I’d rather have sites more like SA than more Reddits, Twitter, FB, etc. that is and it’s a bit of a pity the business model never really panned o

I’d rather have sites more like SA than more Reddits, Twitter, FB, etc. that is and it’s a bit of a pity the business model never really panned out at scale. It doesn't have to pan out at scale, though. That's the thing that I've always loved about it. By charging directly you can stay smaller. For example, suppose you're charging $5/month. You can achieve $100K revenue with 1.7K paying users. You don't have do it "at scale", or to put it another way: you can do things at a scale orders of magnitudes smaller than those going the ad-supported route. There have always been businesses quietly succeeding with this business model. They don't make the news because they're making "only" hundreds of thousands or several million dollars profit. But that's potentially a nice living for a small team of people. One recent successful example is Defector.com; formed by ex-Deadspin writers. They hit their 1-year anniversary and recently disclosed that they're profitable and doing well. The main problem with this model is that, essentially, you kind of have to bootstrap it. I don't know if there are investors actually funding this kind of revenue model, because the revenue ceiling for this sort of model is probably laughably low by SV standards. I don't envision Mark Cuban hankering for a piece of some business that could well be profitable but isn't likely to ever crack $1mil revenue. I’d rather have sites more like SA than more Reddits, Twitter, FB, etc. I feel like it is a logical next step, but I also felt that way ten years ago and there wasn't exactly an explosion of them. My reasoning was: as things consolidated at the top, folks would stop even trying to focus on the top. Even in 2010 the barrier to entry for becoming the next FB/Amazon/whatever was unimaginable.