If this was my service I'd do the following: 1) Everyone runs ads, you get the revenue (no revenue split) 2) Charge $5/month to take ads off 3) Charge $10/year for custom domains (make you you get a good affiliate deal for domain name reg, too) 4) Charge $XXX/year for large traffic sites (where XXX gives you a good profit on your costs)
Nice job, BTW.
Sunny
A former company of mine did this. Many users hate ads on their personal sites and will gladly pay a reasonable amount to have them removed. Many also have no interest in making money off their sites. Besides doing a rev share complicates things a lot more.
From what I understand, ads perform pretty poorly on blog sites (very little intent). That being said, you COULD try to go niche (say, make the best "blogging about products" platform and intent of the reader might be radically different).
Golden. Imagine every startup company that will sign up for a free site, then they get a bit more successful and want more than three pages or whatnot.
Same with the people who go from casual blogging to putting out a ton of posts.
Feels like we have two options for making money.
1. Focus on the viral aspect and charge for upgrades like backup, long version control history, more templates, more pages, PDF conversion, larger file uploads, etc.
2. Focus on the enterprise and make it like an Enterprise wiki. Make features more suited for Intranets. Make it a pure pay product. We feel we have a big win in this field for the typical user because of our obsession with ease of use.
Sunny