FWIW....those ads won't bring in much revenue at all....certainly nowhere near as much as what people think anyway.
Advertisers will pay according to Google Pagerank amongst other things. From around PR 5 and above there's very good potential to earn decent money via advertising but wgt only has a PR of 3 which is nothing special, unless you believe those toe nail fungus and bladder weakness companies who's ad slots appear on here truly believe WGT will generate them sales, so they'll pay more....duh :)
Not that I'm a lover of Google Pagerank but it's a big factor on how advertisers rate potential sites to advertise on and they'll pay way more to be on PR5+'s than a PR3. God.com has a pagerank of 3 but a least you can send him an email via the contacts page. I've tried a few times to get him to stop VEM eating my shots but still no miracles there I'm afraid to say.
I'm surprised wgt only has a PR3 to be honest. What they need is a decent SEO / SEM team....to push their PR up to at least a 5 which shouldn't be too hard to do given the large volume of traffic this site gets on a weekly / monthly basis. If Chad want's to call me to discuss this then I'm available at 100,000 creds per 5 min chat. :)
They'll make far more on lost balls in 1 week than they'll do on ad revenue in 1 year. :)
The ads are just a little extra revenue.....might pay wgt's office fuel bill for the year plus the xmas staff party....but not a factoring decision in whether this game remains free or a paid membership.
WGT are making more money than a horse can crap with or without the ads and on that note, as it's their business and they've chosen to display ads, then the ads will stay, so just use adblock.
Happy Xmas.