website, web-developmentDmoz.com, bloggers.com and vcricket.com has been shutdown by their founders.
All above site have million page views per month. I mean it is huge, very huge. But why they could not make profit from those visitor?
I asked this question because if we know the reason we can prevent that happens to our startups.
There’s a couple of things here…
First and foremost: how do you know the actual (human) traffic on these websites? Remember: Alexa et all just make estimates, and I’d say they’re usually pretty optimistic…
For example, let’s say DMOZ is used a lot by academics and they use web crawlers to scrape the website. That’s a lot of traffic, practically zero ad income.
On the other hand, I’m sceptical about profit from ads. Let’s say you have a million page views per month. Let’s say you make $10 per 1000 page views (which I believe is a lot). That amounts $10.000 per month.
These websites also have costs involved… Let’s do the math:
I’m already at $9.316,- per month, and there’s more… So in short, I wouldn’t be surprised if the business case is just not there.
Sites that expect users to register and do something may get expensive to maintain due extensive attacks from the web. Spam and crap must be identified and reverted. If robots go spamming, the software stack often requires updates to counteract. This means that the initiators must be ready to commit significant resources, and the development team must still be active. When there are not enough resources for this, developers left, attacks force the site to go read only.
Read only site needs very little resources to run in these days, but if the initial goal has been more ambitious, they cannot be easily transferred to the cheap HTML only hosting. If the site has been written to contain custom server stack, database, it still often requires a virtual machine to run even with the most of functionality disabled. Depending on the popularity of the site, online advertisement may not cover the hosting expenses.
It looks very strange and suspicious for me, however, when the high traffic sites close, as they could probably make enough money for hosting from ads and find volunteers to take over if the initial group is no longer interested in. One of the possible explanations is that the site is influenced by the more active and successful competitors one or another way.
Other explanation is that the initial group is not interested any longer but has overlooked the moment when it was possible to acquire volunteers for taking over. You cannot simply pass a popular site to unknown person, God knows what the plans could be - you need to work with the follower for significant time to establish the trust, and it may be that there are no resources remaining for that.
High traffic => High maintenance => High operational cost
(so you must have funds to cover the operational costs)
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