&gt; Why hasn&#x27;t a twitter or a reddit sought to get rev share from the traffic they drive from the resultant pages?<p>Why would I, as a site owner, ever pay Twitter or Reddit? There&#x27;s only two ways they can motivate me:<p>* Prevent linking to my site if I don&#x27;t pay. This has obvious (and terrible) side effects on what those sites are and how they work.<p>* Provide some sort of advantage to payers. For something like Reddit, this would be possible through rank boosting or &quot;sticky&quot; posts, likely on posts that I the payer create myself. Twitter could maybe have tweets distributed to random users, regardless of whether they follow the originator. (I believe Facebook does something similar to this.)<p>Content and relevance is meant to be controlled by the users in these platforms. Both these options begin to abuse that implicit trust by placing the ability to pay on equal footing with the ability of users to naturally boost content. This will work for a while, until the users&#x27; trust is sufficiently eroded that they begin to leave.