Because those things are at different scales. I'm sure there are thousands of hours put into IT and moderation, but there are millions of hours put into content

Because those things are at different scales. I'm sure there are thousands of hours put into IT and moderation, but there are millions of hours put into content creation. The value of SO almost entirely comes from unpaid volunteers who produce the actual content. I'm not trying to imply that this is morally wrong. I think parent comment is just trying to say that it puts them into an entirely different class of websites than journalism. They can afford to run on less ad revenue, because the amount of content they produce per employee is much higher.