Since 2006 we have been on the market in an unchanged form, that is, as ad financed/free file hosting. However, you have been visiting in less and less over the years, as the arguably very simple formula of the services we offer is slowly running out of steam
…
Over the past year, electricity prices have gone up 2.5 times, which, with a large number of servers, gives a significant increase in costs that we have no way to balance. There are still a bunch of smaller reasons [for closing down], but we could write a book on this, and probably no one would want to read it.
Sounds like visits are down and costs are way, way up.
What is sad is that ad-blockers would have never become a necessity, had advertising remained fair (as in: static images, no code execution on browser, no tracking).
Your comment doesn’t make sense. What profit motive? It drove them to shutdown and people to use ad blockers. The feedback loop is positive: behave well -> profit. Your comment discusses the inverse: behave poorly -> go to jail.
The profit motive in question is the motive to fill your screen with shitty, laggy, possibly dangerous ads. Have you visited your local newspaper's website, or a fandom property, lately?
Once enough people do that, the users install adblockers, which also hurts advertisers who were not filling your screen with shitty, laggy, possibly dangerous ads.
The problem is, we don't have laws and courts for ads. That's why we are all forced to walk around heavily armed and shoot down whoever gets less than two metres apart from us!
