From the FAQ:

Personally, I have no issue with the occasional advert or two. So long as they remain in good taste, or informative, or fun, why not? If you consider the price we paid for our Chumby's, it should be obvious that Chumby Industries needed to get some revenue on the back end of the transaction.

However, if adverts for Head-On ("apply directly to the forehead" company) or similarly bothersome content start to appear, I reserve the right to amend my opinion.

For now, I believe that the Chumby is an excellent product that has endless personalization options, and is ideal for a wide spectrum of ages, backgrounds, and demographics.

Your Chumby is what you make of it. I choose to focus on all the great features, and not sweat the small stuff.

We're still experimenting with different sponsored content formats and approaches.  You're right, there won't be any unsolicited audio -- has to be specifically played to be heard.  And any sponsored widgets will simply pass by if not played.  We're working on ways to make sponsored content widgets more personally interesting to each Chumby Network viewer -- in addition to ultimately being a revenue source that keeps the Chumby Network free of charge, we want this to be a way that new and compelling content is made available.  Let us know what you like and what you don't.

RMSko - see http://forum.chumby.com/viewtopic.php?id=2389 for some more on this

No but the device has a server network serving content.. Bandwidth isnt free..
You bought a service .... Otherwise Chumby would have to charge a subscription fee to give you content...
No different then getting News on your cellphone or Broadcast TV..

It was clearly stated in the documentation..

Please read the following forum thread.
http://forum.chumby.com/viewtopic.php?id=2604

There have been some ideas thrown around but Duane is *NOT* totally bullshit...
Seems that most of the people here expect something for nothing...

Im going to give you a free PC and it comes with free internet.... Oh wait..that sounds farmiliar....
They ended up going to a two-tier subscription model.... and doing away with the free content..

Food for thought

Weve gone down this road already. to quote someone else... the exits are clearly marked..
Im not going to get into this again.

Please feel free to use search to see other threads on this subject.

Heres a list of threads that previously touch on the subject. for your convienence.
(there are more, this is just a starter)

http://forum.chumby.com/viewtopic.php?id=2910
http://forum.chumby.com/viewtopic.php?id=2820
http://forum.chumby.com/viewtopic.php?id=2628
http://forum.chumby.com/viewtopic.php?id=2691
http://forum.chumby.com/viewtopic.php?id=2428

forgot to re-mention
http://forum.chumby.com/viewtopic.php?id=2604

Can we get a stickied thread about this? Maybe that will help to cut down on the number of "OHNOES ADS" posts.

Keep the ads if it helps Chumby stay free; they are so few and so easy to delete them if we don't want to watch them it is not even an issue...for me. I can spend two seconds deleting something much easier than I can adding another bill to pay to my stack. I go months and months without seeing an ad and I use Chumby for about 1 hour per day. Now I am seeing a few more Chumby t-shirt ads. Still it takes 2 seconds to delete, and I feel like it is just another holiday "opportunity for spending", so it's not even a big issue to me while scrolling through. I recognize that it might be bothersome to those who use their Chumby differently than I do, for instance on auto scroll. If keeping the ads causes Intersection/Tim to get rid of his Chumby as he suggests, may I please have it? Sorry, Tim, I couldn't resist!

Bandwidth might not be free, but it's darn inexpensive.

At my office we have 100mbps full-duplex to a tier-1 backbone for $800/month. At the data center, we have 4gbps for $4,000/month. Even using the more expensive office rate of 10 mbytes/sec (we can halve it and say 5 mbytes/sec to allow for overhead), that's 13 terabytes of data transfer per month for $800. Or, 16 gigabytes of of data transfer per dollar.

Let's pretend a single widget is 1 megabyte (which is almost certainly generous; the Chumby Wiki suggests below 100k here: http://wiki.chumby.com/mediawiki/index. … for_chumby ). That means a Chumby owner who has 100 widgets - 100 megabytes of widget transfers - is costing 1/160 of a dollar, or less than a cent. Of course, they could transfer them over and over again.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that this sort of almost zero cost is just a cost of doing business in the Internet era, and that I'd be happy to pay a full cent per widget I download, if bandwidth is the issue here.

Bottom line: Having a widget put on my Chumby that I didn't ask for will result in a returned Chumby. That costs a certain $120 of revenue.

[Edit: Changed a word]

I may sound like an a** here but its interesting to me how you spent enough time to figure out how much bandwidth will cost Chumby, yet you didn't spend the time to read one sentence on the website which tells you that there are advertisements on the device. You can just remove the widget when it pops up, i barely notice them on my chumby when they pop up every now and then. And its not nice to threaten Chumby that about returning the device,  if Chumby let you return the device, just because you didn't read about what you were getting before you got it, they would be doing you a favor. They will be the ones loosing money because of your carelessness. Chumby is a corporation, which has a goal of making money, that their job, bottom line is that they are making a very innovative and unique product. The Chumby does much more than display advertisements and maybe down the road once Chumby gets big enough they won't have advertisements on it. If one advertisement bothers you so much I suggest a desert island, as i get exposed to much more advertising just walking down the street than i do through the Chumby.