How to Monetize Volunteer-Driven Platforms

by Jiho Lee, Lior Zalmanson, Chrysanthos Dellarocas and Gordon Burtch

April 16 2025 HBR

Many digital platforms thrive on the contributions of volunteers, whether as content creators, moderators, or community developers. Yet, as platforms scale and introduce monetization strategies, they risk alienating these communities. When Reddit changed its API pricing in 2023, what seemed like a routine business decision triggered mass blackouts by volunteer moderators, hobbling the platform. A decade earlier, unpaid Huffington Post contributors, feeling exploited, staged strikes and filed lawsuits following AOL’s $315 million acquisition. These cases highlight a recurring challenge: how platforms can commercialize without undermining the volunteer-driven systems that make them valuable. This article—drawn from our ongoing research—will offer lessons from companies that stumbled and insights from organizations that navigated these challenges successfully.

The Evolving Nature of Platform Communities

The role of volunteers in platform growth has traditionally been viewed as straightforward: enthusiasts help scale services through unpaid contributions. Huffington Post built its initial success through volunteer writers. Duolingo expanded language offerings through community-created courses. Reddit grew its communities with the help of unpaid moderators. Viki, a video-streaming service (now owned by Rakuten), reached global audiences through volunteer translators who made content accessible in over 160 languages.

Yet, examining these platforms’ histories reveals a more complex pattern. These volunteer communities don’t merely scale existing functions; they fundamentally shape how platforms operate and create value. Duolingo’s course creators have developed unique courses that employ tailored pedagogical approaches, accommodating the unique nuances of specific languages. Reddit’s moderators established governance systems that now fundamentally shape how the platform functions. What begins as a contribution often evolves into co-creation.

The Monetization Moment

This evolution becomes most apparent—and most challenging—during monetization. When Huffington Post was acquired by AOL, the resulting crisis wasn’t simply about compensation. The platform had failed to recognize how thoroughly volunteer contributors had shaped its value proposition. The founder’s dismissive response to contributors’ concerns led to strikes, lawsuits, and lasting reputational damage.

Stack Overflow faced a similar reckoning when partnering with OpenAI. The platform discovered that volunteers didn’t see their contributions merely as posted answers; they also saw them as carefully curated knowledge, about which they held specific and strong views. Community members reacted very negatively to the partnership announcement. The community response—deliberate content deletion—highlights a gulf between platforms’ and volunteers’ views of the community’s contributions.

There are three lessons that can be gleaned from the experiences of volunteer-dependent platforms that have faced the challenge of scaling and monetizing their businesses.

1. You must first develop a deep understanding of how all elements of your operations are geared to volunteers.

When Stack Overflow faced volunteer resistance to AI training, it wasn’t just about content rights; the rebellion revealed that volunteer-created systems had become core to the platform’s infrastructure. Consequently, the knowledge-validation architecture (how knowledge assets are acquired, represented, stored, and organized), peer-review systems, and quality controls weren’t features that could be easily repurposed.

To avoid making the same mistake, platform leaders must first answer these questions: Which core functions depend on volunteer-built systems? Where have volunteer-created tools become essential infrastructure? Most critically, which systems emerged from specific community purposes that might conflict with commercial objectives?

The next step is to create a roadmap for making the transition by answering these questions: Can volunteers be included in co-designing the transition? Should certain features or digital artifacts be shielded from monetization to preserve community trust? How can incentives be restructured to align evolving business needs with volunteer expectations? That information will enable platform leaders to anticipate friction points, develop mitigation strategies, and ensure that commercialization efforts do not destabilize the very systems that drive platform value.

2. Governance structures must be established early.

The Huffington Post case demonstrates how attempts to retrofit volunteer relationships after a platform has taken major steps to monetize its business can fail miserably. The remedy is to create a governance framework early—before commercial pressures force hasty decisions. The framework must address not just how volunteer-built systems will evolve but also how changes affecting community infrastructure will be evaluated and implemented.

Wikimedia Enterprise provides a strong example of this proactive approach. The Wikimedia Foundation engaged its stakeholders, including the volunteer community, early in the development of the Wikimedia Enterprise product. When contributors expressed concerns about issues such as commercialization and resource allocation, the foundation addressed them through open communication, which helped maintain community trust.

3. Successful transitions require mechanisms that balance the needs of volunteers and those of commercial goals.

GitLab is a software platform that allows developers to collaboratively write, test, and deploy code, integrating all stages of the software-development lifecycle into a single tool. It offers a rare example of a company that successfully scaled and monetized its platform without alienating its volunteer community. From the outset, GitLab relied on both paid employees and a large base of volunteer developers to build and improve its open-source software. What made its transition to a public, revenue-generating company successful was that it treated these volunteers not as expendable helpers but as enduring partners in co-creation.

As GitLab introduced paid enterprise tiers and pursued venture capital and, later, an IPO, it did not retreat into a closed commercial model. Instead, it kept its core open-source project active and inclusive. It maintained a freemium structure, keeping the core platform open and functional so that volunteers could continue using and contributing to it in meaningful ways. GitLab also communicated monetization plans transparently through public roadmaps and updates—an approach that helped prevent backlash and reinforced trust. The company further invested in infrastructure that signaled an ongoing commitment to its community, including public recognition of contributors, recurring hackathons, and coaching resources to support participation. While volunteers were not financially compensated, they gained status, visibility, and influence—rewards aligned with their intrinsic motivations and, often, their professional needs: Many were also GitLab users in their own organizations, so improving the platform directly benefited their work.

By preserving open participation, recognizing the impact of volunteers, and structuring monetization in ways that complement rather than displace community contributions, GitLab demonstrated that commercial growth and volunteer ecosystems can reinforce each other when guided by deliberate design and stewardship.

Looking Ahead

As platforms face unprecedented challenges from AI integration, automated systems, and increasing commercialization pressures, many will be tempted to see their volunteer communities as obstacles to navigate. Instead, they should engage with them and take their input to heart. The platforms that thrive will be those whose leaders leverage their volunteers’ deep understanding of the platform’s purpose to ensure that, as the business evolves, it stays true to the mission that made it valuable in the first place.