Unfortunately I dont have the big cell phone companies paying my bills for me like Howard does at his site.
Both Dish and DirecTV have wanted to advertise here directly but i have refused them as I want to keep SatelliteGuys free and allow people to speak their mind. I don't want to risk losing a sponsor because someone said "Dish Network sucks" or "DirecTV sucks" I enjoy being able to report the good and bad about the companies and will not bow to them and start talking only positive about them because they are sponsors.
If you look 75% of our traffic here is Unregistered folks and thats where a majority of our expense on bandwidth goes. Those folks see a lot of ads, I do that not only to pay the bills but to hopefully get them to register and become part of the community.
The registered members see a lot less ads then the unregistered folks as we still need to pay the bills and for those folks who don't like those ads we give them a chance to get rid of them by becoming supporting pub members for $20 a year. Now by my estimates the $20 a year we are actually losing out on ad revenues (well at least we were when the ads were paying higher), but to me thats ok because those folks are active in the community and thats a great thing.
Yes some people use ad blockers, but unfortunately that does not help us and in fact could make features go away for some folks. There are a few scripts out there which can detect the ad blockers and thus will only show them parts of messages and ask them to turn their ad blockers off to see the enitre message. I have looked into those and may have to turn those features on somewhere down the road. Some at that point will leave but if they do they are not going to find the info, news, help and rumors we offer anyplace else and ultimately others will take their place.
But if you do have adblockers in place you have seen how fast our servers really are.
If you have learned anything here or have saved money because of info you gained from this site I ask that you consider becomeing Pub Members.
As I have said before if I could I would have no syndicated ads here at all, but with the economy being as it is the ad dollar is down 70% from where it was a few short months ago. And while the ad economy sucks our ISP dosent care and wants their money.
And thats where we are today.