Full-page ads are really obnoxious.

[Celestein]

Well lets see. How many Premium members are there? At $20 for a Yearly subscription (which not everyone gets) That means he would need at least 41 members with Yearly memberships to cover the cost.
Figuring for the 812 he said before. How many are there?

Somewhat less, VB and Java chat are not yearly expenses. VB is only a yearly expensive if you specifically renew the license to keep getting the newest versions, otherwise you can still run the versions you paid for. It's running 3.8.3 so it is current, though this is definitely an optional expense.

Java chat? Honestly I don't know why you'd pay anything for that, there's free alternatives that are imho better(though I don't know Jaxel, so I'm not going to assume at his server proficiency).

Required maintenance is about 25 members(though again, I'm surprised it costs $40 a month, is it a dedicated server? If so the traffic really doesn't justify that level of hardware, if it isn't, $40 is way too much for shared hosting).

This is of course, ignoring ad revenue.

 

[iKotomi]

Assuming we go with 35 members needed, I'm pretty sure the number of premium members is nowhere near that since I can't even think of 35 unique members that frequent this forum often (not saying that i know everyone on this forum, but considering how nowhere near 100% of the people I know actually use premium membership, that's saying something).

Also, if I remember correctly a good number of those were given away for free for doing random stuff that helped out in the beginning like making skins and stuff.

Also, the ads that were used until now were not making very much money iirc, since all he had was those weird play-asia ads that were somehow contingent on purchases.

Not that I know 100% whether or not everything is accounted for, but I'd argue that there is a good chance that it was not running on just premium memberships and advertisements alone.

That being said, this kind of thing can divide communities pretty significantly. Boxtorrents apparently underwent something similar, and it just got commandeered by a small group of the previous admins who could not trust the original owner. A good policy might be to just release the records to completely clear any doubt, but I don't really know if anything that serious could even happen, since I doubt anyone here is as dedicated as Jaxel to actually running a site like this.

 

[NightmareKnight]

Full page ads suck because they're on almost every website I've been to. One Manga is notorious for them too. Everytime I try to view a page, pop-up. It makes me want to kick kittens.

 

[Psylocide]

Guess what? If you paid for premium membership, there would be no pop-ups. Jaxel provides this site to us, for free, and it plays a big part in keeping the SC4 community going. Be grateful that this site exists at all, and that you only have to see one pop-up every... how long? Press skip ad and quit whining.

 

[Jaxel]

You clearly have a deep understanding of what I do and do not know, I'll give you that.

Yes, I obviously do.

According to the forum statistics, there's 1,283 active members(unique visitors within the last 30 days based on Vbulletin's default setting, most ad carriers count 24 hour periods to determine unique visits). A website with 1000 unique visits/month should be getting at a minimum $30 a month even from google Adsense(and by many reports, AdBrite pays more). This get's a lot more than 1000 the way they're counted, several times that. Even without premium support, it should be more than self-sustaining. If not, what else can i say? you're doing it wrong.

We get 75,000 uniques a month, which averages about 2,500 uniques a day. Which I already showed here: http://www.8wayrun.com/showpost.php?p=102579&postcount=12. However, your numbers are COMPLETELY out of date. Years ago, when I ran UPNetwork, I used to get 24c CPM; then we had something called the internet bubble crash. Now, after just having a crash in the world economy, we get 3c CPM... that means for every 1000 uniques a day, we get 3 cents. 2,500 uniques a day does not equate to anywhere near $30. The full page adds give us 169c CPM, but they show up far far less. In the last 7 days, adbrite has paid out $5.53.

We have premium members, but the majority of them are 1 month only and have already been cancelled.

Also... Servers hosting isn't about BANDWIDTH; it hasn't been about bandwidth in MANY years. Bandwidth is cheap. It's about getting a server that has the RAM to keep your forums running. Yes, you could get a shared hosting plan for $6 a month; in fact, I've run vBulletin on such a situation... you end up with pages that take 30 seconds to load. The 2 second rule of the internet: if a page takes longer than 2 seconds to load, people close it and move on. If you want a server that will run vBulletin without any load problems, you need to get a VPS; and those cost a minimum of $40 a month. Its obvious you are out of date with the internet economy.