Tianya Community Is Going Out of Business

The news is saying that if you can't afford the 100,000 yuan server costs, you might go out of business. As a piece of early internet history, it's about to become part of the past.

A community-driven site has no commercial value—by which I mean the value of operating at scale. The core issue is the inherent contradiction between UGC (user-generated content) and internet ad monetization. Content communities are already far from making money, and with such a solidly established community culture, commercialization becomes extremely difficult later on. This eventually leads to a situation where individual creators make money, but the platform itself doesn't.

Bad news: This well-known company has fallen into paralysis