It was wildly successful. At it's zenith EmuParadise was ranked 700 or so as per Alexa on the entire internet. We're talking millions of visitors per day and thousands of active users every single second. I ran it all by myself with an entire team of moderators, contributors, etc.
It did have ads. Heck, our server bills were in the range of tens of thousands of dollars a month. How could I pay for that without having ads on the site? Then we're in commercial copyright infringement territory. Basically if you get sued, you can go to prison, and you will be bankrupted for sure. At the time there were no torrents, no IPFS, no distributed hosting solutions in any case.
As time went by the stress became enormous. Of course threatening letters and DMCA takedown notices were the norm. And the fact that the site was hugely popular and government agencies such as the FBI could get involved at the behest of Nintendo et al just made it worse. But also keeping it online, through various CDNs, trying to keep it anonymously run at all times (my OpSec was terrible starting out, it started in the year 2000), keeping servers online and uptime to almost 100% and bandwidth flowing and hard drives spinning and RAID arrays working. It was a whole lot of everything all at once and I was just one guy doing it all.
After another website Loveroms got sued by Nintendo in 2018 (for $12MM) I decided I had had enough. Reading stories like the kickasstorrents guy getting arrested while on holiday with his wife and kid, loveroms getting sued, I decided that this was the end of the road for me. I pulled all the games from the site. Eighteen years of work down the drain.
My mental health had suffered tremendously, I was depressed and anxious almost all the time. The sight of a police officer on the street would set me panicking. The cost was too high.
Was it a blast? Oh yes it was. I used to receive thousands of emails from grateful people. Cancer patients who reminisced in their last days playing video games from their childhood, soldiers at war whose only escape was a few rounds of Bomberman (the irony is not lost on me), and so many more beautiful stories of nostalgia and connection.
But current copyright law is going to destroy all this art and culture. There is no real legal way to preserve it. And people like me may do it for a long while, but at what cost to ourselves? I firmly believe that a 7-10 year copyright (extendible even somehow? debatable) would be fair and would let authors get what they need out of their creations. It would help us preserve all this beautiful art and culture that we have enjoyed and share it with future generations.
I would love for a human kid living on a distant exoplanet in the far future be able to play Chrono Trigger and wonder about the history of the earth and our stories.