Ask HN: Would you consider polling your users for the right monetization method? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Would you consider polling your users for the right monetization method?

7 pointsphyscab7 comments

Advertising, Subscription, Value-Added, Virtual Goods, Donation...

If you are not sure which route to go, wouldn't it make sense to just poll your users directly? Has anyone done this?

This was inspired in-part by this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=534766

wouldn't it make sense to just poll your users directly?

People are very poor judges of what they are willing to pay for things, and are especially poor judges when "free to me" is one of the options on the table.

I've done a lot of polling of my users and one thing I've noticed is that authenticated users provide much more useful feedback than "guests". Also, expect to get a very different response from people in poorer economic climates than others. Perhaps you could set up IP filters so you only poll users in your target countries? If so, this might be a great idea.

I agree. we have also polled our users in our startup Tonido. We have got useful feedbacks from core users than the guests.

Polling your users is probably a very smart thing to do, as long as it's worded right and not obtrusive. The best monetization features have some sort of utility built in for the user. ie- Google paid search ads show you items that are relevant to what you're searching for, a freemium account on dropbox gives you more storage space,etc.

you think users will be honest when you ask them how are you going to give me money?

I don't know, that's why I'm asking. Maybe. If your product is good enough.

Give them a poll with fixed answers and an option to reply in text with comments. There are many times when I wished a site would remove the flashing banner ads and ask me for a subscription fee (this is specially true with websites that offer data; i'm forced to waste their bandwidth scraping their data when I would have paid $19.99/mo for an RSS feed)

Some regional newspapers are so bought-out by special interest and industry, it's hard to get accurate market figures from them. There is enough market for paying users who want OBJECTIVE news and market analysis, but the newspapers never offered us this option.

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