Newgrounds has been around for over a decade. I find that both amazing and bewildering. I think most of us can agree that it's an important institution in our 'culture', being one of the few places that allows game creators to upload their games to a large audience. If we ever develop the "Youtube of video games," Newgrounds will have been its predecessor.
Newgrounds has been through its ups and downs since its inception, being mostly succesful at the start. It became a top 600 website and then expanded. Then when the dot com crash happened, ad revenue faltered but the expenses didn't let up. Tom Fulp goes on to explain the current situation over on a post on the Newgrounds forums:
In the time since, NG has faced a sort of "death by a thousand cuts" scenario, with numerous competitors in the movie, gaming and music space. These sites have been backed by millions in venture capital and later bought for millions more by even bigger companies… you know the drill.
Throughout all this, NG has remained independent and has kept the bills paid.
Which brings us to our current reality: expenses have grown while our traffic has stayed the same and ad revenue has gone down.
One of our solutions to this is to stop leaning so heavily on advertisers and start leaning more on YOU, the people who enjoy NG.
So what they're doing is introducing a "supporter upgrade", where you can pay $25 dollars for an ad-free Newgrounds for one year. In addition to this, the site will load faster and better. The ad cuts don't apply to what plays before a video or game.
Hopefully this works out for Newgrounds and enough people are willing to invest in it. It'd be a shame to have the website disappear.