I never really thought about the Etherscan business model before, so thanks for sharing that, Jaack. $25M/yr revenue at a 50% profit margin looks very solid. "Your margin is my opportunity," so there might be some potential for cheaper block exploring services, but this company would need to face the final boss - Etherscan's brand. It's one of the few brands in the space - like ZORA, Uniswap, and Aave - that generate tons of confidence. As Worms said, having that much confidence in a brand and a closed-source service might put us all at risk of DNS hijacking, which is, of course, not good. So, if you want to win with Etherscan, your product needs to inspire a similar level of feeling that "this is the source of truth" among the users. One way to do it without spending years building a brand would be to white-label explorers for chains. If, e.g., Optimism's block explorer wasn't on optimistic.etherscan.io but on optimism.io/explorer, that would sound legit for most users, and few would dig into what kind of explorer works in the back-end. If the block explorers are white-labeled, though, then their competitive position might not be as strong as the one entertained by Etherscan. This would mean much lower margins.
We're gaining market traction every week, and competitors and the general market is taking notice. We have now more than 20 chain clients in our 'portfolio', and are looking to increase that by 200% by EOY. Like Heisenberg (Breaking Bad) would say: "I AM the one who knocks."