Turns out Pillowfort does have a business plan

[alias_sqbr]

It's paid accounts and opt-in advertising:

• Premium Account Features: Essential site features will remain free from a paywall, while users can pay for premium features. (For example: being able to upload larger file sizes, uploading gifs to a library, personal analytics.)
  
• Advertisement Opt-Ins: All Pillowfort blogs will not feature advertising by default. Instead, users will have the choice to opt-in to advertising to help support the site. This means overall less ad revenue, but we believe it is important to respect our users' experience and not force advertising on anyone.

Which is something? I'm dubious as to how many people will opt in to advertising out of the kindness of their hearts.

In related news: Today marks the first time someone actually posted in any of the several Writescrib communities I joined a month and a bit ago.

Comments

[flamebyrd]

I guess this is kind of how LJ works (worked?), except that the ads were enabled by default on new accounts, and included features not available on the ad-free ones. So Pillowfort could consider having some special features available as incentives to enable ads, because I agree, relying on people enabling ads just to be nice is unlikely to be successful... (Disclaimer: I don't know how successful this model was for LJ.)

[lizbee]

I don't recall it being terribly successful -- it came in relatively late in LJ's lifespan.

I wonder if Pillowfort has a strategy for getting around people who opt in to ads, then use AdBlock or similar to avoid actually seeing them.

[alias_sqbr]

They seem the "sad face images asking you to please turn off adblocker" types.

[alias_sqbr]

Yeah there would definitely have to be an incentive. Either way I have to wonder how having ads at all will affect the management of the site.