Look y'all. Bottom line is large websites/web apps are fucking expensive
It’s not like a personal or small business site where you pay $25/mo for a shared hosting package and knock yourself out
You need multiple, dedicated, high-performance servers to handle a service like Tumblr or AO3, or Facebook, or what have you, to keep up with the insane amount of bandwidth and unfathomable amount of data.
Shit cost thousands of dollars a month. And those costs only go up the more users you have. Into the tens of thousands of dollars a month. Someone has to foot the bill for it. And that doesn’t include the salaries of the developers who pour hours of their time into making things function the way they need to.
“but Tumblr used to not have ads!!” you say! “They just got greedy!”
No, they didn’t “just get greedy”. This is how free services work. They aren’t magically able to sustain themselves. At any point. Ever.
Investors see proof of concept during the infancy of a project, and they pour their money– hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars– to 1) help fund the project into maturity. (Maturity = stable performance and a large, growing userbase) and 2) have a seat at the table when big decisions are made
Until that point, you won’t see ads, or be nagged to donate, or forced to pay a fee to access your content. That’s no accident.
Investors eat the cost of running and developing the service, because they know that once that userbase has been established, they can– you guessed it– SELL YOUR DATA TO ADVERTISERS.
They can’t do that until after they have users for advertisers to sell their shit to!
That’s how the investors make their money back, that’s how the service becomes profitable instead of being a giant cash pit.
So for the love of God, can we PLEASE stop slandering sites like AO3, Wikipedia, and now Pillowfort for having the audacity to ask for donations, or for having tiered/paid membership options for additional, non-essential features??
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