Good Lord that is a nice chunk of change for MS. Xbox Live is quite the cash cow for them.

There are random advertisements? I actually had no idea about that. All I noticed was some info about upcoming games and available videos.

Oh well, I pretty much stopped browsing the dashboard since the kinect update anyway. Fucking awful design in my opinion.

Wow... Geez....

MS would never make XBL free lol. Whatever, im happy for what it currently is anyway

It's always been funny to me that people complain about ads the dashboard. They don't get in your way or interrupt your games. I completely ignore them. It's nothing like US TV where the program gets interrupted every 10-15 minutes to show a block of ads and the only thing you can do about it would be to prerecord it and fast forward the ads later. At least on Xbox 360the ads are confined to the dashboard instead of being inserted through the games.

Well, more and more people are getting rid of their cable/satellite subscriptions and moving to streaming services, like Netflix, so ads are disappearing to a degree. 

Though I never had cable or anything myself.  I went straight from OTA broadcasting to services like Netflix and Crunchyroll.  Though I do watch the Daily Show online through its website, which is *supposed* to have ads, but doesn't, if you know how to avoid them.

Because its extremely profitable thus making the Xbox a worthwhile endeavor.

Lolll at people who complain about the ads on XBL. They're almost non-existant and most of the time they are topic related like games on the game tab, movies on the movie tab music on the music tab etc... I think ads on sites like vgc are far more annoying since some of them take the whole page or have you wait 20sec to get to pages (granted we can skip them but still) and sometimes it's just the videos starting with sound that is annoying as hell.

Good for MS if they make money out of XBL and just because they make money out of ads doesn't mean they have to stop charging if they think that model is ok (I choose to pay for XBL Gold). Both Sony and Nintendo will try to do the same next gen so don't count on MS to make XBL Gold free anytime soon unless you want really annoying ads.

Nope, Its one add per page/tap in the US and the add is small.

the problem is they haven't been investing back into the gaming hardware/software =. i mean other then halo gears fable and forza the only new exclusives are some arcade titles. and maybe a 3rd party game or 2.

They do have to support a staff,the hardware infrastructure, maintenance, etc.. Plus everyone gets an upgrade to their Xbox dashboard every year (although, some do not like it.) It is sort of like getting a new console (other than the Netflix app, most do make it better/offer more features.)

I there really is a whole bunch of content from music/movies/games, and fortunately it's rather easy to find with their Bing Voice Search if you have Kinect.

But since Silver is free, gold really shouldn't have any ads.