[littlestymaar]

> But there comes a point where these online services have to make money.

Reddit is 18 old, and you're telling me that they are just thinking about making money now? How come 4chan and Wikipedia are both profitable, but not Reddit? And how is it a problem with their users and not their management?

[qzx_pierri]

> How come 4chan and Wikipedia are both profitable, but not Reddit

reddit has 1.7 billion visits per month[5], with an astronomical amount of persistent storage, with the content never being deleted. reddit is ranked #18 globally.

4chan has 51 million visits per month[4], has very little persistent storage (posts are deleted once the thread slides to the bottom of the board list), and strict size limits for the posts that exist at any given time. 4chan is ranked #708 globally.

Wikipedia does get 4.7 billion monthly visits[3], but they do have a public list of large donors[1], and the entire wikipedia catalog can fit onto a 20gb microSD card [2]

So I can't give a solid answer, but it seems like the other 2 sites you mentioned have a slightly better design when it comes to infra costs.

1: https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/2018-annual-report/don...

2: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dump_torrents#English_W...

3: https://www.similarweb.com/website/wikipedia.org/#overview

4: https://www.similarweb.com/website/4chan.org/#overview

5: https://www.similarweb.com/website/reddit.com/#overview

[Eisenstein]

If reddit had stuck to what it is good at: threaded, in-depth text conversations and links, it wouldn't need such a large amount of storage or bandwidth. Yes, I know that 1.7 billion users is a lot of text, but (1) there wouldn't be 1.7billion users if it were only text and links (2) the users who wouldn't be on reddit without multimedia offerings I am sure use a almost exclusively multimedia and account for the lions share.

Go back a few years, nix the 'let's host video and pictures and live chat and ignore every single thing the users are asking for so that we can bring in the eyeballs' idea and instead of that monetize the regulars using the their content and site's ability to guide google to it.

Keep 150,000,000 dedicated users who reliably generate valuable content for you and keep the site spam free for you, and all you have to do is keep some devs on hand to add tooling and site features that are useful. The caveat is that Stevey Huff has to live with one or two fewer commas on the balance in his bank account.

[jimktrains2]

That 20gb dump doesn't include history afaik and probably doesn't include images and other multimedia.

I don't think it invalidates your point, but I just wanted to clarify.

[littlestymaar]

> Reddit has 1.7 billion visits per month > […] > 4chan has 51 million visits per month[4],

This has an impact on their costs, but in an ad-driven business, it increases their revenues by as much.

> with an astronomical amount of persistent storage, with the content never being deleted

I'd like to know the actual amount of storage, but I really doubt it is actually “astronomical” (unlike Youtube).

Moreover, I suspect that the biggest part of that storage is actually video, which isn't really where the value (for the users at least) is.

Overall, if their costs are to high compare to other players their revenues, it's first and foremost a management and cost effectiveness issue, not a lack of revenues.

[moomin]

VC money. VC money gambles on big wins. They'd rather have a huge blow-out than a small success. So you take VC money, they want you to grow. They care about that more than making a profit. For a long time. Then, when you are huge, then they want money.

This sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. But Google and Facebook started out without a profitability plan.