I think territories not being profitable is a feature rather than a bug. Owning a piece of real estate as one of the first settlers in a place is never profitable. You have to invest ahead of the curve. Once it's obviously profitable to everyone it will be intensely competitive.

Also, the whole purpose of this website (in my opinion) is to explore tying financial incentives to a media network. If the real estate was cheap it would quickly get astroturfed. Higher cost promotes quality territories and more engaged admins.

Think about it like domain names in the 1990s. You could literally buy any dot-com domain name you wanted. No one else wanted them. But you still had to pay and renew every year. Some of those domains are easily worth millions of dollars today.

If you predict SN has a monster year and over time becomes an interesting piece of Internet real estate every territory will look cheap by today's standards. I say this even when factoring in my bullish assumptions about the value of bitcoin.