Hello Matthew,
The life blood of this and any forum are the "other" people, those that come here to ask questions and the loyal few non-staff that answer those questions and at times kick the proverbial foot ball around just for fun.
Without people coming here the forum is inactive and in reality dead. If there are no or almost no readers and interaction it is dead.
While it is true that your writers make regular reviews or commentary take a look at how many people "viewed" them since January of this year. Many of the most viewed threads were started last year, over a year ago, or longer.
If you had a company that sold XYZ product and had capitol to spend on advertising would you spend that money on an active network full of people that were interested in your product or would you spend it [throw it away] on a network that has no audience or almost no audience.
You have your work cut out for you, because no matter what you believe and with the work the writers have been doing in the past year this site has lost nearly 100% of its audience.
This is a forum, people make up forums, no people = zero productivity. You will need to find a way to bring back as many educated non-paid contributors as possible, bring in new educated non-paid contributors, and get the public interested again.
You should increase topic areas to include areas formerly not associated with extreme technology [ExtremeTech], such as consoles and everything else popular with all consumers in regards to electronics. Even a camera section would be an idea. Expanding forum content is a good idea, however, again you need people to make this site interesting and alive. Attract people.
As I write this there are 19,435 forum members and I am the only one online. I wish you good luck because at this time these forum halls ring empty.