A few weeks ago I made a post about my thoughts on an ad-free, membership based blog. I have had a few more thoughts on it since then, and have decided a few things on the subject.

Read more »

I’ve thought about this for a while, and I think it could possibly work, and work well. I’m not afraid to give my ideas out because innovation needs to be shared. The idea is to have an ad-free blog. Most everybody wants to monetize their blog these days, and they do so by selling or displaying ads on them. But what if you didn’t have to? What if you wrote good enough content where people would pay for a membership to read your blog? Think about it, you could have a completely clean site, free of any bulky and annoying advertisements, and get $1 a month from your readers which would let them free browse your content every month. Got 20 readers? That should pay for your hosting. Got 10,000? You would get ten thousand dollars every month. I think I personally would pay one dollar a month for a membership to blogs like TechCrunch, YoungGoGetter, PaulStamatiou, etc. This model has a lot of upsides, cleaner designs, no more annoyances, it’d be more like people are paying for an ongoing book. But on the downside we’d run into a few problems, like linking to your articles from social sites like Digg, only registered users would be able to view them. I may try this model later on with Massive. Anyone have any opinions on this?