They can earn a living in other ways. Some examples: - having a day job (this obviously means they won't have as much time to put in the site, I know) - Servi

They can earn a living in other ways. Some examples: - having a day job (this obviously means they won't have as much time to put in the site, I know) - Service As a Software Substitute (this doesn't work for sites that just display information) - subscription/premium model (for press sites like Arstechnica, it seems like an alternative) - donations (this usually doesn't scale up to a salary, but can sometimes cover hosting and more) - sponsoring Most of the content is by people who make it available for free: blogs (a good part of the links on HN), forums and community sites (HN itself, StackOverflow, Reddit, ...), non-press sites (personal sites, project site, etc). An overwhelming majority of those don't rely on advertising to exist. It might be hard to have a "service" that's massively used and that you can host and make available for free (i.e. no ads), but I bet it's not impossible (especially if you can upsell something else. See GitHub, Travis, DropBox). I'd argue that a libre p2p service is more useful to have (e.g. http://tox.im http://tox.im) than a centralized, "gratis but ad-supported" centralized service like TPB.