How we plan to pay content creators?

We are asked this question time and again. How the heck will Datajoy pay content creators?

When we started thinking about the FUPM model, we first looked at our costs.

First, we looked at fixed costs…

1. We currently run our infra on a fixed price VPS. Since each DNS request is basically a fraction a kb, we don’t expect to hit any usage limits at the volumes we are talking about. This may change soon but we currently spend less than $150/month on server costs.
2. We aren’t paying ourselves a salary — though we most definitely track how much time we spend on Datajoy each day, we aren’t actually billing any time against the company. This means that all the technical support and responsiveness you see from us is a labor of love :). Salaries = 0$/month
3. Payout rates — we have a very generous payout rate of 1c/visit. This is far far far above the widely accepted payout rates of about 0.06c/visit that Quora answer suggests. On the other hand, only a handful of websites have signed up for FUPM. Plus, only a handful of users currently use Datajoy. The number of Datajoy users visiting websites which have signed up for Datajoy is very, very low. Once this number starts approaching higher figures, we will have to revisit the payout ratios we started out with.

So, right now, we don’t expect to spend a lot more than 250$/month on fixed and payout costs.

Ideally, we would like to have the opposite problem where our costs balloon to unsustainable levels and it starts hurting our pockets.

Once that happens,

1. We will have to turn to our users for donations. There is plenty of interest on the usual sites like Hacker News and Reddit where people want to pay content creators. Even if we convert 10% of those people into contributors into the payout pool, we expect our business model to be on the road to sustainability.
2. If that doesn’t work, we will consider selling completely depersonalized data to Wall Street. We know, we know - just saying the words “sell” raises hackles everywhere but consider this — we literally don’t ask anyone to create any profile or account to use Datajoy. All we really get from you is your IP address which our proxy server uses to determine whether to allow you to use our DNS server or not. We throw away your IP address once our proxy server makes its decision. This means we honestly don’t know who is making which DNS lookup request. As far as our DNS server is concerned, all lookup requests come from 127.0.0.1.
3. If all else fails, we will shut down the service and apologize profusely to our users. Don’t let us fail, dear reader, don’t let us fail.