Personally? I don’t think there will ever be a way to monetize it without any downsides to whatever funding model you picked.

When I grew up, the web was composed of a lot of passion projects such as fansites, programming blogs, and of course, porn ;) Lots of people hosted these on their little baby home servers. There was a vast diversity of websites that you could find and discover. I’m hoping with big tech cratering due to enshittification, it will go back to that, but I’m not optimistic.

A bunch of years back (likely 10-15) there was a radio interview on a discussion program related to some sort of internet topic. One of the topics that came up for discussion was online piracy, and as part of that one of the points expressed by the guest was in regards to monetization. He believed that creators were at some point going to have to potentially embrace a reality where only a subset of folks consuming content are actively funding it, but that funding could be enough to create the content and keep the cycle going.

While the discussion above was about a subset of consumers purchasing the content (and the rest presumably getting it for free in various ways) I think we’ve seen that general methodology really starting to come to pass in the “creator space” with patreon and similar mechanisms. I’ve seen it gaining traction in more traditional web spaces, like small topic focused journalism outlets. That sort of direct funding has been around a very long time but I think consumers are more widely willing to chip in vs in the past expecting everything to be 100% free in exchange for more passive types of monetization.

I don’t think it’s a universal solution applicable to everything, but I do think it’s a viable model, especially around smaller, focused web spaces, especially if they can create some sort of genuine “community” where enough people involved will feel enough obligation to pitch in a little.

You’re never going to get 100% of people to care enough to pay 100% of the time, and there’s no guarantee it would be sustainable for a specific creator or project forever, but I don’t think there’s going to be any sort of “one size fits all” method going forward either.

However I do believe this sort of direct funding method (whether very directly or done through a service like Patreon) will continue to be viable even as the big companies go through their cycles of rising, falling, and merging, but never really quite dying.

I’ve had a small website running for just under 20 years now. It barely uses any bandwidth and it’s super cheap, so I just pay for it myself. No ads or even Javascript (works fine in text browsers such as lynx). Not everything has to be about making money. In the early days of the web it was more about sharing information. Maybe we can try that again?

I think ads could still work fine, the issue is that Google has more or less ruined the advertising environment.

Donations are great, almost no matter the size. If you have a big user base there will be people with money to burn it a desire to see whatever you got flourish. If you are a tiny a porn project anyone into your little niche is going to be willing to throw support your way.

Subscriptions suck, depending on what they do. If they provide the only access then your service will never take off. If they just give you cool stuff on top of whatever it is you’re already doing then you are just rewarding reoccurring donations, which probably works best.

Advertising is a valid way to make money, it just stopped being a way to make enough money for the typical scenarios (low-effort individual hosting, VC-forced growth).

Compute, storage and bandwidth have all significantly lowered in price over time, but moderation and hosting costs haven’t as internet proliferation, legal requirements and media standards kept growing.

There hasn’t been much focus in keeping costs low.
The most effective workflow for working with JavaScript is now installing a separate OS to install an installer for another virtual machine that installs an installer for an installer that installs build tools which install installers for dependencies to build 10 lines of code. Docker singlehandedly made “It works on my machine!” “Then ship the entire machine!” into a dogma.

Paid, ethical sponsorships with relevant companies to your particular audience seems to be a good bet (or selling your own product).

Things like Louis Rossmann’s (now defunct thanks to Amazon) affiliate links to computer repair products he fully endorses, or a hyper-niche prosumer home server retailer like Art of Server who creates highly informative tutorials on second hand hardware modifications and also has a storefront from which you can buy these devices pre-flashed and ready to go in a similar setup to what he is showing are both good revenue streams if you can get a strong enough following that sees your wisdom for what it is. I doubt it’s enough to make a living on, but as a side hustle it’s probably not that bad if you get a strong enough core audience.

Cookie cutter shilling just makes me suspicious of the product being sold, especially if they seem to be following a script. It comes off immediately as deceptive, if not completely dishonest. I see Raid: Shadow Legends and SurfShark as inherently risky/adversarial just because of how ubiquitous their marketing is, even in sectors that shouldn’t give a shit about them.