Someone please correct me if I'm wrong on either of those points.
You are not wrong. According to
mexxer-2 post from 2016, a portion of the 25% of the bitcoin the forum generated through ads was intended for mod payments according to a formula. If the formula is correct, the most active moderators earned 0.3% or more per month, each. This was confirmed by Quickseller further down in the thread.
As far as I can tell, the percentage is now higher than 25%. The ad auctions are not bringing in much bitcoin right now and the forum has grown enough to need a lot of mods. My guess is that the mods get nearly all of the forum ad revenue and hosting is paid for out of the forum’s reserves.
Do you really think so?
The last
mod payment resulted in the mods getting a total of 0.1844
BTC, and was sent in the middle of March. I looked at the previous ad auctions going back a month (based on the end date) prior to the mod payment being sent, and the forum received a total of 0.325
BTC from selling ads. So it looks like last month, the forum spent about 56% of their revenue on mods. At current prices, that leaves about $8100 to pay for hosting, and any other expenses the forum may incur.
I am not sure how much hosting costs the forum per month, but it is probably a decent amount based on the amount of traffic it gets.