I posted this on the forums, but figured this might be a better place to post my opinion.  Not looking for flames, arguments, or anything of that nature.  I am simply laying out what I have observed being said.  Take it as you will, but please be constructive with your comments!

Honestly doesn't bother me one bit that Curse went ahead and added a premium portion to their service.  Not surprised the decline in advertising has come and I would imagine as time goes on it may continue to decline as a revenue base for Internet services.  More and more people ignore the ads to begin with, so marketing companies have less reason to use advertising to get out their message, especially if it is not targetted to a specific audience.  Hence the reason for having a team to go out and get contracts with marketing agencies related to your web content.  Despite all that effort, out of all the impressions an ad may generate, only about 2% at best turns into potential business.  And of that 2% only 75% results in actual business in the best of circumstances.  That is simple economics and you can probably find more accurate statistics using Google, but I suspect what you may find will be lower as those are best case estimates.

To operate a large network like Curse, all the bandwidth and software development costs have to get paid for somehow.  Being that I am a project manager and web/software developer by trade, I know that stuff isn't cheap.  Web hosting and Internet bandwidth providers are in the business to make money.

So is it worth $29.40/year for the premium service?  Mind you I am not defining what a "premium service" is just what is being offered.  Well, it comes down to what you feel $29.40/year is worth (or $2.45/mo or ~61 cents per week or ~8 cents per day).  And if you calculate minimum wage of $6.55/hr, that is ~11 cents per minute, accounting for taxes you pay for that in about 2 minutes of work.  So, now that we see the math, is it worth 2 minutes of work to pay for the service?  For me, yes, I got better things to do, like playing games! :)

And for a side note, nowadays, you can't buy a gallon of gas for $2.45. :)