#is... a pretty clear indication that social media is probably impossible without mass data harvesting

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cohost users: 20 thousand cohost subs: 3300

one in six cohost users is a subscriber (unbelievably high; awesome!). they're like a third of the way to breaking even.

tumblr users: 125 million tumblr ad-free subs: 28 thousand

one in five thousand tumblr users is a subscriber. they... don't release that level of info.

hmm. I guess I don't have any more interesting insight to first-order-approximate from these. cohost is, to my extremely limited understanding, like four people who take something like half market rate for being full time web developers and also doing a bunch of other jobs, and don't have moderation/safety costs (yay self-selected community!) or a phone app. the obvious question is how much you would have to scale that up to paint a realistic picture of what you would need to run a site with tumblr's scale and tumblr's quality and with the level of moderation it has now, let alone what people generally wish for, but I certainly can't. and I have no idea how much money tumblr brings in from ads besides "not nearly enough."

(for the record, I don't know a lot about cohost—or pillowfort—besides that cohost's jae is an excellent communicator and their financial posts on the staff blog there are a great read, and that both sites seem at a glance to Actually Work Now. nice!)