Here’s another perspective…

Do you think Spotify’s business model is sustainable in the long-term? How about Reddit?

Spotify & Reddit earn enormous sums of money because they’ve built a captive audience of listeners and readers.

But how much do they pay their listeners and readers? Zero. (Spotify does pay small amounts to artists, but zero to listeners).

Yet without listeners and readers, their platforms would be worth nothing.

Fountain and Stacker News are flipping the script, by giving revenue earned from advertisers to the people who are making the platform valuable in the first place… the users.

I suspect many companies will take this approach to bootstrap a user base and disrupt Web2 competitors who don’t pay any money back to their users (Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, etc…)

Rather than asking whether or not it’s sustainable for companies to pay the users who make the platform valuable, I think the more important question is whether it’s sustainable to extract all the value a platform generates and pay users nothing.