Lo! The prophesied return! We are in the presence of Alexius Rex.
Personally I'm really not sure about the idea of this place becoming a business. I'm sure there is some unobtrusive way that monetization could be implemented as an option, but I really question what would happen to the ecosystem here if ulterior incentives and advertising were introduced. A point of pride for this website I think is that we have readers, active regulars, and people making thought-out comments and reviews. Which is exceedingly rare for a fiction website, interactive or not, below the CoG size threshhold where these things are bound to occur by probability alone.
The magic of CYS, however, is the total democratization of content and culture that's taken place here. The stories that stay on the site are essentially up to popular vote, and the stuff that gets posted is free to be crude, unpalatable, or strange within the tolerances of the community. This place is home to not only surreal and avant-garde stories, but exceedingly violent and edgy ones. It's also not only home to just stories, but quizzes, puzzles, RPGs, weird math games, school reports, informational little PSA-like stories, and all manner of interesting and bizarre things that just don't happen in a CoG-like setting where stories are the product. And I think that never knowing what you're going to get is part of the spark here. By my guess, CYS may be one of the biggest collections of just, high-quality Outsider Art from all genres that actually gets seen and considered by anyone on the internet. And to monetize it would raise quite some concerns.
For one thing, our community and content is not advertiser-friendly, and the freedom to be contrary, uncouth, and weird, is probably a tremendous pull factor that keeps us together, though it does cause troublesome interactions. This volatility is unpredictable and probably even inscrutable from an outside perspective- and, I think, that's really not something people investing money or ads and whatnot into this community would want. People also generally dislike ads, and I woul guess, without some other important additions whatever they may be, people would just feel like the browsing experience decreased in quality without any perceivable benefit.
If there were a push to become advertiser-friendly, I think we would lose a lot of people and stories that make this place fundamentally what it is, and stifle the atmosphere in such a way that I feel like important parts of the active community would gangrene not long after. This sort of open town square of ideas where you can make and say truly anything within reason would pretty suddenly become a place where you can say very few things, and, flatly put, simply less things would be created. Over the years we have been entertained by people from all ends of the political orthogahedron, almost every fandom I could name, people with a lot of absolutely off-the-wall ideas and people who do a handful of simple ideas with great artistry, and all other manner of internet wanderers brave enough to set up things here. But when you make advertising a priority, you kind of give sponsors control over what can be allowed to appear, equal to or greater than the entirely organic market formed by the community and its top contributors, and that can be poisonous for a small ecosystem like this.
To contrast, I would point to far bigger places like CoG, again, which is a very homogenized place with internet culture very similar to youtube, twitter, and reddit- Which, while they are generally polite and outwardly presentable, this mass corralling of the populace into an expected measure of decorum also creates an adversarial and authoritarian relationship between the community and its custodians, with a lot of disenfranchised creatives who dislike the system, most of its leadership, and are borderline ashamed to be using the platform in the first place. Small niches of interest can be carved out, but they are regulated in unfortunate ways, for they rest under a proverbial Eye of Sauron. This place in itself is a small niche of interest that just happens to get a lot of visitors and readers, and maybe the whole system wouldn't be super sustainable if CYS had nearly as many users as CoG, but the little organization we have is generally good for who we have, and I think the people currently with us form a neat and dynamic sieve through which only the reasonably mature idiots who can be trusted with the freedom CYS provides, can survive and thrive here.
In truth, if there really were no considerations to be made for the content preferences of advertisers, I would have no problem making an adblock exception for a place as dear to my heart as this. But I'm not sure if even other users who like the place even as much as I do would share that sentiment.
An alternate method of monetization is to make stories the product, but that creates a potentially even more deadly cycle for places like this. I feel like this is a cringy childish parable to bring into a discussion like this, but it's the only analogue to the kind of mischievous, hare-brained creative energy this place has that I know anything about.
Once upon a time, a long time ago, there was a game called TF2. It was already a very unique video game completely unusual to others of its kind in the first person genre. Most gamemodes incentivized teamwork over individual performance, and the combat was a back-and-forth cartoonish gunfight rather than an immediately-resolved dispute where the person with better reflexes and map-awareness would win every time. This created an incredible game that is completely alien and antithetical to all other shooters to this day. Because of the teamwork aspects making other players actually worth paying attention to at all skill levels, this created a social atmosphere where players developed a unique and vast vocabulary of taunts, voice-commands, and other interactions and in-jokes. Where wandering into an enemy-controlled area in any other game would yield extremely predictable results, TF2 players could walk into an enemy base and high-five the other team and then walk out relatively un-exploded while a tremendous battle is just happening on the floor underneath them.
This and more meant the community was unmistakably unique in and of itself, but every Halloween, they would go all out. There were maps, cosmetics, and minigames unique to this time of year, all of which were completely wild and balanced not at all around winning in skill at the game's combat like most of the other content, but around the goofy stuff that the community did all on its own. However- The way that these Halloween cosmetics were initially distributed throughout the community was toxic to the atmosphere. Every once in a while, a box would simply appear somewhere on the map, and notify everyone. Suddenly, the entire game and everyone interacting within it would cease for 5 to 10 minutes as they frantically ran to get their free hat. You've probably heard of the TF2 hat market because that's perhaps the thing that has most escaped the community. Back then, any hat you found during Halloween was not only rare and special, but tradable for effectively some amount of real-life currency depending on what it was. Suddenly, as opposed to picking classes that were most effective for what players wanted to do in the game, players were picking classes that had the best mobility for getting around the map and finding the box first. No one was doing what they wanted to do anymore, Halloween became a slog of salt, envy, and resentment, and the system was drastically changed so that free Halloween hats weren't tradeable and were also rewarded mostly according to goals centered around actually playing the game rather than a race to the finish.
I guess an analogy I could have gone with as opposed to this whole spiel was this- A bunch of people are having fun splashing around in a pool, gradually making up their own game with the ball or whatever they have in the pool with them. Everybody has different skills and different goals, and are trying to do different things, but everyone is having a good time. Then, some person sneaks up, drops a heavy gold bar in the deep end, and runs off. Suddenly, the game that these friends were playing is gone, and what has replaced it is "Who can pull the heavy gold bar up to the surface and get home with it first?". Only certain people in that friend group will be any good at that. And the competition between all of them will be fierce nonetheless.
Assuming there's a limited amount of attention a site can get, because there is, a system that monetizes stories creates a sad and unfortunate homogeny. When stories become "units" to be "moved", as they are on CoG, who I would highlight is the only really big example of this it creates a stifling market where art races to control the biggest share of the lowest common denominator. Outside of the very few mold-breakers who have to sign a riskier contract than other games, CoG games are almost all assembly-line pieces of quite uniform tales with customizable cardboard protagonists and gender or sexuality flip-flopping romance partners marketted at tumblr kids and the wine moms they grow up to be. This happens on other monetized game platforms that have allowed this as well. Roblox games are now almost all incremental app-like-games designed by teams to wring money out of children. Fortnite was once its own strange and interesting game that became a roblox-like sandbox platform capable of aping everything popular, from Pubg to Town of Salem and all the other shit, designed to wring money out of children and whoever liked whatever it was imitating. And no matter what other interesting things are on the platform, the tasteless majority will win, because it works. The platform will attract people who are good at making that kind of thing as opposed to making whatever they want for the purposes of having their art read. The clones of the profitable thing will flood the site in much the same way that Warrior Cats did, and those games will in turn attract a young community with no interest in what actually made the site good in the first place.
Who knows what it would be that eventually takes over in the event of individual game monetization- Whether it's the archetypal CoG imitation game or something else, it'll become the CYS game, when one of the aspects of CYS's beauty is that there is no CYS game. There are Endmaster games, there are Steve games, and Mizal games, and Ogre games, and the renowned CYBERMONKEY franchise. And certain things may become more or less famous across the site, but you still never know what's going to show up in the New Storygames section because nothing is incentivized except making a game in the first place, and you never know what's going to take off as a cultural touchstone in the community, even if it's really good or really terrible from a quality standpoint, because it's entirely subject to the taste of people who read on their own free time for points and commendations. There are games that have been too terrible to even remain on the site that people still reference now as part of this rich tapestry of humorous esoterica, because love for this place and its ideosyncracies is the purest motivator.
Another alternative is merchandise, but that also risks causing this same homogeny by proxy, and MHD seems to be selling her art for CYS fans already.
If there had to be something monetizable about CYS, I think the only way to do it without really killing the magic would be something that's entirely unique to this place- The Cystian propensity for War. Granted, gathering up the want and the sustained focus of the community to consistently do something for money might be too inconsistent to form a real business around, but it would be funny if this happened. Many of CYS's most fondly remembered community excursions and bonding experiences have been in its friendly competition with other places, whether it was the time several members all gathered to sweep the Spring Thing contest, submit hundreds of stories and reviews to the IFDB, secretly rebel with CoG expats during the Briar Fiasco, and even war with ourselves during writing contests and the legendary Commander event that is lost to time.
I'm not sure if channeling the good will of a ragtag collection of capricious and vitriolic internet nerds is stable fuel for a business, but at the very least, CYS is a very interesting and resilient thing that can grow out of their proverbial petri dish into other places when properly nurtured and pointed in the right direction. CYS might not be easily monetizable, but, with the right signposting, they can be pointed in the direction of something that is, at their leisure, as long as it's not too intrusive. How long it'll last, I'm not sure, because we never exactly wound up doing anything like this on a permanent timescale before, but I feel like it would be a way to make money with CYS without disrupting what CYS is, and that's certainly better than nothing.
