When I launched Cheerful Ghost more than three years ago I wanted to build an amazing video game community that was funded by its users. Initially I had three ideas for ways to make enough money to keep things going and one was using traditional web banner advertising. I didn't plan on this making us much money, but felt it was a good compromise to make a few bucks to offset some of our traffic costs. In a perfect world, I don't actually mind this model as it mirrors much of how traditional forms of radio and television use to fund the programs we love. With that, there have been some very interesting conversations recently about web advertising, privacy and respect for your readers. These factors coupled with the simple fact that our 3 year net on ads is less than the price of Fallout 4 has led us to drop our use of traditional web advertising. We don't find it effective, respectful of your privacy or very awesome to look at. We have replaced our advertising banner space with a rotating mention system. Right now it rotates between two things that mention that we recently published our first game Starship Rubicon and mentions how our site is funded.

Cheerful Ghost is a site aimed at creating a safe, open and independent place for people to talk about what interests them in video games. If you have any ideas on how we can do this better or ways we can improve our current Membership system, let us know.