Hype Machine launched in April 2005. We started running ads a few months later to cover growing hosting costs, and have remained an ad-supported service ever since. Ours is a straightforward business: we make money from display advertising and use it to build products that help people find new music. Unlike most internet companies, we don’t have investors or other funding.
We are grateful to everyone who’s purchased our mobile apps since we began releasing them in 2011. These sales allowed us to maintain the apps and develop new features, and we thank you for your support and enthusiasm.
We wish we could have kept our apps ad-free. But with just three employees filling dozens of roles, Hype Machine has to rely on a steady source of income to pay for servers and pay each other. Over the past few years, many of our listeners have moved from the web to our mobile apps. Combined with an industry-wide decline in display ads, this has had a serious impact on our revenue. The difference is significant enough that a one-time app purchase can no longer support our service, something that advertising still creates an opportunity to do.
Since we launched mobile ads in December 2016, there’s been a strong show of support for an ad-free option in the apps. We are exploring ways to make this happen, most likely through a subscription model. It means a lot to us that so many of you like what we’ve built over the years, and want to see it keep going for many more.
If you are interested in an ad-free Hype Machine, please sign up below:
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