This is my ninth season covering the Pirates while running this site. For the majority of that time, the site was free, relying on revenue from advertising, which was reliant on page views. The way that process works is that ad networks and sponsors pay $X for every 1,000 page views. And then the incentive is to maximize the amount of views to maximize revenue. This often leads to trouble.
Because page views were the primary source of revenue, I studied every article to see what types of articles received the most views, and what types weren't worth our time.