[grumpymouse]

I do pay quite a bit for content. It needs to be high quality and I want to know what I'm getting before I pay for it.

I pay every month for the Financial Times - it's good quality news coverage. Though it often comes from a particular political standpoint it doesn't need to resort to all the outrage-bait clickbait articles that have consumed the output of other newspapers in the UK.

Medium is generally low quality, and there's nobody on there that I would pay monthly to receive whatever they feel like writing.

Stack Overflow is useful but answers are quite hit-and-miss. I pay for educational content/videos/etc on other sites, but I would probably want Stack Overflow to be better organised and more in-depth if I were paying for it.

Basically, it needs to be good quality and consistent content. If you want to make money by being a platform and gatekeeper for content produced by random external people, curate the content well and make sure that there's real value in paying for it.

[motbus3]

Great answer. Thanks. I probably should have stated in my original question too

but though users help in content, there is a associated price for the company to keep the services running.

let's say a magic company decides to only pay its bills to keep infrastructure and basic development team running. let's also say because of costs associated with billing and taxes this gets to 1 use month

it is a pretty low value. I am not here to argue if ad companies are moral or not. I think the era of free content will be soon-ish over as costs with computing are, for the first time ever, rising independently on the amount of power delivered. this is because of war, inflation, etc.

I am supposing, with the little knowledge I have, that the return from ads is very subjective and rarely pays itself in years.

to support my pov, I would say some things about Alphabet and Meta.

Google know this and now show a dozen of ads wherever it can because, I suppose, the income from advertisement is going lower and lower. this might not yet be reflected in stock as Alphabet is a much bigger company than Google itself.

Facebook I suppose, or Meta, has ads as a side business. they track user behaviors, in my opinion, in a very invasive way. Even though FB still not presenting considerable earnings with their ad platform.

on the other hand, we see companies stop selling full products and selling smaller items. this has been pretty prominent with game industry but also with software companies such as Microsoft.

though medium and stack overflow are not nearly perfect content providers or communities, it would be somewhat shocking if they not pivot more their business to improve earnings to compensate for increasing costs.

for example, stack overflow could charge a monthly subscription fee to allow ordering the best working responses. I am not saying that I enjoy that, but I still would be surprised if nothing like this started happening in 5 years or so.