I would sure have loved that car, too. And that was a wonderful read.
In case others aren't noticing, this is a non-ad-viewing member lobbying for no ads.
There are two ways to look at ads as an anchor:
1. They discourage users, slowing our growth up that hill.
2. They put a load on the hardware, slowing the site down more as more users get on board.
I assume you're talking about the first item. Since ads are delivered from another site, they actually give our hardware a bit of a breather. Although it's really not needed. The new webserver is amazing.
If memory serves, I did go adless for a while to see what impact it would have on membership growth. Memory may not serve well, though. I am, after all, 43. In any event, we haven't done popunder ads for quite a while.
My data from monitoring how the hardware is doing tells me that even if the entirety of SI's population and traffic (which I estimate to be 3 to 5 times the size of ours) descended on the site right this instant, the hardware/software would not only handle it, but handle it so well that no slowdown would be noticeable. Still, it would be desirable to have both webserving and database serving happening on 2 machines each when/if that kind of population explosion happens. Which is why one of my current back-burner projects (worked on here and there when I need a break for other projects on the front burners) is to do the coding changes necessary to ensure that when we go multi-machine again, we won't require the "sticky" aspect of Network Load Balancing. That is, it won't matter which machine each of your requests goes to because all relevant data that previously required you "sticking" to one machine will travel with your request. That way, we'll only need the simplest aspects of NLB and won't need extra hardware in front of the machines (which is not only an extra piece of hardware I would need to learn, but also is an extra potential failure point that could take out access to the whole site).
But getting back to ads and their effect not only on growth but on the site's bottom line.
We really do make a pittance from ads currently. They do pay the ISP bill, but that's about it. A friend who runs another website of comparable size recommended another advertising agency because they've shown themselves to be able to deliver better-targeted ads and his site's ad income is many, many times higher than ours.
But that ad agency isn't interested in us. Most ad agencies are not keen on message boards. I'm not sure why, but that's the way they are.
Matt maintains that ads are worthless and if the decision were his, I know we wouldn't be running ads at all, or would only run ads from a banner exchange. I maintain that they at least pay the ISP right now and I believe that they're a big part of the reason subscribers subscribe. With the likely pervasiveness of ad-blockers, I could be all wrong on that last point.
I've been fighting trying to turn ads into a large enough revenue stream for about 10 months now, and have to admit that the temptation is great to simply drop any and all ad agencies and go only with ads that're sold in-house. We do have an ad rep who works on a commission basis, and though he hasn't made a sale yet (the lack of demographics has been a big barrier), he's put in a ton of work and I'm not going to leave him out in the cold. So, getting back to my temptation: I'm greatly tempted to drop all ad agencies and have the site be completely ad-free until our ad rep starts making sales, and run only those ads. If he sells just one small campaign, most clicks would be ad-free and we'd just serve that campaign up randomly every hundred or so clicks.
I'm even more tempted to give our current agency until the end of the month to get some campaigns here that can get our ad revenue up to a level that doesn't just make me mad or get an agency that will.
I just put in a new survey and while I won't necessarily have the community decide this issue, I'll pay attention to the results.
I can possibly be talked out of ads from ad agencies, but I'm very committed to the idea of having ads that're specifically for the people who use this site and having them be interesting enough and clickable enough that we can have a page visitable by everyone whether subscriber or not so that they can see all of the available ads on one page if they like.
Market Data 
Markets 
AI
