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27 Comments

How does your community make money?

For those that are running communities, how are you making them sustainable?

With Ministry of Testing I did a combination: events, sponsorship and membership fees.

With Rosieland I'm going to be doing paid membership (already have it as a newsletter) and then we are exploring one off paid products.

Some Twitter responses here too.

How about you?

  1. 1

    So far, ads and sponsorship deals

  2. 4

    Rosie - I'm in the midst of building Uncovered - a platform to solve the cold cases of murdered or missing people - and I must say... Rosieland is GOLD!!! Thank you SO much for all the work you're pouring into YOUR community!

    1. 1

      wow...this sounds super interesting and I can see how building tools optimizing for this type of use case can add loads of value.

      1. 2

        Thanks! It's something I've been passionate about for a while and with the shift I've seen of people consuming "true crime" content for entertainment purposes to wanting to advocate for the victims, providing theses tools can hopefully start to bring peace to these families.

    2. 1

      Hah, thank you 🙏🏽

      Uncovered sounds interesting. 🕵🏽‍♀️

  3. 3

    Paid membership here so we can have 2 (very small) salaries and fund the growth.

  4. 3

    For Folyo:

    • I sell a referral newsletter that curates the best web design freelance / agency rfp referrals.
    • I sell a training program on how to build your own client referral system.
      That's it!
  5. 2

    For prototypr:

    • newsletter and website sponsors
    • started using ko-fi.com (to support writers and the platform)
    • started a deals page and will add indie products and affiliates

    This site isn't about maximising revenue, but without these things, it's just not sustainable..next would be jobs board/ small products like templates

  6. 1

    I am currently wrestling with this. It's so tough, but these responses have been super helpful.

  7. 1

    Some of the most popular ways for communities to make money including

    • Advertising: helping companies to promote their products to the target users through your community
    • Membership fees: by providing value-added services to community users to collect membership fees
    • Knowledge payment: provide paid knowledge such as courses and articles to community users
    • Others: For example, bringing revenue growth to your other main businesses through community
  8. 1

    My community earn from online business in USA, They are
    Locally owned by passionate, hard-working and experienced hemp growers who have been in the industry for years, Colorado Breeders Depot (CBD) has rapidly become the preferred source for the best premium smokable hemp flower and wholesale CBD & CBG seeds anywhere on the internet.

    We operate out our hemp farm in Canon City, Colorado and do all of our growing and operations on the property, so there is nothing shady or hidden about anything we do.

    The CBD team is honest, caring, and driven to provide the best customer service to both individual buyers and support to hemp farmers nationally and globally. We love to work together and it doesn’t feel like work at all. In any contact you may have with us, you can feel the energy and devotion we put into every seed, flower, or product we offer to our customers. All of our products are made and sold in Compliance with All Local and National Laws and Regulations.

  9. 1

    Great to be here! more helpful for the community members to get exciting insights and trends in this current era. Get more insights about trendy fashion for home and casual footwear through thefashionpod.com

  10. 1

    Well, it depends on the type of community. If you are only operating digital, you must focus on really creating value, as cliche as this sounds. Nowadays, there is much supply on small things that help peoples (everyday.)life, and you if you solve a problem for them, you can charge for that. Obviously there are many ways to make money in detail (e.g. limit free content, limit free messages, ...)
    If your model is analogue in some sort (even there is some tech in it), there it's probably easier, because you have more access to the customer, and also can understand what people don't like. I think there a three major ways in making money here: You either make it an all inclusive fee, give a base model to the customer and charge for specific add-ons, or you charge everything. All of these have their own benefits, from easy overview, over the benefit of choice to maximum flexibility. Maybe you can apply this to digital models to, but I have more insight in tech mixed with product, so I'm a bit influenced. Hope this helps!

  11. 1

    Hey Rosie,
    Checkout https://sweditapp.com/
    I'm Ramesh, one of the cofounder of swedit.
    We provide community manager with the ability to charge money from your members for charity or membership

  12. 1

    With LookingforWisdom, I'm experimenting in running a free philosophy newsletter with a paid tier for a rolling programme of ongoing philosophy courses, and a linked study community. So it's ⅓ a newsletter, ⅓ a community platform and ⅓ a series of ongoing online courses.

    So on the paid membership tier, subscribers get weekly philosophy lessons, and this gives them access to a discourse forum as well. Non community members (or regular subscribers) get weekly Philosopher File updates for free. I'm only three weeks into running paid courses, and I've covered my hosting fees for discourse/ghost for the year, and also my Zapier fees. So that's a good start. Though it will be a while until it can give me a sustainable income.

    I thought about setting up a Ko-Fi page for those who don't want to become members, but want to support the project. But my hunch is that this will make things more complex. And I've decided not to go down the advertising/sponsorship route. So I'm at the moment keeping things focussed and clean, building interest in the ongoing courses, and seeing how this goes over the next six months.

  13. 1

    Memberships (the core of our monetization) and newsletter sponsorships!

  14. 1

    I just (literally yesterday) opened up my community (refinecltv.com/join-collective) to members outside of our beta users. There's a $25 / mo membership fee, but I never explored sponsorships.

    Rosie - What did your sponsorship program look like for Ministry of Testing (e.g. benefits offered to sponsors)?

  15. 1

    Great question, and I will keep any eye on the different answers from others,

    I run a free-to-join community for non-native professionals to improve their English fluency for their careers. We post interesting content and have our teachers jump in and get involved in the discussions when they are not in their online classes.

    No charge but we aim to convert a specific % of members to paying students for 1-1 and group lessons, eventually. It is free to join but there is an initial Zoom call and intro to get a feel for their level and interests.

    We actually remove inactive members. I would take 50 members who end up with even 1 class a month over hundreds to just inflate our numbers.

  16. 1

    For justin.chat and visionaryPass, I sell 💎 gems: https://visionaryPass.com/gem

    1. 1

      Cool! What can I do after buying/having gems in your community that other members can't do?

  17. 0

    building a community takes time and is a long process, making sure to get those active users and pitching them product helps!

  18. 0

    My Community does Peer-to-peer Crowdfunding, where we donate and contribute to each other's campaigns. Our members are raising funds for Personal, Business, Start-ups, Small Businesses, Restaurants, and other projects that need funding. We have raised over $600 Million helping new and existing members. Contact me for the details.

    1. 2

      I'd be interested in hearing more about this.

      1. 3

        They said they raused 600m? I had to lol. I will be very weary of contacting them. Whenever someone says contact them privately it's 99.9% a scam. How does IH let scammers and shills post here?

        1. 1

          As soon as I saw "$600 Million" an instant red flag. I've been kicking around the idea of building a community for a while and the moderation part is one of the biggest things keeping me from going all in.

          I think IH does a decent job of weeding out the scammers. Also perhaps it's the simple fact that most of the IH community is intelligent enough not to fall for their non-sense claims, etc.

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