Roughly extrapolating from the amount of mana that has been donated to charity, I would guess that the amount of money coming in to manifold from people buying mana is quite small. Will manifold change its strategy to try and generate more revenue before the end of 2023?
Examples of things that would count:
Making manifold real-money or soft-real-money in some way (e.g. mana is redeemable for things other than donations)
Ads
Selling market data
Running private prediction markets for companies
For all of these it should be clear that they are at least trying to make this a main source of revenue, and not just a bit in the side
Examples of things that would not count:
Essentially the same revenue model, but with a big shift in marketing that makes it much more effective (e.g. popularise EAs giving their 10% via manifold)
Dec 11, 11:17am:
Will manifold significantly change its revenue model before the end of 2023→ Will manifold significantly change its revenue model before the end of 2023?
A "main source" of revenue would, Ithink, need to be double digits in terms of percentage. Right now, it looks like only grants and VC $ are main sources. Don't see any evidence of a serious belief that, e.g., ads could be a non-trivial source of real-money revenue as currently implemented as opposed to a sink to combat mana inflation.
1 and 2 were implemented together in the new ad feature:
"Will manifold change its strategy to try and generate more revenue"
To me, this question wasn't asking whether they would generate more revenue from ads, but whether they'd try to generate more revenue from ads.
I'm not sure why else they'd introduce ads other than to make mana more valuable so they could try to sell more mana
both /ad and the new boost feature are intended to be mana sinks eventually. the 0 fee is just to encourage usage at the beginning
They've already said they're planning on doing items #1 and #4 in your examples, so the question is just whether they get around to doing so before the end of the year.
