#if you did a call out to specifically the fanartists as a place to centralize commissions

[wainswright]

This is my googled 30 min research so i'm just guessing for fun.

Looks like either you need to be a hip place that attracts so many new users (makes a splash in numbers for investors?) and get good press as THE place to be in order to attract advertiser dollars OR

Make your core usability lock behind a paywall like spotify, which is cashflow positive, but can't tell if this worked out for medium (probably not)- (and looks like Substack isn't doing too well) This focuses less on advertisers and more on users.

Alternatives? Monetizing content + ads on selected produced articles? That's a niche that isn't filled.

You know there's this whole style of paying for webnovels in China or something, like if they didn't ruin the concept of wattpad by viewing users... like that, instead of treating them like content creators a la Youtube. Which looks like it's going strong.

In lieu of nonprofit, I guess you'd have to get a community of people producing good content that the site made a no brainer to use- and a kind of distributive ad process like uh... tiktok.... hm..... untargeted is that big of a deal? But it'd take advantage of the tumblr social pathways- the ability to monetize a post if you chose. Can't remember much about post+ but that came out of nowhere... I don't remember having any idea how to use it. I hope it was something like- you can choose to monetize certain posts behind a paywall? That's the only way you could do it, right?

Fanfic concerns: nobody on youtube worries about this when making videos about established properties tbh. I guess don't write fanfic specifically and put that behind a paywall (or do and see where this leads us) but fanart is free game? How confusing. Home of fandom could be like.... reviewers.... taste makers..... god tumblr actually IS good at stealth word of mouth marketing for a lot of properties. Very funny.

But if I was thinking informational- or like "how to recognize chords", or news feed that would be an idea I didn't even think of when post+ in it's unclear use state came out.

Okay, maybe that wouldn't work- we come here to shitpost. Maybe you could have the option of making a goodpost blog (original posts only) behind a paywall. But a general fee, like spotify charges $5 for access to all songs, instead for monthly access to paywalled content? The response would be a little different now, I'd imagine.

Both options, as well as an option to see blogs more automatically as the constructed sites and not just on the dash like squarespace? that's doing well, though I've seen random complaints about the nature of the not-html style site constructions. Complexity was mentioned as part of the issue retaining users along with lack of immediate interaction/reason to stay, but showing off various blogs as their own sites and then letting you follow the author of the blogs on the dash seem like it'd work out..........

It retains the free functionality but the alternative would be presented as a sidegig.

Chaotic patreon.....Patreon and Reddit are private, with Reddit maybe having an IPO by the end of 2023, so I'll assume they aren't doing super great. Tumblr up for IPO soon?

Best case scenario for site survival: it's sold to huge company that can eat the cost of operations until the site is made hip to advertisers, or shrug.

But there really isnt a good microblogging site- that allows all the ability to make a searchable blog..... (I see maybe they were thinking they could just use the social part of tumblr and somehow get wordpress to show up on the rss feeds) but yeah there's not really any social capacity baked into to wordpress, on lj I would go over to see what people were doing for that day and read their comments. That site does live on in spirit in dreamwidth

Bluesky and mastodon have that character limit and you can't format anything, but if they get successful they can rake in ad money. I don't know about this. Can't even remember what pillowfort is like but I remember there was some weirdness with the founders that scared me off, I didn't think it was going to last well.