Founders

There are 3 business models for apps.

1. Free with ads
2. Subscription
3. Transaction fee

The common thread for all three models is the user—a person, business or AI—has money to spend. 

That’s obvious for 2 and 3 since the model involves spending money directly with the app.

But for 1, if your user base doesn’t have money to spend, the ability to monetize via ads will be low.

Working on Farcaster and Warpcast. Longer thoughts at https://dwr.email

Other notes

Farcaster is still figuring out its business model. Experimenting with 2/3. Ads would be a client-level decision. 

Crypto today is really good for 3, bad UX for 2 but a bunch of smart wallet stuff can improve this, 1 is nascent (although a few examples like CoinMarketCap and Dexscreener). 

Subvariant of 1 “selling data” but less valuable than monetizing via ads. This is also increasingly limited because of regulatory (which ironically makes the at-scale web2 players more powerful).

CMC and DS aren't really example of crypto ads: they're simply crypto-focused publishers who run very legacy Web2 ad tech and charge a fixed CPM rate-card to crypto products of various levels of sketchiness. They're certainly not coupled to transactions or performance in any way (and generally generate very little of either, per clients whose campaigns we've measured).