I've been thinking about how to make money on Nostr. Here are my ideas:

1. Hosting service

2. Digital goods

3. User generosity

(Ads are essentially off the table.)

More on "digital goods": the most obvious way is through paywalled content, eg "Zap to unlock". There's no way for any centralized system to skim fees off the top, so to make money you have to be a top content creator. And what content are people willing to pay the most money for..? OnlyFans. I hate this idea, but it's likely only a matter of time in the Nostr paradigm.

My other idea is profile items, eg essentially NFTs people can display on their profile. It would require client cooperation, or at least users to choose clients which support it. This is a half-baked idea, but I like it more than OnlyFans and I think it could make money, especially if the items help represent a user's personal identity or affiliations.

A few short notes on the other bullets. Hosting service is hard with a low profit margin (unless it's highly specialized) and there isn't currently a strong enough incentive to self-host relays, so we have to create that incentive first by gamifying the relay experience similar to ActivityPub servers (eg a relay is a community).

And finally on user generosity, Nostr users are overall wealthier and way more generous than other communities online, so you have a far better chance utilizing that vs say ActivityPub. Creating spaces users really want (and then empowering them) will help. I think it's possible to be cashflow positive with a team of 2 or 3 people just on donations if you do it right, but to scale further you need to be tapping into the human psyche a bit more unless you become a full-fledged nonprofit.

So in conclusion, let's not build OnlyFans and find a better way instead. Ideas are still baking. Also, this is completely unrelated to the #OnlyZaps hashtag which is about replacing Likes with Zaps. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.