Re:YC AI
by thewhitetulip on Monday March 20, 2017 @05:42AM
(#13912821)
True, what made me write it was a YouTube channel I came across, they don't accept donations or show ads on their channel and they have crazy views, they say that we don't want to earn money on this, granted that they give it away for free, but it isn't "evil" to get some money out of it, I am not saying rip off students by charging 10000$ per session, but providing something like a PDF version of the online guide for a small amount say $5 would, in the long term, give you some return.
That's passive income which you don't have to bother about, like you'd have to bother about ad deployment. We as an industry are funny, we expect everything to be free of cost _and_ the author should not monetize it in any way possible, it isn't evil to monetize that's what I am saying.
For a fairly niche resource such as this (it'll never reach a "how do I get a boyfriend" level of audience), it's unlikely to ever draw as much ad revenue to pay for itself. To do so, a high quality, specialized ad system would need to be deployed, which honestly becomes a high touch deployment and maintenance project, that isn't directly tied to the core goal of just providing an awesome resource publicly for the greater good, which is just distracting (or costly) for whoever is behind it.
I appreciate the mature choice to not try to gain small change and instead eat the cost for hosting and development to feel good that you are providing something not just great, but unadulterated as well.