Comment by Tapas Adhikary on "📢 Community Q&A - How should we monetize Hashnode/Devblog?"

Thanks for putting out all the points for discussion.

Buying HashNode a cofee? Why Not? It is cool that, HashNode doesn't have plans for any paywall and $2 is perfectly fine for a Premium service.
Recruitment is tricky and a platform to support Recruitment could be more trickier if not done right and not supported enough by the community around. I like the courage in thinking on this line. Appreciate!
Training and Courses: This is the most loved one for me. I would be all happy if HashNode provides this platform. Here also we can have a free vs premium concept so that, it is not fully discouraged thinking it is paid.
Ads? Nope!

All the best to you folks, doing great job!

Premium accounts + recruitment. Ideally the recruitment would be opt-in for members--if I'm not looking, I don't want any messages.

Thanks! We will most likely introduce "Premium Accounts" very soon before implementing other ideas. This one is the easiest and most straightforward.

Training and Courses

What kind of courses do you like to read - text or video? Also, do you already use any platforms such as udemy/coursera etc and if yes, how much do you spend on courses per year?

Another quick question, would you be interested in paying for premium articles? i.e research driven articles that go deeper into difficult concepts -- users need to pay a very nominal amount to the author (~ $0.50 to $0.99) to unlock such premium articles. Authors have full control over setting the price for the premium tutorials they write. One of the cons of this approach is the "paywall". If every other article is premium and locked, it'll definitely upset a lot of users.

What do you think?

Sandeep Panda,

I like the courses over Coursera, mostly video courses. To me those are more lively, light-wight and less committed than Udemy. Most of the courses that I have purchased are between $8 to $12. In Udemy I went for only one paid course which was so awesome(Andrew NG's ML course) that I paid $50. That's max and very rare. Anything more than $10 to $12, I would question myself.

Per year I spend around $50. I also had a subscription from egghead.io for $49 and that year I didn't buy anything else.

One of the cons of this approach is the "paywall". If every other article is premium and locked, it'll definitely upset a lot of users.

Question is, once we start that, can we stop us from getting into this loop? I think, difficult and people will have similar respect they have for Medium today!

I can honestly see a lot of benefits to making the platform costs a couple of bucks a month, better support, more of a true filter. I like the idea. You've got my vote.

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