The owner of GameFAQs can do one of three things: he can get funds by any means necessary whether it be banner ads or pop ups so game companies send him money to pay for bandwidth (extremely likely scenario), he can pay thousands of dollars out of his own wallet every year for the bandwidth (extremely unlikely), or he can shut down the site in its entirety and have a bunch of internet dweebs scream about how he “turned his back on gamers” (highly unlikely).
Do you people have any idea how much it costs to run a site like GameFAQs? That site serves more bandwidth in a day than this site could ever dream of doing in the span of a whole year. It’s NOT cheap. RPGFan.com costs almost two grand a year to maintain, and even it does not come close to GameFAQs bandwidth. I worked at the site for five years and watched it grow, and if not for donations and some of the revenue from the soundtrack ads, RPGFan would have been gone a long time ago. Sorry, but not a single editor is willing to pay that kind of money AND work on the site for nothing.
Some of you really have no idea, and it annoys me to see a bunch of people whine and complain over a FREELY PROVIDED SERVICE.
Unless anyone here spends several grand a year to maintain a website that serves over a terabyte of data transfer per day, you have NOTHING to complain about.
I have no problem with banners, and I have no real problem with this new advertising. I’m just a little curious as to why the costs of maintaining GameFAQs have spiked so much recently that all of this extra advertising is necessary. The site had sidebar banner ads for a good chunk of time, and seemed to be getting by just fine. But I don’t claim to know what’s going on behind the scenes.
Curiousity about the necessity for more advertising is irrelevant. Whether the owner wants a little cash in his pocket or he needs the extra revenue to cover increased costs, the fact of the matter is that the content remains free and no one here is paying for any of it, so complaints are hardly justified.
Whatever the cause, it’s probably been something that’s been brewing for a while. I can only imagine the kind of traffic a site like that gets (I visit it almost everyday myself) and it’s possible that the banner ads are no longer enough to cover everything. Or maybe the web master had to quit his day job to run the site full time. I don’t know, but considering how much people hate advertising I’m pretty sure the webmaster didn’t come to this decision lightly. It’s a bit annoying, but as Parn said, the service is free and even with the ads it’s still quite good. A strategy guide will run you $13-20 US in a brick and morter store, but they’re free on GameFAQs.
It’s a free service that the webmaster provides for gamers. Perhaps the popularity of Gamefaqs has been increasing? Maybe because the webmaster had to buy out the URL for gamefaq.com (that used to be a porn site… typed that by accident once and found out the hard way)? Maybe the people doing the banner ads lowered their rates?
Whatever the reason, the webmaster deemed it necessary at NO cost to the users.
I think the reason some people are getting upset has to do with the fact that this recent surge of advertising has come shortly after GameFAQs was purchased by CNet.
WAIT, CNet bought GameFAQs? It’s pathetic when these large companies start buying out sites — the same happened with AniPike, and it turned into shit.
Anyways, I thought the ads were just there so the owner could pay for the damn site, not because they were bought out. It seems whenever something is bought it, it turns into something really shoddy. A good example is Cartoon Network, when WB bought them out, they started showing all these new, yet disgustingly boring and stupid cartoons until every damn show turned into something that was made AFTER 1999. It’s quite pathetic. But this is going off topic.
Says the guy that uses Hotmail, a free service provided by Microsoft chock full of advertisements, a company far more aggressive as far as business practices go than CNet. Spare me the melodrama about “principles” and other related nonsense, it makes you sound really ignorant. What, do you sleep better at night knowing that you stuck by your “principles” and didn’t type www.cnet.com in your browser?
Give me a break. I’m out of this thread before I start getting nasty. A bunch of people bitching over a freely provided service really TICKS ME OFF.
