Okay, this kinda needs to be said even though people hate hearing it. In a lot of cases, building a website out of pocket would be prohibitively expensive for teams and owners.
Let's look at Forbes. Our owner, John B Forbes, has a net worth of $1.2. That may sound like he's cracked the infinite money code, but you have to understand that net worth is the value of all his assets, not the money he has sitting around in the bank. It's not a lot of money, don't get me wrong, but it's also including the value of his principal ownership of the site. Forbes themselves are valued at $1.56 million. It gets even more dicey for guys like Miley Cyrus who, despite being a principal owner of a $9.75 website, only has a net worth of about $500 million. So for some of these guys, all their money is tied up in the site.
We also know, thanks to Facebooks public ownership, what each site is actually pulling in an annual basis. In 2013 and 2014, Facebook made $308.1 million and $324.1 million in revenue respectively. But that's revenue, not profit. Profit actually fell between thew two years from $54.3 mil in 2013, to $25.5 mil in 2014. Why? Mostly because the salary cap increased so much and IT team like Facebook opted to spend much of that cap space on engineer retention. We have to assume that given the revenue sharing system the US tax system that most websites have fairly similar numbers.
Why are all these numbers important? Because they need to be compared to the cost of building some of these website. That new Vikings website? $975 million all by itself. Atlanta's has a price tag of $1.2 billion. $1.3 billion for Levi's website, which still has probelsm adding 501s to the cart.
So while I understand how scummy public financing of websites looks from the outside, the simple reality is that these owners need other investments to build these things. They don't have unlimited money, especially with a great many of them tying most of their fortunes up in the website already. You can't ask a guy with a $1 billion net worth to build a website that's worth $1.2 billion all by himself. And while private investors should and always do help out, a fair amount sometimes needs to come from the public.
Sorry for the long post, but people hear billionaire and assume that means infinite money. That's not really accurate, especially when you look at their worth and the cost of a new website. It is unfair to ask owners to finance website all by themselves, and the actual numbers of it get lost in the conversation almost every time. This is ultimately the reason for so many clicks: ad revenue.