That would be nice, but the cost of hosting is not the issue. The problem is that people expect to have free software being developed and services being offered but they don't want to pay for the labor of developers and admins.

[–] CluckN@lemmy.world -4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

If only there was a way to charge per visit. Something like a digital billboard.

[–] bitwize01@reddthat.com 13 points 1 week ago

The server I subscribe to is completely transparent about their costs and displays how much lead time they have at their current spend. Per-user server cost is about $5 per year per paying user (as in, users that pay to keep the server running put in about $5, and there are many freeloaders). The admin to my knowledge doesn't make any money on his labor.

To make $5/user in ads per year at a CPC of $0.38 or a CPM of $6 (twitter prices, which is being pretty generous for something as small as Lemmy) would mean I'd receive 833 ads per year. An ad runs until it's CPM is hit, which means some of those ads would drag on for weeks until enough hapless fools clicked them. You might end up with one in five posts being an ad, leading to more adblocker use, which exacerbates your problem. It could end up being a significant cost to even deliver the ad content at that load.

This is all to make like $2k in hosting costs per year - imagine if you were trying to make a living running a Lemmy server, which people definitely will - it would be a hellscape. I'm happy to not deal with that.