[manderley]

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.

[dmix]

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.

[manderley]

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.

[15457345234]

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.

[dmix]

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

[devmor]

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

[victorbjorklund]

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