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How to monetize a file upload website? (alien.top)

submitted 11 months ago by 140BPMMaster@alien.top to c/entrepreneur@indiehackers.space

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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!

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[–] Mother_Abies@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

BLUF: Pseudo-informed opinion, assuming you are set on the market: Monetize via monthly subscription access to the feature/functionality of file storage as a directory accessible via url that just uses the basic folder structure for sharing, and scale pricing based on storage size and user counts.

I just went thru a very quick (read: 1 day) tool selection exercise for our small biz and ended up back at g drive and changing my ops process a bit because I couldn’t find a file share/storage solution that didn’t use direct links to files. Was looking for options of sharing lower levels of the old-school file serv experience of parent/folder/subfolder urls I could use in dynamically generated automation for api calls. Looked at and/or talked to sales folks at egnyte, tresorit, box. All had similar solutions and limitations, and all want you to share like hashed direct links to folders or files that I would need to build a reference table around to use in automated delivery. Especially sucks for a business where our output is new files on recurring basis. We are on AWS for some other minor pieces, but even s3 is weird in that you can only share folder structure if you build an app around the bucket. So yeah, back to the ol’ g drive for now since we’re only a smidge technical in nature.

Saying all this to say, there’s seemingly still at least one way to differentiate in the UX for online file sharing. Not sure if you want to solve for it or enough people want to buy it, but there’s one guys’ journey in your space :).

Maybe the better outcome is I get lucky and someone smarter than me points out an existing solution to my problem in this thread, ha.