As another poster said, even political forums opposed to prop 8 had google ads on their site. No one has control over google ads other than Google. Let's put that to rest right now.
As for APC becoming a 'money-making' site - other than google ads added to augment what little is made off of sponsors, there really has been no change in the advertising on the site. Let's put that to rest now as well. Unless you want to make mandatory 'subscriptions' like other planted websites, there is no other way to cover the costs of keeping forums like this up in terms of maintanence and bandwitdth. I personally don't see how CG makes money off of forum websites myself looking at a glance the amount of money per month per website. Unless you know how much money-investment and time (which also equals money) it takes to run a website, lets keep the public speculation to a minimum.
The forum changes were made to make the site more user-friendly and to provide the most useful information at the top. There is no real useful information in For Sale or Trade posts. That's why they are at the bottom. There is no 'ulterior' motive other than to improve the usefulness of the site and making the most pertinent information available at the top of the page in this age of 10 second attention spans.
We posted and replied to this thread to keep our members aware of measures we are doing to make APC as user-friendly as possible. If people question our actions and second-guess our intentions, I'd like to make it clear that the moderators of this forum are actively trying to keep APC focused on the the planted aquarium hobby and keeping APC as one of the most useful forums for the hobby, regardless of ownership of the site. Suffice it to say we're listening to what members have to say and doing what we have in our power to change APC to the forum.
This thread is closed, if anyone has any questions feel free to PM me.