Correct me if I'm wrong, but the parent company uses PSD more as just a low-cost low-maintenance side revenue stream than anything. It gets tougher and tougher to keep a site free where you don't sell anything...and there's a fine line between a tolerable amount of advertising and 'I gotta use an ad blocker' levels.
One problem many users don't think about is...if you like a site, you can't just block their only revenue source for it by blocking their ads. The more people that do that, the more likely a site has to 1) increase the number of ads or 2) close down.
But, the level and type of ads here do get cumbersome...and too often cause pages to not fully load and/or you go to click something only to have an ad pop up where you just clicked, etc.......and annoying users doesn't increase traffic either.
I'm here as often as I am because the forums on my OWN sports game site are extremely underutilized. I have active players (or at least did pre-covid) but posting has been down for years. Forums in general are tough to keep active without giving users more reason to log in.
One thing I've wanted to look into for years is ways for smaller sports sites to combine resources to network together for various things, instead of each site expending energy to do some of the same things, spending more per site for server space/bandwidth, etc....networked together advertising could be higher value, lower impact just because of traffic numbers from combining resources. If a mod wants to put me in touch with someone with the company on that, I'd be down with that.
gotta love 'referential' treatment