I don't think any of them are idiots. But here's a small sample of companies, off the top of my head, who have had serious problems in terms of monetization /

I don't think any of them are idiots. But here's a small sample of companies, off the top of my head, who have had serious problems in terms of monetization / revenue and needed to use investors / host company's money to run: Pinterest. Groupon. Reddit. Snapchat. Instagram. Youtube (for many years). Twitter took a long time to make money. Most news sites have a hard time, which is why WSJ is paywalled (as mentioned in the article). On the "smaller valuation side", we could say FriendFeed, Zite, Hot Potato, Beluga, GroupMe, TweetDeck, Dodgeball. It's much harder to than you may realize to monetize.