Hey Bluelake!
Well, it goes like this. I had an epiphany one day and realized that I'm truly giving the flight schools a valuable free service. I've probably gotten several megs of email from flight schools either thanking me for the publicity, or verbally berating me for the publicity.
Most of the letters I get are from schools that talked about how their enrollment picked up after some of these forums went up.
The forums eat up a lot of bandwidth on the server. So I was debating lumping all of the Flight Training forums into one generic forum until I decided to give the training schools an opportunity to directly reach the audience and help finance the costs of running the website.
Personally, there is a lot of 'salesmanship' on from marketers -- primarily the reason why I reserve all rights to tell a school to 'pack sand' if they practice what I personally feel is false advertising.
If an advertiser, just for arguments sake, offered me a $5,000 to run a misleading ad, I'd honestly tell them to kiss my butt (but in the vernacular).
Would I become a commercial source? Not in my eyes.
I'm not selling a product and whether or not I get two hits a day or 50,000, it makes me no difference as long as those two hits were from people that found answers to their questions. Seriously.
Also, I still reserve all rights to speak my mind, as it's my website and I answer only to myself. I don't have a board of directors to answer to and if a flight school, or advertiser screws up and tries to intentionally mislead my users, I'll promptly refund the balance of their advertising fee and 'let 'em have it'.
I think a lot of advertisers know this and thus haven't wanted to touch it with a 'ten foot poll'.
My integrity means worlds more than a few bucks I might get from running ads on the website. Believe me, after I toured and reported on my experience at Pan Am, tour offers flooded into my mailbox but that's not the kind of guy I am!
After all, it's a 30-day test to see if it's worthwhile to run aviation-related ads on the website.