[davegan]

Yes, and Facebook was built by a few nerds in a house in San Francisco.

And yet they've now spent hundreds of millions. Proving a concept is cheap, but taking into account all the threads that are involved in building out a large scale application is expensive.

My guess is that the $40m quoted for just the paywall is also inaccurate. They probably looked at this as an opportunity to update their platform to be more flexible to take advantage of further business needs for the next decade.

Whether it's a good investment is debatable. But as someone who works in the technology and media sector, I appreciate them taking the plunge.