New ways of monetizing a block explorer

The author argues that block explorers are expensive to run and that advertising will not sustain them for smaller chains in the near term, so new revenue models are needed. Etherscan's Explorer-as-a-Service was paid for by a few chains, including BNB, Fantom and Polygon, but it can cost up to 1.5 million dollars a year, while Routescan starts at roughly 350 dollars a month. The article points to Mempool explorer's new paid service that expedites unconfirmed transactions, noting it had 158,000 dollars in gross revenue over more than a year and about 120,000 daily users.