This is exactly the conversation we need. I was trying to suggest something similar within the SkateHive community, with ads for skate companies and brands.
If you compare the business model of social media with Hive, they’re both free, but social media monetizes your attention through advertising and data collection, and we do none of that. That’s a lot of value we’re just leaving in the table cause some ppl don’t like ads.
Meanwhile Brave shows us a model where we can give people control over what they see, or if their data can be used. We could essentially be curating advertisements, as well as selling data with consent, and have the revenue be shared through a Hive buy back program.

Other ideas I’ve had include crazy things like focusing on the emerging demand for open source scientific research journals, archives of journalistic materials, training open source ai models, and decentralized versions of any other thing out there that have been too centralized.