is better that you enable monetization. That's because when you generate revenue, you can also use the money to manage the community in the better way, you can have paid staff and run paid marketing.