i remember a few years back when online-go.com (OGS) decided to double down on ads in order to fund new servers to speed up the service outside of North America[1]. They opted to not just place ads in the landing page, but to also display ads in the game page. It was a huge disaster. Nobody liked it (including the dev who implemented it).

What resulted is that they turned off ads altogether[2]. I haven’t seen them post about a retrospective, but since they’ve never looked back. It seems like turning off ads was a good decision for both the users of OGS and the platform as a whole.

1: https://forums.online-go.com/t/speeding-up-ogs-around-the-wo...

2: https://forums.online-go.com/t/ads-ogs-and-you/14090