We have a few pillars of monetization, some mature, some more in the works:
Sponsorship (once a month shoutout, inclusion in our main newsletter, etc.) We try to model it after "conference sponsorships", in that they are a natural part of the ecosystem but nothing we want to go too hardcore with in terms of overrunning the platform with unpleasant ads.
DEV Listings — In that post I get into specifically how that works in relation to our business model.
Special events/contests: Online hackathons, etc. We've done one of these and it went over extremely well. We wan to make this more regular as an additive event the community loves.
Support contracts for devrel teams who want to make the most of the platform: Training in community-first business practices etc.
Pro features, specifically for devrel, but anyone who wants to go deep into DEV: Advanced analytics, alerts on topics etc. We see these as things we'd rather build specifically for a subset which would like to pay, rather than provide everything to everyone all the time even if it's really only a small subset which would care about and benefit.
Commercial open source initiatives: As an open source project, we are exploring the future of allowing more use cases for our community software and offering hosting, support, special licenses etc.
Misc future projects: Maybe a conference? (No promises here, but it's an idea!)
We would describe our model as hub and spoke: We have a core community platform we are not interested in trying to directly monetize all the traffic from, but as a company devoted to the dev community, we have a lot of adjacent areas where monetization fits nicely.
We think this is all pretty scaleable, but very longterm thinking. The fastest route to monetization (and often exploitation) are obtrusive ads and paywalls. These are not in the roadmap.
This stuff isn't all that well documented in any one place, but it should be.
Is there any plan for Reddit style donations? Like Reddit Gold but similar. If you can do humblebundle style book things I think that will be quite interesting too and promotes a lot of goodwill from the community.
Lead Product Evangelist @Kentico, Founding partner @craftbrewingbiz. love to learn / teach web dev & software engineering, collecting vinyl records, mowing my lawn, craft 🍺
Great article Ben!
I want to know what is the monetization model of DEV.
You know I have been reading and following articles on DEV from quite 2 years or so.
I'd love this platform to thrive but would like to know your thoughts, roadmap etc. :)
PS: sorry if it is documented somewhere.
We have a few pillars of monetization, some mature, some more in the works:
We would describe our model as hub and spoke: We have a core community platform we are not interested in trying to directly monetize all the traffic from, but as a company devoted to the dev community, we have a lot of adjacent areas where monetization fits nicely.
We think this is all pretty scaleable, but very longterm thinking. The fastest route to monetization (and often exploitation) are obtrusive ads and paywalls. These are not in the roadmap.
This stuff isn't all that well documented in any one place, but it should be.
Is there any plan for Reddit style donations? Like Reddit Gold but similar. If you can do humblebundle style book things I think that will be quite interesting too and promotes a lot of goodwill from the community.
Amazing! I know some of them previously. Definitely looking forward for a conf (happy to volunteer!)
Wish you all the best. Looking forward to do participate in this journey with the community.
A conf where topics and speakers came from the community!
Writers and readers meeting and discussion everything DEV/dev!
I would love to see something like the Technical Writers Summit find a home at an event like this!
Yes, please!