great question!
i'm going to get real honest here and disclose some things i normally keep private:
sites like the new york times, wall street journal, and many others are not even profitable on their ads - and their CPMs (the amount of money they make per 1,000 pageviews) is around $3-5.
chess.com earns about $0.20 (yes, 20 CENTS) per 1,000 pageviews because we have a lot of non-US traffic, and we aren't large enough to attract brand advertisers like the NYtimes can, plus our users view a LOT of pages, so that drives down prices. that is a fraction of what other sites make.
if we relied on ads, that wouldn't even cover 20% of our costs. seriously. that is how bad ad revenue is. we use ads to generate SOME revenue, but also as a way to encourage people to become paying members.
trust me - i HATE ads, and i HATE having ads on the site. but this isn't a charity project - it's my full time job. i didn't even make any money for the first 2 year this site was in existence - i was living off of personal savings, so i don't feel one bit bad trying to cover my costs and make a small living for my wife and 4 kids.
i'm not trying to tell a sob story - i'm a super lucky guy to have this as my job, but it isn't easy making it on your own in any business.
does that help put thing in perspective?
Wow, such a candid answer -- not everyone will always understand even though the ads and the system are all very reasonable, and I think because there are always a certain % of customers that will be very disagreeable many owners give cookie cutter responses but this is quite frank and personable, very nice.
I see on the main page you have over 1,000,000 members, wow! I don't know how late my congratulations is, but this site really is great! I'm happy to see it's caught on in a big way.
I don't usually quote big posts, but I just wanted to say that I'm 100% behind erik and Orangehonda on these subjects. Great site, reasonable ads+custom taylored answer and congrats on the million member mark erik!
Erik, do you still get pageper-view if the person is a member? Because I would like to know that I am helping out, even by a little.
Their 'royalties' received for hosting ads is paid per thousand views of the ads. Paying members view the pages ad-free, so no, in my assumptive opinion, they would not be included. CHESScom is making up for that small CPM income by your generous paid membership.