I&#x27;m a co-founder of a website for Australian high school students.  It&#x27;s a forum-based community where students help each other, share resources, and make friends by bonding over the high school experience—especially for students in their final year as they study for our equivalent of the SAT.<p>For the past couple of years, we’ve averaged more than 350k users, 500k sessions, and 1.5mil page views per month (Google Analytics).  Traffic peaks every year during the final exam period and after the final results are released, when the average session duration sometimes exceeds 8 minutes.<p>It’s a thriving community.  Can it be a thriving business?  Some of the big obstacles to using traditional business models are:<p>(a) students don’t have much money;<p>(b) students really dislike ads; and<p>(c) advertisers apparently see better results from programmatic advertising platforms than from direct campaigns with us.<p>We’ve experimented with things like selling premium notes and resources; partnering with tutoring agencies; and running seminars, all of which appealed to students, but small margins meant that revenue was very modest.<p>What other ways might there be to tap into the value that is inherent in a community like this without detracting from the user experience?  What else should we be thinking about?