TestECull said:
Another point I'd like to make is that Facepunch, a forum with probably twice the traffic Escapist has, does not have a subscription service and does not have anywhere near the volume of ads.
Yeah, it's pretty likely that a FARK clone on a discount hosting service [http://www.cloudflare.com/] has twice the traffic our site does....
OK, probably not. In fact, it's more likely all the traffic that site gets wouldn't even make a blip on our stats, regardless of your perception. The fact of the matter is that it costs more to keep a site of this size running
per month than most people will ever hope to earn in
a year, or a
full 4-year tuition at a university. We go through multiple terabytes of bandwidth
every day. We have a rack of servers that we need to maintain to keep everything running.
And the really shocking thing? We do everything we can ourselves to keep costs down - and we do it
really well. We encode our own video, we manage our own servers, and we even moved/assembled all our own furniture in the new office space. Not only does it cost that much to run our site, but other sites are spending twice as much, with larger teams, to handle half the amount of traffic we do. We know this for a fact, because we've worked with some of these sites on various projects, and they are absolutely floored when they find out.
We don't have corporate backers, and we're not pulling down DotCom-crazy salaries or living a life of luxury. We're not becoming or making anyone rich by doing this. Most of us would work less and earn more at virtually any other job, but we're here because we love what we do. And we want to keep doing it. So that means whatever ads we need to run to keep the site running will be here, and we'll keep experimenting with new things to see what works best. And if you don't like it, you can pay your own way with a PubClub membership, which runs how we'd really like the site to. Otherwise, suck it up and deal with whatever we have to do to keep the site free for everyone, because the only other option is be a lot smaller and go subscription-only, and we really don't want that.