Serious question? What's wrong with more ads? They're a great source of revenue, some members may ***** about them but they'll get over it. The problem with a subscription fee is a ton of people are just gonna be really turned off by being required to tie a bank account or electronic payment to the site. It's not about the dollar, tons of gun guys are just funny about electronic funds.
I'm not saying I care, or the couple hundred of us more active members care, but of the thousands of casual traders you would lose a good chunk of them if you required any form of electronic payment. Just run ads, it's what all the successful social media sites do.
Unfortunately gun sites are blacklisted from all the major ad networks so I don’t even really have the option to run more good ads. The only options available to me would probably come with more malware and pop ups than we could handle, or they are really intrusive like auto playing videos and page takeovers.