Are the ad banners on the top randomly generated? I was looking for the link to HyperRev and kept refreshing for a good 3 minutes. I noticed that Omni Power's and Inline Pro's site banners showed up 3 times as often as the rest of the banners. The S2Ki Market Place's banner showing up 5 times as often as the rest, but that's kind of obvious.

 

I know that different weighting can be applied to each ad, but I don't know if cthree uses this based on what vendor's deals are.

I know that the counts that I see when ads are equally weighted are very close.

 

I've asked cthree about ad weighting previously and he stated they are equally weighted. I would hope this is still the case. It is quite easy to check by emptying your cache and doing a series of forced refreshes.

Re: Finding a sponsor:

Unfortunately numerous requests by members to have the sponsors link moved back to the top of the page have not been granted.

 

All ads are weighted equally. They are rotated sequentially, not randomly but rotated among all of the pages loaded by all users not per user. You just hit ads in the same part of the cycle.