It's a pretty cool place they've got there, but I find the stuff to be much to expensive, generally speaking. I've been on the forum for a little while and thought I'd give a crack at the 10 question quiz to see if I could make a little credit, and then I'd consider a nice soldering station or something of the like.
From a business perspective, it's basically 150 grand for advertisement. Realistically, I think they let a lot of people down there and I think that many will remember that they spent two hours trying to get in just to find it was all over when the page finally loaded. That whole "we want a DOS test" is kinda BS to me. I'm not an IT guy, but I believe that a few good IT nerds can simulate that easily. IMO, it's an excuse for "our servers just aren't capable of this."
They can still accomplish the advertising that they want without burning up a lot of the community's goodwill as follows:
Lower the individual maximum take from $100 to $40.
Spend about 10k renting out more bandwith.
So, instead of a mimimum of 1,500 people earning, you have a miminum of 3500 earning, and everyone is happier because they were able to actually get in and "play the game."
Plus, for what stuff costs over there, I'd imagine they'd go ahead and spend 20 or 30 bucks on top of their free $40. With a 50% gross margin (which I imagine they easily pull at those prices), the $40 credit you gave the customer costs you $20. If he spends 20 more on top of that, you're in the hole now just $10 dollars per customer.
10 x 3500 = 35,000
35,000 + 10,000 spent on the extra server rental = 45,000 cost of "advertisement" to them
Not to mention more people have become customers, and less people are now pissed off at you.