By selling 8 small ad units along the top/side of the site, for $5k-$10k/each per month. They would sell out easily. Maybe give away one to a lucky startup each month.<p>I've often thought that it'd be awesome if HN had ads like this, and all the money was donated to the EFF or something. No one would mind and it would give them a huge new source of funding.<p>--<p>Incidentally, it's occurred to me that this could be a successful startup idea. A startup could facilitate other companies "donating" ad space to worthy causes. The startup takes a small cut for selling/serving the ads. The donor just picks an ad unit style and drops in Javascript.
If I remember one of pg's posts (that I can't easily find right now), it was intended that YC is the way that HN is monetized. HN encourages smart people to start startups and apply to YC.
There's a huge opportunity in monetizing the library. (the link on the lower right)<p>HN is a pool of knowledge ranging from true-to-life successes to know-it-alls who just hang around and keep re-quoting philosophies which they never really live out.<p>Emphasizing on 'HN is a pool': the place is a firehose of information that drowns most minds. This like-minded community, new or old members, in turn affects each other to become passionate. That's the thing, passionate about what? How do they start spending this passion? How do they go about in creating a cable company?<p>There must be a way to organize this pool of thoughts and posts into digestible streams of water in which, I believe, some people or corporations would actually pay to drink from.
The traditional answer is that I would use it to promote and capture mindshare for a startup accelerator. An innovative improvement to the traditional answer is that I would pay people 1 cent for every upvote they receive. The first hypothesis is that this would increase mindshare and quality of discussion, the second is that this would in turn have a positive effect on the quality of startups in the accelerator. (I'm defining "monetize" to mean "make money using".)
This site is pretty similar to Reddit, so I'm guessing that they would have very similar monetization strategies:<p><a href="http://profy.com/2009/01/03/reddit-figured-out-how-to-monetize-social-news-will-digg-listen/" rel="nofollow">http://profy.com/2009/01/03/reddit-figured-out-how-to-moneti...</a><p>Incidentally, Reddit isn't as profitable as you might imagine, given its immense traffic and highly specific demographics.
Charge to add features. With a relatively simple baseline experience, there are always people looking to customize what they see on the site. Just look at the number of add-ons for browsers and alternatives/aggregators which exist.
It has a business purpose and the business it serves makes good money. As someone else said, is this thought experiment about monetizing some other forum "similar"* to HN or a thought experiment about monetizing this forum? Because monetizing this forum would likely be counterproductive to Y-Combinator's business goals, which HN currently serves.<p>* "Similar" is in quotes because I believe the life blood of HN is that it serves Y-Combinator's business goals and is not merely a forum. I think that is why no one can seem to replicate it or seriously "compete" with it.