im refering to sites such as this one, gamespot, ign.

they must employ people in double figures and have offices and equipment for doing video reviews, podcasts and stuff.....so how do they pay for it? they also got costs like web designing, people to keep it up to date, all the editors, web-hosting/servers....

i cant see advertising revenue covering all of it, infact i cant even see advertising on their websites even though i took off adblock.

am i missing something??? are these even good businesses or is it rich people doing it for fun?

Ads, really. Some like Gamespot and now this site have a premium, paid membership, but most sites live off ads. They must be good business otherwise there wouldn't exist that many

Most of the big reviewers are on MS's payroll of course. 

i dont understand.....i see no adverts on any of the websites.

Advertisements from Videogame companies.

...Hence the problem with reviews

Are you sure you turned your Adblock off and not just made an exception?  Cause there are a lot... and the ads don't nessisarily have the same exception address as the website.

Advertisements, plus vgchartz will now have subscription money coming in that will provide them with a lot of money.

IAWTC. So much truth nowadays. =(

ok ive turned off adblock plus on both google chrome and firefox, still no adverts. also tries internet explorer where i dont have any ad-ons installed.....still no adverts.

let me assume there are adverts......are they bringing in hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay for all the staff and everything else required to run these sites?

i really doubt their being paid for the reviews (although ive said it myself a couple of times)

You don't need hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay staff, and hosting a site is dirt cheap