We do not look at it as a competition at all. There are a lot of things we could discuss as to why their site has so many visitors, etc. But ultimately, if you are happy one place or another, be happy.
Yes, welcome. We also don't know how much venture capital goes into their site. None goes to ours. You can certainly disable ads here. I had the opportunity to meet one of their associates in Bellevue, Washington, but the person had little interest in discussing anything - as in actually answering a friendly greeting like "Hello, how are you doing?". Windows7Forums.com was around first, a year before them, in fact. Their domain has only 11 characters, uses only letters and no numbers, while ours uses 12 letters and a number. Google's algorithm is a trade secret, but we don't keyword stuff or buy backlinks, which some sites seem to have done.
We used to also delete inactive accounts every year (people who never posted), or our old site would have well over 100,000 registered members right now. From a technical perspective, it looks like they never upgraded their forum code after v3.*, which is something that irks me, but its none of my business.
To me, it looks like they built up a big fan base with their tutorials and emphasis on acquiring backlinks Good for them.
Here's a good article:
The 7 Characteristics of Good Domain Names
I'd love to converse with them about how their site is run. They're just not interested in that level of socialization. Content creation is encouraged for revenue generation through the sale of affiliate software. That happens everywhere, but profit motive isn't our only goal. We came out with a mobile app and guess what they did... the list goes on. Maybe it's all a big coincidence. lol. Wish them well, certainly.