| > 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 |
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.