Maybe "community" needs to be defined. I see SOH as a flightsim community, as is FlightSim.Com and other web sites. Those are the communities I was thinking of in my previous post. All these community web sites need some form of financial support to keep running.
FlightSim.Com over the years has been primarily funded through what are called "affiliate sales". We align with one or more stores, help them promote products and they pay us in return. Our first affiliation was with Flight Sim Central, who went out of business with no warning. We were briefly affiliated with Simmarket but ended up being affiliated with FSPilotshop, which worked well while eDimensional was the owner but not so much after they sold out and the new owner took over. We are also affiliated with Amazon though we don't run all that many ads for them.
We now own the store we run, which is why it's on our domain as
https://store.flightsim.com and not under another name. Developers can sell on their own, but consider that they get benefits by selling through a store. We provide exposure to the flightsim community for products our store sells via news, reviews, banner ads, social media posts, our newsletter as well as through the store itself. We often create the banners, sale graphics, etc. for the developers. We're working for the cut that we take and I think everyone benefits: the developers reach a larger audience, flightsimmers get exposed to add-ons they are interested in, and our community web site gets funding we need to continue running.
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