

Ask HN: How on earth does Posterous make money? - marcamillion

Their FAQ says this:<p><i>It's Free
Yes, we're free. There are no hidden fees for storage or bandwidth, and no forced advertisements on your Posterous Spaces. We never collect your credit card information or ask for any trial periods.<p>In short - there are no hidden costs, no strings attached, and no reason not to start posting today!</i><p>So how do they make money? They have been around for a long time, and they are still hiring.<p>Is there something genius happening behind the scenes that allows them to continue growing off of cash flows? They don't seem to be constantly raising money, although they did raise $10.1M over 4 rounds, but could their burn be so low that they can do that every time they run out of money?<p>The reason I am asking is because they host both my personal and company blog. I am concerned they might just lock-up shop one day, because they run out of money, or they are selling my info someway because there is no such thing as a free lunch.<p>So where are they getting their lunch money, aside from investors? What am I missing?
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dantiberian
>The company does have revenue, such as this early deal with Coca Cola for a
branded site, but has stood firm in keeping the “nickel and dime” consumer
fees out of the product. [...]

>Later this year Posterous will launch a pro version of the service for bigger
brands, and allow things like Javascript and site monetization for a fee, they
say.

[http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/01/18/posterous-revenue-
coca-...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/01/18/posterous-revenue-coca-cola)

And from <http://kahlil.posterous.com/how-posterous-makes-money> in January
2010

>So I asked Posterous co-founder Sachin Agarwal how Posterous will actually
make money. His answer was simple. Charge for business and commercial use of
Posterous. What about consumers? Agarwal says that Posterous will remain free
for consumers, but will just charge for businesses, which reminds me a lot of
how people imagine Twitter making money.

Their business model could easily have changed from this by now though.

~~~
marcamillion
I guess the question is, why do they go through such great lengths to hide it.

Almost as if making money is somehow a bad thing.

Hiding it makes me, as a user, nervous.

~~~
steventruong
I don't think they're intentionally hiding it or going out of their way to do
so. At least, I don't see it like that. The quotes you pulled were probably
part of a sales pitch to get users on board and is probably representative of
how they actually do things. The way they make money base on what dantiberian
posted has no bearing on the pitch they're making (assuming all of these are
true).

If they make money by charging brands, what does that have to do with you as a
consumer? I don't think they're hiding it, I think its just a separate
approach.

~~~
marcamillion
The quote I pulled was from the FAQ page:

<https://posterous.com/faq>

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anthony_franco
I know they were using Viglink for a while to monetize their affiliate links.
Not sure if it's still in place though since there was some backlash regarding
it.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1309849>

I believe that's how Cloudflare also monetizes their traffic, with a Viglink-
type service.

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peter_severin
I'm worried about Posterous too. I've noticed that search function has been
broken on all Posterous websites for at least a week. There's no fix in sight.
I didn't expect this from them at all.

Edit: looks like the search was finally fixed.

