How does fluther make money?

Hmm, maybe there should be a couple of sticky questions on the first page.

How does fluther earn money?

How is the Fluther web site funded?

Marketing and polls are not allowed.

@oratio
Its never answered in those. It seems to lead credibility to my initial guess of insertion of questions by companies.

Oh, it has been asked a bunch of times, but I thought it was answered in those.

It’s by ads for people not logged into Fluther. The Fluther gang has also received investments from a company.

@jackm Both of those questions oratio linked to have your answer as the first response.

@andrew
So its really just those 3 ads for non users that run this site? I would have thought that wouldn’t be enough, but I’ve never ran a site as large as this.

Am I allowed to ask what investors hope to get out of the site then if they can’t tap us directly?

What do they hope to get out of the site? A return on investment, I’d imagine.

@andrew
Ok, I just thought the community was used as more than just ad clickers.

When you sign up to Fluther, they sell your soul to the devil (small print for the lose) for a healthy profit which goes towards their plans of world domination in combination with the intensive knowledge gained by all the posts on this site.

@jackm Some facts of life in the Internet world. Fluther is a privately held company. Thus, the company’s owners and stockholders do not have to share their revenue or even their revenue sources with the great unwashed. Andrew was gracious enough to tell you anyway.

Second, Fluther is closely held and only took it’s first round of “outside” money (although it may have had some “family and friends” investment earlier) this year. Here is a link to an article on that.

What there is not is any attempt to use the site’s questions for commercial purposes. Questions detected as being spam or marketing plants are quickly rooted out by the moderators and/or flagged by the community.

some of the members secretly send a $1.00 check every month…

@flameboi Oh, you got that memo? Say @jackm let me know if you want the address to which to send your $1 check. I will be happy to send you mine.

@Marina
I am aware that I am not entitled to know where the money is coming from, or what it is being spent on, I was simply curious.

I also wasn’t accusing fluther of any nefarious practices, that was simply the only idea I could come up with as to how companies were using fluther for their benefit. But as @andrew pointed out, they simply see the site as a money making endevour, and don’t intend on using the fluther population for anything more than clicking on ads. This makes my initial idea moot I guess…

With their color laser printer.

I do not know about all of you.

Andrew and Ben always catch me off guard.

They beat me and take my wallet.
Walking away laughing they say, “see you next week.”

PLEASE somebody help me!!

The staff are professional leprechaun catchers. You wouldn’t believe what you can get with a pot of gold these days!

@ChazMaz Stop wearing that green suit and ditch the shillelagh!

@AstroChuck Actually, when we brought the color laser printer into the office some of the guys thought it’d be neat to see if they could scan currency—and there’s hardware level blocking preventing scans of denominations larger than $5.

@andrew Holy crap, I never would have even though of that…