It's interesting to think about how much of this is bc of indirection -- if your revenue comes by packaging up users for some third party (e.g., the advertising model) then what does it take before you have material amounts of profit? Well, I guess we know what it takes, and we generally don't like it.

But when you don't have to be indirect anymore, and users can literally pay the site, and each other, then that's a whole other universe to operate in, which will have its own physics / dynamics. Though those dynamics will have to be discovered...