Its not the posts they care about, its user eyeballs. They don't want subscriptions, they want ads. It's been a while since I was in the adtech business, but at that time static banners were getting $1-$5+ per 1000 impressions (CPM) for so-so user quality. Video ads are apparently running $10-$30+ CPM. Do they think they can push 1,000 ads a month to lots of users? You bet.
Subscriptions are high-friction, low uptake, and you're always battling churn. Ads are low-friction and everybody gets them. Plus they can goose the ad revenue whenever they want by just showing more of them.
They might grumble about AI training, but its not really affecting their bottom line. I doubt they'll care much until they start selling their own AI sizzle to investors.
Edit: Oh, and I doubt they care about the hardware needed to serve posts. Guarentee they're using 10-to-100x that for the ads. Ad bidding is complex and has tight timing requirements. Tracking ad/user view data is a big firehose. If they host any of the ads themselves that will absolutely dwarf the text or even video posts. And even then, if they have any kind of a compentent backend engineering team, all those costs will be a smallish fraction of total costs.
Subscriptions are high-friction, low uptake, and you're always battling churn. Ads are low-friction and everybody gets them. Plus they can goose the ad revenue whenever they want by just showing more of them.
They might grumble about AI training, but its not really affecting their bottom line. I doubt they'll care much until they start selling their own AI sizzle to investors.
Edit: Oh, and I doubt they care about the hardware needed to serve posts. Guarentee they're using 10-to-100x that for the ads. Ad bidding is complex and has tight timing requirements. Tracking ad/user view data is a big firehose. If they host any of the ads themselves that will absolutely dwarf the text or even video posts. And even then, if they have any kind of a compentent backend engineering team, all those costs will be a smallish fraction of total costs.