I work for a small company that runs content sites, profitably

Sure there will be small content companies in all mediums, but you can't be a big single media content creator. You need to create other revenue venues over multiple channels. Besides, instead of just telling us, show us ... what site do you work for?

http://www.heavenmedia.com - 1.5 million monthly unique readers and 20m page views, employee number in low double digits.

  you can't be a big single media content creator

Why not? I see no reason it can't be scaled up, and we've scaled up by purchasing several websites in the past couple of years (from small to slightly less small). Sure, the bigger you get the harder it is, because there's more work creating the content, and more work monetising it, and more opportunities for making mistakes. But it's certainly doable.

HackerNews :)

Well Hacker News doesn't make any revenue and acts as a community project of a company, not a profit-aiming brand.

It also produces 0 content, merely comments.

It's an aggregator.

We've all got used to the aggregators like google making all the money by convincing everyone content should be free. It was the greatest and long-term wise worst achievement of the dot com boom.

> It also produces 0 content, merely comments.

I wouldn't say those are mutually exclusive.

And even for the comments, HN hosts them and doesn't write them. Well, except when PG comments ;)

HackerNews is not a creator it's a host. It support my point.