I can assure you that is not the case. If an instance has any amount of users, ad revenue can be huge. It may be a couple bucks a month per user, but if you have a thousand users, that’s enough to pay for servers and then some.
The real issue comes with the requirement for more heavy moderation, if you bring in advertising.
Reddit’s reason for monetizing the APIs was making an average of a dollar a year per user. That’s despite the official app having way more downloads than the 3rd party ones.
Facebook makes 50 dollars a year (which pretty much is a couple bucks a month) per user because it tracks you not only on its own website, but on most other websites too (like & share buttons, facebook pixel, etc) even if you don’t have an account.
If you pay $5 per year to your instance host, it is more than they can make with unintrusive ads.
I can assure you that is not the case. If an instance has any amount of users, ad revenue can be huge. It may be a couple bucks a month per user, but if you have a thousand users, that’s enough to pay for servers and then some.
The real issue comes with the requirement for more heavy moderation, if you bring in advertising.
Reddit’s reason for monetizing the APIs was making an average of a dollar a year per user. That’s despite the official app having way more downloads than the 3rd party ones.
Facebook makes 50 dollars a year (which pretty much is a couple bucks a month) per user because it tracks you not only on its own website, but on most other websites too (like & share buttons, facebook pixel, etc) even if you don’t have an account.
If you pay $5 per year to your instance host, it is more than they can make with unintrusive ads.
If you can pay a dollar a month, it’s WAY more.