Your opinions are spot on Jeff.

The core problem is in order to make monetize content you need traffic. Lots of traffic. That is the only real way to make money with both advertising AND a paywall when it comes to content.

The problem is the type of content that sites like the Tavern, WPDaily, WPCandy, etc. produce is content that only caters to a small niche of readers. WordPress theme and plugin developers, WordPress consultants, etc. Those are the people that visit these sites.

Yes WordPress itself powers an amazing percentage of all the sites on the internet. But the vast majority of WordPress users don't care about the type of WordPress related news and content provided by these sites. To them WordPress is just the software that powers their web site.

While it is possible to monetize a niche, and in some cases catering to a small niche can be a big advantage. But not this particular niche.

The amount you would have to charge for advertising simply wouldn't be worth it to the advertisers both because the ROI wouldn't be worth it. You'd have to have high advertising rates. And because it's such a small niche the advertisers would balk. Along with that issue these sites are visited daily by the same core group of people... which is why the same recurring faces appear in comments to blog posts, in the forums, etc. So advertising becomes ineffective when your simply reaching the same people over and over again. They already know about you and probably already own your product.

A paywall also wouldn't work because the niche is so small for it to be viable you'd also have to charge a lot... because you'd need a high volume in order to charge a little amount. It's a similar problem to the advertising issue I explained above.

Content is very hard to monetize. Especially in small niches where it doesn't involve a very high traffic site.

Jeff is also correct, we buy advertising for Gravity Forms on sites and podcasts such as the DradCast as well as WordCamps simply to support the community and those projects. Not because we expect a ROI.

Both both of you are incorrect that affiliate programs are that critical to our business. They were very helpful in the beginning, but not so much anymore now that we are well established. Which is why companies like WooThemes have completely dropped their affiliate programs.

We spend next to nothing on advertising and our affiliate network isn't valuable enough it couldn't be eliminated without seriously impacting our bottom line. In fact we've considered eliminating like WooThemes and several others have. Our brand and product is so strong, established and influential that we are able to succeed despite the fact we advertise so little. Our biggest driver of sales? Word of mouth advertising. There's no better kind. But but in order to get that you have to build a kick ass product and back it up with kick ass support.

As for competitors to Gravity Forms... there already are many competitors to Gravity Forms. Formidable. Ninja Forms. There are several on CodeCanyon. There are a couple more I know of but can't think of their names. It seems a new one pops up every few months. They haven't impacted our sales one bit. In fact our sales and revenue grow month after month. The fact that there have been numerous "competitors" enter the market hasn't had any impact on our sales or growth.

The truth is we don't even view any of the WordPress form plugins as our competition. I've said this numerous times. We view SaaS solutions such as Wufoo and Formstack as our competition. We don't look at the other WordPress form plugins as competition, never have. This isn't a knock at those plugins, its simply how we've always looked at things.

You'll see more of the reasoning behind this thinking as we implement more SaaS functionality within Gravity Forms itself.