Scott says that it’s insanity to expect that Web services should be free. I agree, and I’ve written here many times about my support for services that I well and truly appreciate. This is homesteading the noósphere at its root.

If you didn’t check out the comment I linked, let me quote myself:

I’ve just gotten my Web community to near self-sufficiency. Know how that happened? I told them the costs involved.

Now, we’re a non-profit, and also seeking to just break even … , but … still.

We’ve made fundraising pitches at [rocksmyfaceoff.net] before, but I think this time we hit on the magic trifecta of how to get people to donate:

1. We gave them incentive to do so. In making the wider Rumor Forum experience optional but placing a value on it, we gave people a reason to support us [wanting to be involved in the full community experience] without degrading the basic experience [talking about the bands that form the basis for the community].
2. We gave them a simple mechanism to support us. Prior to this point, supporting us was an admittedly byzantine issue. Make it easy for people to support you, and they will.
3. We told them why we needed their support. This is quite similar to Kevin Burton’s Golden Tickets for TailRank—he explained where the community funding would be spent, and he got people [including me] to support him.

I think that there are lessons to be learned here. Simply: openness about your needs, incentives for support, and simple mechanisms to allow people to support you. The 2005 Internet supports all this, so when you have a fait accompli, I think you can make it happen.

I don’t think you can do this when you don’t have a reputation or a product that people are already familliar with; if you’re an unknown quantity with an unknown product, you’re going to fail. If your product or your reputation are known values, though, I think you can leverage this mechanism to get yourself to self-sufficiency. [Yes, this means that you have to spend some capital to make some money.]