[natethomas]

Then when something breaks, or doesnt work as advertised, you go on XDA or this forum (hey - google, like) and produce a bunch of ad impressions.

Let me say, following your extremely long rants is very difficult for a few reasons. First, they aren't super well planned out, so they come off as just a random collection of ideas that can't be followed, and we're left forced to guess at whatever point you were trying to make. I genuinely have no idea what's making you laugh, I think because you are leaving out the conclusion/punch line? In fact, that might be the perfect description of your various rants. You write a couple sentences as if leading to some kind of idea, but then move on to the next argument before you can write the conclusion to your idea. Everything is just an implication that has to be guessed at.

And second, your rants have a tendency to make unfounded assumptions or rewrite the facts to better set up a strawman argument, so that you can more easily break that argument down.

Case in point, I'm not sure if you've noticed, but Kodi doesn't have ads in the forum. Or on the website. Or the wiki. Or anywhere else. We do have sponsorship links, but impressions have absolutely no effect on whether we keep sponsors or how much we receive from them. So your strawman argument, which (while super hard to follow) was to somehow link us into the chain of people profiting from the pirate boxes (I think?), falls on its face.

As mentioned elsewhere, beyond being able to say "Hey neat, look at all the users," there's literally no benefit for the Kodi organization to get more users based on content aggregating piracy addons. We haven't seen a big rise in shirt sales or donations. We haven't seen an increase in the number of PRs or devs. We don't sell page ads. Content providers have not, so far, been impressed with our numbers enough to make official addons, because they perceive those numbers as being fairly valueless. And we don't accept sponsorships from hardware companies that push the piracy angle.