

Ask HN: Would you consider polling your users for the right monetization method? - physcab

Advertising, Subscription, Value-Added, Virtual Goods, Donation...<p>If you are not sure which route to go, wouldn't it make sense to just poll your users directly?  Has anyone done this?<p>This was inspired in-part by this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=534766
======
patio11
_wouldn't it make sense to just poll your users directly?_

People are very poor judges of what they are willing to pay for things, and
are _especially_ poor judges when "free to me" is one of the options on the
table.

------
ScottWhigham
I've done a lot of polling of my users and one thing I've noticed is that
authenticated users provide much more useful feedback than "guests". Also,
expect to get a very different response from people in poorer economic
climates than others. Perhaps you could set up IP filters so you only poll
users in your target countries? If so, this might be a great idea.

~~~
codemechanic
I agree. we have also polled our users in our startup Tonido. We have got
useful feedbacks from core users than the guests.

------
jasonlbaptiste
Polling your users is probably a very smart thing to do, as long as it's
worded right and not obtrusive. The best monetization features have some sort
of utility built in for the user. ie- Google paid search ads show you items
that are relevant to what you're searching for, a freemium account on dropbox
gives you more storage space,etc.

------
pclark
you think users will be honest when you ask them _how are you going to give me
money?_

~~~
mahmud
Give them a poll with fixed answers and an option to reply in text with
comments. There are many times when I wished a site would remove the flashing
banner ads and ask me for a subscription fee (this is specially true with
websites that offer data; i'm forced to waste their bandwidth scraping their
data when I would have paid $19.99/mo for an RSS feed)

Some regional newspapers are so bought-out by special interest and industry,
it's hard to get accurate market figures from them. There is enough market for
paying users who want OBJECTIVE news and market analysis, but the newspapers
never offered us this option.

