Leave the banners, but use the pinning to maybe feature a sponsor every week/month or whatever.
If you have multiple sponsors pinned up top, that quickly becomes ineffective in the same way a stale banner does. If nothing changes, the eye skips right past it. Same reason fresh banners will almost always pull better than whatever they replace regardless of design.
However, if you basically feature a sponsor each week and let them plug whatever they've got going on that's new heavily, then people will read, learn and hopefully sign up. It becomes more like news than just an ad. The more things you can do to make it that way the better.
Maybe a little Q&A to make things interesting. I'm not talking newbie stuff, that's not needed here. How about a Serge interview of the week and post the transcript as part of the pinned thread for a sponsor? Serge interviewing one of the principles behind any of the Oprano sponsors just about the biz in general and where they think it's going is the type of stuff we'll all read.
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