It was a different era, EP was about the stories.
Like who reads that much now, we all got seduced by Twitter culture.

Given EP’s nature and mechanics, it does not appeal to most social media users today. It requires a longer attention span, ability to write, and most importantly, not be superficial all the time. This hinders their ability to grow to the size of Twitter or Facebook. A growth that would be necessary if they are to survive, after all they have server bills to pay. Their income has been mostly through minimal amount of ads and donations.

They were not fond by the idea of selling private information to ads agencies for income. So in a way, they were missing out on a hefty sum of steady income because of this. An income that most social media sites would not miss a beat to acquire.

That said, government agencies, US government agencies, took notice to that. Usually these agencies would have direct or indirect access to private user information by the ads agencies, but since EP did not participate in that business model, they were targeted with direct requests of this data.

These requests were so great in volume and required so much resources to deal with that it became impossible to keep EP online without more income streams, ideally from selling this same private data being requested by government agencies.