I want to make a website that allows people to upload files, and allows linking to the uploaded files. But I have no idea how to monetize it. I can’t really think of any premium features I could charge for, and I don’t think putting adverts on the site will be effective, since most of the traffic will probably be of people just viewing the files, not the website and ads placed there. Has anyone got any suggestions? Has anyone seen how other similar sites monetize it?

Thanks!

  • spacegod3@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    There is a market for that, probably going to want to go developer oriented. You can have an api that interacts with the file system. Filestack is a product that does something similar.

    If you can interact with the files using an API, that’s super useful. There’s just competitors already, I personally wouldn’t switch over on an existing project and I imagine others wouldn’t either so you’d probably want to target users just starting to build their apps.

    Some ways to monetize could be some advanced feature, easy image resizing, cdn capabilities, on the fly image editing.

    Even without the api and just linking to images, a premium feature allowing easy resizing to thumbnail, banner, original size, etc(by attaching some parameter to the url) could be super useful for static sites too.

    Lots of directions you can go, I think best bet would be to find a startup that needs a product like this and build around that while making them your customer.