How does Fluther make money?

Advertising————->

Selling Dr. J Jelly shirts, Amazon Affiliation, and if you log out you will notice ads underneath every question.

@MrMontpetit I see the t-shirts and the ads. I can’t imagine that they make a lot of money on t-shirt sales. Wis had ads too but the income was a relative trickle for them.

@Benny I would venture to say that Fluther’s business model on all levels is more sophisticated. The ads you see there are connected to the Qs, but, if you log out and surf over to Fluther after a Google search, the ads are more prominent (and connected directly to the Q at hand).

haha, there’s a Barbara Streisand ad over there right now because of the recent question about her.

What they don’t want you to know is that Ben and Andrew (Fluther founders) come from old landed European aristocracy. They needed something to do between polo season and grouse hunting season, so as a gesture of goodwill toward the little people, they started Fluther. It’s essentially funded by the proceeds of their South African tulip plantation.

@Harp Not quite

@Harp LOL! Great answer

Yes! Bagillions

Why? Gettin paranoid already Benny??!! LOL!! You know…I really think wis.dm just over extended itself. Remember how upset we were with the creation of the scenes….gosh. Wish they’d listened to us.

@DutchCat No, I was just wondering. This seems like a successful site that works really well. I’m just wondering what their business model is that makes it successful while wis has failed.

@Benny How can you tell that they are any better off than wis.dm financially? Other than this site working faster I find no way to tell if this site is overly successful or not. Of course I know very little about running sites, but I think what goes on behind the scenes is not usually brought out unless it really has to be.

@Kelly27 Well, I can’t. The only way I can tell that they’re better off financially is that this site is active and wis.dm is dying. I guess that’s the essence of my question—is this site financially viable, and if so, how? The deeper question is how did Martin and Will screw up on wis?

@Benny I wish I knew the answer to that last question….

Their expenses were greater than their revenues (isn’t that always the problem). As far as I understand, they didn’t really leverage advertising in a way that would allow them to make money on the site.

I think all the changes to wis.dm were way expensive…When they were more like this site—back in the day—I don’t think they had financial problems…

Wis.dm made most of its money from selling its technology to third party corporations. The advertising was only meant to be a supplement, but it was so poor that it didn’t generate any revenue.

Testing….testing failed.

@DutchCat You can link to pictures, but you can’t post them directly

@harp just experimenting with the textile commands I found like this?

@DutchCat :) fun stuff, huh?

@DutchCat – make sure you add yourself to your Fluther…

@Ivan Interesting, I didn’t know that. Now I understand a little better why they did the things that they did.

@forestGeek OK…but it just seems so…narcissistic! What will that do, anyway?

@Harp oh yeah! At wis.dm, in the old days, before you could highlight and do all KINDS of cool stuff quickly (Like write STOMP in bold, red, and 50 point font! Or 100. Or whatever!), everybody got together and taught everybody the JCL codes you hand typed before and after your words…...it was a fun, fun time….old days, before the scenes…

I noticed wis.dm has a jobs section. Fluther is just two guys who do other stuff too. As long as the ads pay for the server we are fine. Maybe wis.dm tried to get to big to fast.

Look at Digg. They have 70+ employees and I don’t think they have ever had a profitable quarter. Look at Metafilter, they have 4 paid employees and they don’t have money problems.

@johnpowell To my knowledge, that ‘jobs’ section was never used. I could be wrong about that though. There were only a handful of people who worked at wis.dm as far as I know. They were never a big operation. I just think it was poor business management and planning. You would have to talk to Martin Clifford.

@Ivan And over extending themselves….

@johnpowell I think that’s it in a nutshell….

You really don’t know that wis.dm died from lack of money. These are unfounded assumptions. Will and Martin were quite proficient liars, as their last attempt at a palindrome proved. You could have emailed them all the palindromes you wanted and never gotten back into wis.dm.