NephriteHeart

number one trusted contaminant

like a weed, naturally, as a matter of course


  • This is truly the most Cohost implementation possible. I figured I would see a banner above/below my main feed or some other indicator. Nope! It's the fourth line down on the left hand menu. There is no color or emphasis that would call my attention to it as a new thing to make use of.
  • Extremely back of the envelope math here, but I counted 150+ ads. My assumption is that you will see everything when you scroll down until there are no ads left to see. If we assume this level of buy-in remains constant, that's about $6,000 of ad revenue per month for Cohost. That still leaves them several thousand in the hole in terms of monthly expenses, but it's a money-making feature, a thing this business somehow lacked for years.
  • You can probably tell by my tone I don't love it. I love parts of Artist Alley. This is a user-requested feature. I like community-generated, non-programmatic ads! They were fun on Something Awful and every other place I've seen that tried them. The inclusion of ads makes Cohost the first website in years that gives a single, hot shit about artists, instead of belching up some VC-mandated garbage that makes it harder for human beings to make rent.
  • What I don't love: we're monetizing a flaw of Cohost. Discoverability here is shit. I am only using one tag for this post because I don't have it in me to carpet bomb this post with 9 tags in the hopes of finding the one that is most widely used. I don't know what the popular tags are because Cohost hides that information from me. The one time people tried to get around this, the Global Feed tag, the developers pitched a giant stink about it and offered no alternatives. It's hard to find other people here and we have no idea which tags are the right ones to use. But you can opt out of this platform-imposed difficulty... (BioWare bastard protagonist voice) for a price!
  • Artist Alley could be a respectable revenue stream for Cohost. I'm more interested to hear about the ROI from the artists who buy ads. Aurahack got some initial nibbles for her new comic but Aurahack is brilliant and she's put in the time. She has a following. Will this give a leg up to people who haven't yet found their breakout success? I genuinely want this to work out because it would be a lovely change of pace if a single good thing happened to artists.

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