Looks like they officially announced premium subscriptions: https://hq.getmatter.com/patron > Ads – the standard business model for the previous generation of reading/media products – smuggle in bad incentives. When revenue is a function of impressions, it becomes harder to justify sweating tiny details ("will refining this interaction really increase engagement?") and easier to justify engagement hacks that degrade the experience ("let's send more push notifications"). I hope all my competitors think this way 😎

What is your long term approach to ads? Will you always have them around in some capacity?

yep, that's the plan. I envision the structure will stay how it is now for a long time/forever. I.e. 20% of the items in the home feed + emails being ads. I probably will add a paid plan at some point so people at least have the option of paying if they would prefer to not get any ads. I'm waiting for this to be requested before I set it up though; I've got a small note about it on the settings page. long term I would like to experiment with bringing payments for paid newsletters and maybe ebooks into yakread, but the business model there would still essentially be advertising. the ads would just lead to newsletters inside of yakread, and yakread would take a fee for any paid subscriptions that it drives. that being said, the current pay-per-click system is super simple and effective, and it'll probably be a long time before it's worth experimenting with anything more involved.

Honest question, how do you do ads without getting perverse incentives? It makes sense to me that wanting ad revenue -> wanting users to spend more time with product -> not having user's best interest at heart, but I take it you disagree with that thinking?

I don't think ad businesses are/can be completely free of incentive misalignment--but the main thing is that imo that's true of all businesses, regardless of how they monetize. for example, in regard to optimizing for engagement--yes, ads do incentive that, but so do subscriptions. Netflix is the prime example (the fact that they've recently got into ads notwithstanding). substack and lambda school are also examples of companies that have incentive misalignment problems, despite all their emphasis on how aligned they are due to their business model. (I can elaborate on those once I'm not typing on my phone...) to answer your question--how do you do it without perverse incentives--it's a question I've had in the back of my mind for a while. so far I think a couple things that can help are (1) be transparent about the existence of perverse incentives--you can't even begin to address the problems if you pretend they don't exist (2) avoid pressure to grow beyond your means. e.g. if you take a bunch of VC but it turns out the market opportunity of your business isn't large enough to justify the amount you raised, you'll be under a lot of pressure to make more money, with ethics possibly taking a back seat to some extent. (I'm not anti-VC in general for the record, I just think you need to be careful/honest about if it's really a good fit for your business) (3) try to foster a competitive ecosystem, so people can switch to a different product if they feel like yours isn't built with their interests in mind. this is a large focus of mine with the unbundled-web thing (it's also why I'm not confident that VC will ever be a good fit for yakread)