Unlike many popular online community forums and websites, Car-Seat.Org is privately owned. It is operated by a core group of moderators who are parents and child passenger safety advocates themselves! Many forums are owned by large companies, have been purchased by "vertical forum integrators" or were sold long ago by the original founder to another party who simply monetized it for profit. These entities often care little about the topic or community beyond its potential for financial gain. We mention this because Car-Seat.Org is now big enough to be very expensive and time consuming to maintain. We rely on our visitors and members to help us continue with our mission, so we can avoid selling out like many other online communities.
The forum and related websites are now primarily supported by advertising. We do not directly sell any products or services. The easiest and best way to support Car-Seat.Org is to use our links to sponsors and advertisers, including Amazon, when you make a purchase. It doesn't cost you anything but a few extra seconds to use our links or to bookmark our links below!
Also, I ask that you please consider NOT using advertisement-blocking software/settings here, or at the very least put
www.car-seat.org into your whitelist. While many of us don't like ads, the reality is that our sponsors and advertisers track who visits their websites from our forum and that affects if they will continue to advertise and how much they are willing to pay. You will see fewer advertisements over time if you register and become an active member, and no ads appear for subscribers. I continue to avoid any type of pop-up or mandatory "intro" ad placements that many other websites use. If you must use an ad blocker here, please consider supporting us in other ways listed below.
As many of you know, our websites continue to grow and require increasingly expensive hosting services. As of January, 2012, just the forum alone generates well over 1 million page views a month from up to 250,000 unique visitors, transferring 5GB of data for over 10,000 visitors on a typical day. That does not even include traffic from Carseatblog or Car-Safety.Org. Our forums have surpassed 15,000 registered members, of which well over 700 visit each day and nearly 2000 visit monthly. Well over 1000 members and visitors are browsing the forums during peak hours. The growth in the last few years has put the server resources used by our websites beyond the limit of most standard hosting packages. The 2GB database of over 1.5 million posts alone puts our forums beyond many e-commerce hosting service capabilities, let alone the 400+ concurrent visitors that visit the forums at any instant during peak times. Combined with the cost of the software and chat room, the additional costs of a very high end dedicated server needed to host our database quickly and reliably has increased the cost to operate the forums to a very significant amount. Until mid-2007, the costs had been much lower, so it was not necessary to accept subscriptions, sponsors or advertising of any kind. Unfortunately, this is no longer the case.