Hacker News Reader

Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

Nothing in that post indicates they are taking it offline, the HN headline is just editorializing. It says Vice is no longer making new content for their Web properties and focusing on other platforms instead like YouTube.

There's no way they'd give up the ads dollars they get from he existing stuff... That makes no sense

View on HN

> no longer making new content for their Web properties and focusing on other platforms instead like YouTube

Way to jump out of the boiling pot and immediately place your head in the lion's jaws...

Those ad dollars will diminish quickly, and pretty soon it will be more expensive to keep the website up than to just take it down.

It's not that expensive to host old blog posts and they already host videos on YouTube... What's expensive in those operations is supporting new content and growth. Now they can wind it down and establish a fixed legacy system and eventually run it on autopilot with a small team in support roles.

And they'll keep updating contracts to sell ads for a defunct site? Seems doubtful. Past experience shows that the site is unlikely to stay up for the long haul.

You don't need to sell ads directly to Nike to make more than enough $$ to incentivize running an existing major content site, let alone pay for a small team to sufficently keep it running tech wise...

Google "ad networks"

People just try and hack it constantly - as in, hundreds of automated hacking attempts per day, and when they succeed, they won't make obvious changes, they'll tweak things gently in a malignant way that won't be noticed for some time.

Put everything as a static site on S3 with cloudflare in front. Cant really hack that (unless you fuck up with S3 configs or if AWS itself is hacked)

It's really not that complicated to manage cloudflare type Web app firewalls and shutdown content interfaces, both comment sections and admin panels, so there's no malleable auth areas to breach. And even if that happens a small team could easily handle run of the mill script kiddies and SEO schemes.

You'd be surprised how much money you make from long tail or thousands of old articles, even with current SEO rules favouring new stuff

It won't be enough to run a big media company but more than enough to keep old content around

I don't think you have any contextual knowledge of how cheap it is to serve static content.

Hosting a static site behind cloudflare caching should be very low. Doubt it would cost more than 200 dollars.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com