“why are pillowfort/ao3 asking for money?? Tumblr and LJ are free!!!”
y’all really don’t get how this works, huh?
Look y’all. Bottom line is large websites/web apps are fucking expensive
It’s not like a personal or small business site where you pay $25/mo for a shared hosting package and knock yourself out
You need multiple, dedicated, high-performance servers to handle a service like Tumblr or AO3, or Facebook, or what have you, to keep up with the insane amount of bandwidth and unfathomable amount of data.
Shit cost thousands of dollars a month. And those costs only go up the more users you have. Into the tens of thousands of dollars a month. Someone has to foot the bill for it. And that doesn’t include the salaries of the developers who pour hours of their time into making things function the way they need to.
“but Tumblr used to not have ads!!” you say! “They just got greedy!”
No, they didn’t “just get greedy”. This is how free services work. They aren’t magically able to sustain themselves. At any point. Ever.
Investors see proof of concept during the infancy of a project, and they pour their money– hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars– to 1) help fund the project into maturity. (Maturity = stable performance and a large, growing userbase) and 2) have a seat at the table when big decisions are made
Until that point, you won’t see ads, or be nagged to donate, or forced to pay a fee to access your content. That’s no accident.
Investors eat the cost of running and developing the service, because they know that once that userbase has been established, they can– you guessed it– SELL YOUR DATA TO ADVERTISERS.
They can’t do that until after they have users for advertisers to sell their shit to!
That’s how the investors make their money back, that’s how the service becomes profitable instead of being a giant cash pit.
So for the love of God, can we PLEASE stop slandering sites like AO3, Wikipedia, and now Pillowfort for having the audacity to ask for donations, or for having tiered/paid membership options for additional, non-essential features??
If you’re not paying, you’re the product
If you’re not paying, you’re the product
Eyeballs, data, or money. I mean, it all boils down to money in the end; the other two are just accepted means of getting advertisers to pay for it, which they do with the expectation of getting the money out of the user pool less directly.
Direct payment options include donations (like AO3), direct pay (like Pillowfort’s current donation-for-invite model), and freemium (like Pillowfort’s planned long-term model). But us paying means we’re the people the service caters to, and us paying for all of it means we (users) are the only people the service caters to, which is a vast improvement in security and general user experience over any situation where advertisers and investors are competing with us for best-interest privileges. (As opposed to, say, all those shitty cloned “pay-to-win” games where the user experience is designed to annoy the player into spending money to make winning easier, which is what tends to happen when users and investors co-exist as the beneficiaries.)
Whether this recent fuckery is a means of “harvesting” Tumblr’s userbase as a moneymaking device after years spent cultivating a community of users with a cool free mostly-useful internet platform, or a means of assassinating Tumblr in order to drive its userbase to sites where it’s easier for them to extract value from us by buying and then killing an unprofitable social media model, this is what tends to happen when the investors get first say in a thing. It exists to make them money, and if it doesn’t do that well enough to satisfy them, it gets mutilated and fucked up until it does, or until it dies and drives us elsewhere.
We need a space that is “Of Our Own,” again, this time for social media purposes, and that costs money on this bitch of an Earth. We need something that won’t be beholden to investors who might decide someday that we’re more profitable as products than customers.
Mathee's Blog 