Comment by jfoster
10 years ago
Really glad that you like it!
I feel that it's a difficult site to monetize. Part of the appeal is that it can be more convenient than having a resizing application on your computer. I think adding sign in (a dependency for premium plans) would undermine that a bit.
At the moment, it's still growing quickly, doesn't take up much of my time and costs barely anything to run. Given those circumstances, I don't feel I need to rush into monetizing. I'd rather wait and see.
Probably the best thing that could happen in the meantime is widespread adoption of a very low friction micropayments platform. I think PayPal or bitcoin are best positioned for that, but I haven't seen any signs of that ideal scenario coming to fruition any time soon.
You may also consider using this tool to drive traffic to another product/service. It's advertising but you would benefit more than slapping on some Adwords. I think micropayment is a bad strategy, adding any payment/signup friction to a service like this and users are going to bounce
I pretty much agree on all counts. Let me elaborate a bit, though.
Drive traffic to something else: That's my current thinking.
Adwords: I think Adwords would make the site seem slower and ruin it a bit. I'd consider a single, short text snippet Amazon link, though. Eg. "Check out the latest Nikon DSLR on Amazon"
Micropayments I would only consider if a service emerged that was as simple as embedding a one-click button and took sufficient market share that it wouldn't be a barrier. I can see that the likelihood of this in the near future is small, though.
This seems like maybe the best strategy, if one ends up being needed.
That's true, since it's all client-side (except hosting the site itself), the costs to run it would be almost nothing, maybe it's better off staying as a free service :)