I just checked your profile out - cool niche! (Apologies for not responding sooner. Still figuring the HN interface out and didn't see your reply to me!) I'm

I just checked your profile out - cool niche! (Apologies for not responding sooner. Still figuring the HN interface out and didn't see your reply to me!) I'm very much talking about tendancies here rather than absolutes. Certainly some very principled sites manage to keep their editorial courage - in the gaming community, for example, Zero Punctuation and Penny Arcade both run ads, and neither are afraid of pissing people off. But it's a dichotomy I've always found uncomfortable and difficult to reconcile with when running sites myself, and I think a lot of people have the same problem - you're to be applauded for managing to steer a straight path, and I'm sure you've had to fight to do it. (Indeed, you could view the entire content farming industry as a manifestation of the same problem - when your client isn't the person coming to your site for content, it's very easy to let the content slide.). And even in your company, at the end of the day, if there's a strategic meeting about how to increase revenue (assuming you need to), the questions you'll be asking will tend toward discussing the advertisers' needs, not the readers' (except in as much as you'll be asking how you can increase views, of course). I know this is an impossible question to answer, but in similar situations I've always ended up wondering "How much better would our services have ended up if any revenue-focussed meeting centered on our users/readers rather than our advertisers?" Incidentally, I'd strongly disagree that advertising is a dead model. And I agree that particularly in the gaming sector, it's possible to give users genuine value with some ads - my partner runs a gaming site and she's experimenting with the same model, with the same intention of giving users ads for things of value to them.