Founder and CEO Andrew Torba made an announcement – listen below explaining why users will now have to pay at regular intervals to use Gab, which has long branded itself as a free speech alternative to the big boys.
"Starting on March 1st only GabPRO, Verified, Donor and Investor accounts on Gab can share media files," the company said in an announcement. "Gab is no stranger to controversy and news of this change spread like wildfire and caused a stir very quickly."
Torba explains that, in order to save Gab from going the way of the do-do bird, it had to do something about its file storage problems.
"Over the past several months Gab has been under attack, likely by state actors or activist groups, from botnet accounts that were being created with the sole purpose of overloading Gab's infrastructure in various ways," Torba says.
"These bot accounts would create an account and upload 5-20 gigs worth of media in a matter of hours or days. Combined with the authentic media uploads of actual users this created a cat and mouse game of trying to stop the bot accounts and expand our storage capacity every few months which took engineering time away from our other initiatives. Something had to be done to stop this."
Had Gab not immediately nipped this problem in the bud, it would have collapsed in about six weeks' time as its servers were filling up way too fast with attack data, rendering the platform useless for legitimate users.
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Listen: Gab's Revolutionary Leap to Subscription-Based Survival https://t.co/Q1jg9bO1Ll
— Andrew Torba (@BasedTorba) March 4, 2024
(Related: Remember back during the Wuhan coronavirus [COVID-19] "pandemic" when Torba pulled off the impossible for Donald Trump by recreating the former president's then-Twitter account on Gab?)
Paying for social media
The other problem Gab has had to overcome is its constant bleeding of cash. After the collapse of the advertising market in 2023, Gab has struggled to stay afloat, especially since advertising was its sole source of income.
Running a social media platform that caters to free speech rather than corporate censors is not easy, especially when advertising is the core source of income. X (formerly Twitter) is learning this as well.
"It's become extremely clear both with Gab and X that running a free speech platform simply cannot be done with advertising," Torba says.
"Activist groups like the ADL go after advertisers on free speech websites which they know is the lifeblood of the business. This is how they gained control of X and have Elon in the palm of their hand despite him being one of the wealthiest men in the world. This is why X has recently started censoring again and reimplementing pronoun policies among other such leftist nonsense."
Since Torba has no interest in catering to what he describes as "the demands of the enemy in order to get ad revenue," his only other option, he says, is to implement a subscription-based framework that requires users to pay for the product rather than be the product.
"A website of Gab's size cannot exist without a significant amount of money to cover operational costs," Torba warns. "In Gab's case we have the additional overhead of dealing with our own in-house infrastructure which costs a significant amount of both money and time to maintain."
Torba says another user-suggested option was to delete "a ton of old posts," but he says this was not an option either due to the "historical repository" of data that exists on the platform.
Censorship is driving millions away from mainstream social media onto alternative platforms like Gab. Find out more at Censorship.news.
Sources for this article include:
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