The sad fact is that I try to keep up with the site and the podcasts, but I make zero money from them and just do them for fun.
I mean this in the nicest possible way, and unless I'm seriously overestimating the popularity of the Gaming Steve Forums... the fact that you're not making money from this site says to me you need to get some part-time marketing help. You're missing out on a serious opportunity here if other folks can live off the ads they get from their blogs and this forum isn't earning you income. The google ad view traffic alone should be enough to... well, I don't know your numbers, but if MY piddly site made me $100 cash just posting a couple comics, a forum as lively as this should be earning you enough to pay for itself, even without new podcasts.
Am I missing something? I know I've clicked on ads I saw on the forums. The popularity here isn't enough to garner some sponsors for the site?
This is actually something I was wondering about, but it was just sitting in the back of my mind until now.
Something to consider would be the amount of traffic this site gets. Look at the pageviews for the last couple of months:
August: 1856876
July: 2059201
June: 2227289
May: 1475869
And the pages querying the database:
Forum Index: Page created in 0.033 seconds with 13 queries.
Everything Else: Page created in 0.193 seconds with 20 queries.
Posting Form: Page created in 0.04 seconds with 16 queries.
Stats Page: Page created in 0.104 seconds with 25 queries.
So there's around 40-50 million database queries a month, added to picture hosting and so forth. I don't know how much bandwidth that eats up, but it's not a small amount, I'd imagine.
However, almost all of those pageviews serve one or two ads. So that's a lot of ad views and there must be a fair amount of clickthrough as well, I'd guess.
Draw your own conclusions from that. I doubt Steve is going to wander in and tell us the facts, but you could draw conclusions either way from these data.