

Ask News.YC: Advertising with Revenue Sharing or Free? - staunch

My product is a service for other sites to re-use. I'm trying to decide whether I should make it advertising supported with revenue sharing (50/50 split with the webmaster) or make it totally free with no advertising. I can afford to offer it free. My primary goal right now is just to drive adoption. It seems intuitive (to me) that free would further that goal more than including advertising, but I've also realized that offering a new revenue stream for webmasters might be just as (or more) effective.<p>I'm afraid that letting individual webmasters choose would result in a muddled "brand image", with the people who want a new revenue stream (falsely) believing it's not good for that and the people who want it free believing (falsely) it's not available advertising-free.<p>I find myself flip-flopping trying to decide which direction to go. Any thoughts or advice?
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jdavid
The goal of any startup is to find out early and often how customers will
react to your vision. If you have a vision of charging for a service, and you
give it away for free; you may find people leaving to a competitor.

If ads are your vision, then establishing trust with your consumer base is
critical. They need to know that their information is not being used
inappropriately.

You will also demonstrate value sooner to investors if you have an established
revenue stream.

One option we have considered is establishing 2 brands, just for this purpose.

One can be ad based, and the other could be free or subscription based.

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gscott
> My product is a service for other sites to re-use

If it adds value to the website for the webmaster then maybe you should not
split anything from ads. The value would be in the new feature.

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davidw
One thing I've tried to do with new sites, at least, is put small, unobtrusive
ads, so that people aren't bothered much, but do get used to the idea of there
being ads. Maybe they're so common these days, though, that it's not really
necessary. Anyway, the idea is to manage expectations, whatever that may mean
for your product.

