Quote:
Originally Posted by Little Cloud
im confused how do websites even make money anyway?
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So I'm interested, how did you think these sites run themselves? Websites are businesses, just the same as any other. We're no different to the store that your parents buy food from. We have monthly overheads (server fees, wages etc) to pay in just the same way, and we need to make money to be able to run.
Just like it will cost a store a lot of money to have a refit or build an extention, it would cost us a lot of money to build a new part of the site.
But here's the BIG difference.
Everyone who uses that store pays it money, even if all they're buying is a candy bar, whereas the vast majority of the people who use websites don't buy anything, they use the site for free.
To continue the store analogy it would be like if 75% of the people who shopped at a store never paid for anything, the store would soon go bankrupt and be forced to close.
Gaia does indeed do what it has to to get money coming in. It amuses me that people call them sell-outs and say they don't need to be as money-hungry as they are because they've apparently made a profit recently. They laid off a huge amount of staff over a year ago because they couldn't afford to pay them, they need that profit to be able to build their staff back up again if they are to have any hope of surviving.
Gaia's soul belongs to the big corperations now. Once you get beyond a certain size that's inevitable unless your owner's surname is Rockefeller or Trump maybe...look at Neopets, that's now owned by Nickelodean. Once a website becomes a behemoth the only way it can sustain itself is by "selling out". Unless it's been massively vigorous during its growth to make sure it's not gaining a load of non-supporting users, and if it succeeds in that then it's never going to get huge, is it?
The really big sites that rely on user money to run HAVE to become grasping because they've grown so big from having possibly
millions of accounts that take up database space but have never donated a cent towards the running of the site. So the only way they have any hope of staying afloat is to be partly owned/bought out by a big corperation who has the funds to keep them going, but who
will change the site into a pure money-making machine because all they are interested in is the bottom line.
There's my lecture for today, anyway ;)