Since the start, we’ve done our best to make choices that are in the long-term interest of the Gander community.
Locking in our mission as a Benefit Company. Getting Trust & Safety systems into place before harm happens. The whole exclusively Canadian infrastructure thing. Steady growth.
You know the drill by now: we’re doing everything we can to do this right.
We made those choices because we want Gander to be more than just a flash in the pan. And if Gander is going to last, we also need to become financially sustainable.
And we’re certainly not going to chase the business model that’s ruined the rest of social media for everyone.
Like everything else we’re going to approach this with intention to test business models and revenue generation carefully.
With that in mind, here’s where we’re headed.
TL;DR
- Gander needs a sustainable revenue model, so we’re testing some stuff
- Sponsored feeds will be the first revenue test people see
- Still not doing surveillance capitalism, still not selling your data
- We’re also exploring subscriptions, creator monetization
- We’ll test, listen, adjust, and keep building with the community
Building social infrastructure costs money. There’s no way around it.
Community investment helped us get Gander from a prototype to a real working platform (in around five months, to boot). We’re grateful for that. In fact, we are over the moon that Canadians showed up to fund this thing and become co-owners.
Buuuuut… we can’t depend on that kind of financing forever.
If we’re going to keep Gander running, pay people properly, keep building carefully, support the community, and grow in a way that does not lead us to the same problems we’re all trying to get away from, we’ll need to explore some options IRL.
And since Gander Social Inc. is a benefit company we’ve made commitments about how we build and operate: responsibly, transparently, with privacy in mind, and guided by the community.
Sadly, we can’t pay for servers on good vibes alone. As much as we’d love to.
So the work here is building the kind of business that supports our loftier ambitions.
Careful does it now
Some (most) social media business models do more than just monetize your data and attention. Bad enough as that is, they do us one worse when they structurally incentivize fraud and manipulation.
At home, we see Dutch youtubers meddling in our affairs to make a few quick bucks. Nothing against the fine people of the Netherlands, we appreciate the tulips and the friendship. Sadly, there are grifters grifting everywhere. And certain business models reward it.
Reuters has even reported that internal Meta documents projected roughly $16 billion in 2024 revenue from ads for scams and banned goods.
Yes, you read that right… $16 BILLION.
No thanks.
So when we talk about building Gander sustainably, we’re not just talking about revenue. We’re talking about creating revenue models that don’t incentivize bad behaviour or reward manipulation, fraud, rage farming, or identity theft.
So we have to be careful.
Here’s what we’re exploring
Now that the context is out of the way, here’s a closer look at a few of the avenues we’re exploring.
Sponsored feeds
Our first revenue test. They let businesses, organizations, publishers, institutions, and partners support topic-based feeds where they actually make sense. There’s a closer look at this one below.
Subscriptions for specific Features
We’re exploring subscriptions for people who want or need more from Gander. That could mean better image resolution, larger uploads, longer-form posts, or more tools for creators and communities. They are second in line. More on these below too.
Revenue sharing with creators
We want creators to have ways to earn here. That could include private groups, digital goods, events, paid community spaces, or tools that help people teach, gather, publish, and build. Meaningfully though and in a community oriented way.
Ideally, this is about helping people who bring value to the community keep doing that, while earning some income doing whatever it is they do best. Also, we want to the exchange to be an equitable one, that favours creators.
Local discovery and offers
Longer term, local discovery could help people find what is happening near them. Events, shops, community groups, services, hidden gems, and your favourite casse-croute. It could also give smaller businesses a way to accessibly reach people in their actual communities.
Wingspan
Wingspan is our work on open sovereign social infrastructure. Plainly put, it is the Canadian infrastructure that sits underneath Gander. There’s potential here for communities, organizations, and governments to have ownership of the content, data, and networks they create and rely on.
It could become another path to sustainability that tracks with our M.O.: keeping data, communities, and connections under Canadian stewardship. More on this one later, it deserves a deep dive.
The first test: sponsored feeds (our first ethical approach to advertising)
On Gander, feeds currently organize posts around people you follow, your Nest, and topics… like Art, Food, Politics, and so on. Right now there are around 12 categories, all of which pull content based on topics, keywords, hashtags, and accounts.
We’ve already had some fun with this. After a long, long winter, we created a Spring Feed full of community posts on gardening, hikes, patios, and (reluctantly) some snow.
Because it’s not a Canadian spring without a bit of extra snow.
Sponsored feeds work the same way. The feed is “fed” by posts from the community, except the feed itself is supported by a business, organization, publisher, institution, or partner.
The sponsor does not own the conversation. They support it.
That means the brand not only aligns to Gander’s own ethos, it suits a particular feed too. And they add something useful, relevant, interesting, or maybe even delightful in terms of content.
For example, a book publisher might support our Books feed, a record label may sponsor the Music feed, or a hardware chain could sponsor a custom feed for DIY.
The idea seems to have landed, and our first sponsored feed is on the way. Soon, our Technology feed will be sponsored by a Canadian internet provider.
Spoiler: it’s not one of the big three.
Next up: subscriptions
You may have heard us talk about this before. And certainly the community has mentioned it numerous times: many people would rather pay for extra features on Gander than have us rely on the models the other guys use.
To be clear, we’d rather shutter Gander than create something evil or addictive. So that’s not a thing for us.
But the subscription idea is sound: make something useful, and people will pay for it.
We are still working through what subscriptions could include, but our early thinking is pretty simple:
Subscriptions should add value.
They should provide additional tools for people who want or need them. What they shouldn’t do is hide the useful parts of Gander behind a paywall.
That might mean better image resolution or file size uploads for photographers, long form posts for writers, private groups that creators can monetize, or tools that help communities organize, publish, build audiences, and meet their goals on Gander.
It’s really about giving people who need more tools and features, more tools and features.
This means that every interaction on Gander won’t send you spiraling down a sales funnel you’ll never escape. Rather, we want to help people who bring value to the community keep doing that, with the tools they need to do it.
Figure it out bud!
All of this is a starting point. Like everything else that we do this will forever be a work in progress.
We do not think there is one single answer here.
A healthy business model for Gander will probably be a mix of ideas: some small, some bigger, some obvious, some a little off-piste at first, and some we haven’t even thought of yet.
That gives us room to test carefully and then decide based on what actually works. Regardless, every revenue path should support the experience here.
So we’ll test. We’ll listen. We’ll adjust. We’ll say yes to the ideas that fit, and no to the ones that do not.
And when we get something wrong, because we probably will at some point, we’ll fix it.
The community has always been our north star and that’s not poised to change.
We’ll be sharing a few surveys along the way so folks can provide input and feedback.
In the meantime we’ll keep doing what we do carefully, with you.
