An enthusiast community can self-sustain basically indefinitely on things like premium-supporter subscriptions, the occasional fundraising pitch, and well-targe

An enthusiast community can self-sustain basically indefinitely on things like premium-supporter subscriptions, the occasional fundraising pitch, and well-targeted advertising. But it will never be more of a revenue generator than "it keeps the servers running and finances a couple of volunteer moderators doing some logo swag giveaways once a year." I'd expect that in a targeted community, though, the "drive-by" users are a lot lighter of a burden. You get the search spiders swooping in and archiving everything, but by and large, even the most passionate lurker on, say, VCFed or Audiokarma, is not going to be generating thousands of pageviews and complex queries a day. They might browse a few dozen pages to figure out exactly how to fix their doohickey and move on with their life. Maybe they eventually convert and become a content contributor. Conversely, when it becomes a sOcIaL pLaTfOrM, you intentionally are trying to corral many more low-engagement users. Notice the key metric is always Daily/Monthly Active Users, not any form of "Quality Participant". So they're eager to have as many people scrolling their site 24 hours a day as possible, even if they're adding no real value. This spikes your infrastructure cost without creating users who are necessarily connected enough to contribute back, whether with direct payment or content. I also suspect that the "social platform" tends to have a different economic drive than the enthusiast community. Nobody really says "I want to build a community for ALL THE THINGS" unless they have some grand vision of going public, grand monetization, or becoming some sort of new-media titan. They're going to be much more finicky when these dreams aren't met.