Why Do The Q/A Websites Close Down?

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For obvious reasons, I've researched this a lot, and what most of the others say is correct. It's almost always about money. Custom development on a basic site is around $10,000 if you have inexpensive developers and don't use stock templates. If you're using US-based developers, you're talking $50,000+. If you use stock/ canned templates, you may be able to start for closer to $1500. If you opt for a canned cloud site, it's much, much cheaper, but you have no control over the back end of the site and you pay based on members and data. You're at the mercy of whatever the platform will give you and your site can never be unique. You may also never be able to move your site's data later.

Now, let's say you start getting into "smart" sites- the kinds that can predict what people want or use algorithms to predict trends and matches. ... That's some serious development time. I looked at canned add-on software that could predict honesty and moods based on the context of the content. It wasn't flawless, nor was it always accurate... maybe 75% accurate, but it was danged cool. Imagine being able to look at something and tell if the person is lying instantly or being able to have software scan the site to show me where to look for "trouble" and heated discussions, possibly TOS-violating debates/ personal attacks. Brilliant. It was several thousand dollars and, again, not customized by an in-house team. Integration is extra. When sites get big, they start building these kinds of engines that can scan for things like that. Some big sites have software that scans for child pornography and auto-reports it to the authorities. No human interaction at all. Some counseling sites have programs that scan text for warning signs that people are suicidal. Other matching sites have programs that scan for content that suggests people are moving away from the site- mentions of email-addresses, chat platforms, and payment platforms, and reports all that to the site owners. With enough money asvailable, these sites can easily exceed hundreds of thousands of dollars in development costs alone.

Then, there are other expenses, like the cost to maintain. Browsers and devices update all the time. When they do, your site or app may no longer work for people on those devices/ browsers, so you have to keep updating code. With vast amounts of code, there will always be human errors... just like nobody has perfect grammar. Some are better than others, but all codes have errors. You may not notice an error right away, but eventually it will rear its ugly head... especially when you're fixing and repairing other things. Plus, there are infrastructure costs. Servers, storage, security, encryption, etc. And, we haven't even gotten into managing the community. Who is out there helping people? Who is moderating? Little sites like us, it's almost always the owner and volunteers, but when you get bigger, you need a staff. Staffs cost money. Think about that. If I hired someone at minimum wage to be here 24/7, it's almost $90,000 a year just to have one person monitoring the site all the time. But the big sites don't think like that. They have engineers, developers, community leaders, managers, marketers, etc.

Sites start building up like this- adding new features you may benefit from and others that you may not even know exist. It gets expensive. There are lots of ways to generate revenue. Some sites charge for membership. Some charge for advanced features. Some use ad-supported models. But, income will always fluctuate, especially when you're dealing with people. A recession hits- boom,  half your members stop renewing. If you haven't planned for this (which you can't always do), you have to cut back. Goodbye employees and on-staff devs. Answerbag talked openly about one of their issues. They got traffic from Google. Well, Google always wants to provide the best results to people and one day, they shifted their model to favor sites not generated by communities and they started looking for high-quality content. Overnight, their traffic dwindled down to nothing. A hit like that could easily take a site that brought in several hundred-thousand dollars each month to a thousand... then what? What do you do? There's no longer revenue to support your model. You cut back. People don't like it when you cut back. Here on aM, you guys are very tolerant of the challenges we face... some glitches are going to be here for a while and the site speed sucks. But, imagine if it worked perfectly and then one day, it stopped. We'd lose most of our members. The mindset of user experience is different. You guys mostly know it isn't always going to be seamless, but if you expected it to be, you'd leave. We do lose people that way as well, but not established members. People come and see we don't have the bells and whistles and move on because they're used to corporate budgets and staffs running sites. That model is not sustainable. Period.

This is one of the reasons why I'm so careful and mindful about budgeting here. We are slow to implement changes and update, but that will make us stronger overall. I also refuse to work with investors because it will put us on the path of self-destruction, IMO. We're slow, but homegrown and sustainable. That's a good place to be, considering the alternative.