I ran a high end audio website for seven years. At the end, I was getting a million visits a year. My web hosting with a fast virtual server was $30/month. It costs nothing to run a website - until you start paying yourself. Josh and Irene probably have an idea how much they want to make off LuLa, which is why they took it over from Kevin and Chris.
That's the principle I was about to state to Alan G.
Michael may have been doing it for kicks - he seemed able to afford a nice country summer retreat with a boat - but if you need to pay people to shoot videos, edit them etc., then unless you have stumbled onto a tribe of wealthy people who want to do that all day long without collecting a living wage from it, you have got to make the site make money.
Advertising deserted the printed page with speed, and went electronic. I heard recently that it doesn't actually have a better chance of prompting sales at all; your ability to judge value for advertising buck spent still remains an elusive daydream, too.
Today, the biggest car maker in the UK has said it's firing 4,500 people on top of a recent 1,500 others who met the same fate (the Jaguar group of companies). They cite marketing difficulties in China and the demonizing of diesel. Over in the States, Ford appears to be ending all its car production and concentrating on SUV and truck buyers, with the exception of Mustang. In Europe, Ford is making a massive restructuring closing production entirely in some countries.
This is change on a seismic level, folks, and I suspect we have only the tiniest idea of where it's going to lead and leave us.