And reddit's revenue isn't great. The good news is, our traffic continues to grow by leaps and bounds.
Talk about doing it wrong.
When you have growth but no revenue, it's probably because you aren't asking your users to pay. That should be every website's first option - ask people to pay for the service they receive.
Paying users are great, un-paying users are a liability.
It's also a good illustration of what Joe Kraus said in his brilliant Startup School speech -- when you put your product into beta, put your business model into beta at the same time.
They could at least make their ad display scripts deposit tokens for the user via async requests, and throttle users who run out of them. It's a better way of thanking me for not running AdBlock than a PNG of the alien giving me the thumbs up.
Sometimes, free users increase the network effect; also, sometimes the longer they use the system, more likely they are to pay for it eventually.
2. You'll need to find me some stats that back up the point that there is a relationship between the length of time a user is on a site and their commitment to purchase. If this is true, all websites should see increased per capita conversion rates over time. I don't think this is the case, but please prove me wrong.