Advertising on paid for genealogy sites

[tony vines]

I subscribe to a well known and normally well run subscription genealogy site. However these days every time I use it a banner advert pops up on the Home page. Mostly I ignore them but increasingly I get one telling me that I may have won a very valuable prize. My view is that this kind of thing is the lowest form of advertising, hardly distinguishable from the scams which in fact it pretty much is.

It seems to be the norm today that if you get information for nothing, for example from a free App, you must expect to be 'advertised at' and I accept this as an acceptable way to cover the development and running costs. However, if I pay I expect to get the service free of adverts. BBC versus ITV is an analogy. So when I pay for a service and then get scamming adverts I get very cross.

I complained to the site owners and they explained that advertising will help them to provide better services. That doesn't cover the main issue of scamming however and they haven't given an explanation for that.

Does anyone else find this objectionable or am I just naive?

[malcolm99]

It's not just you Tony. I think it cheapens the excellent product they're offering.

[Mutley]

I agree with you both.

[Guy Etchells]

snip

It seems to be the norm today that if you get information for nothing, for example from a free App, you must expect to be 'advertised at' and I accept this as an acceptable way to cover the development and running costs. However, if I pay I expect to get the service free of adverts. BBC versus ITV is an analogy. So when I pay for a service and then get scamming adverts I get very cross.

snip

I don't follow your TV analogy.
Every TV licence payer pays for the cost of the BBC, it is not free.
If you subscribe to cable tv you still get adverts on the majority of the channels you have purchased.

The adverts help to reduce the price one has to pay, they do not cover the full cost.
Cheers
Guy

[sueannbowen]

Tony - you are a mind reader. I was really really getting annoyed earlier today. Same site - flashing rubbish at me. considering how much I pay for my subscription I object to this bombardment. Does anyone know of a way to block these flash ads?

[christanel]

One minute before I came on here I had searched for a way to block flashing ads. I used Adblock plus which took just a few seconds to download for Chrome. Now to see if it actually works

[Neil Wilson]

One minute before I came on here I had searched for a way to block flashing ads. I used Adblock plus which took just a few seconds to download for Chrome. Now to see if it actually works

please let me know if it does

[Waitabit]

Is that the site in UK or the other one? I haven't seen it yet,...I have Adblock.

[tony vines]

OK Guy, bad analogy but my main point is paying to be hit by scam adverts. I know that I have a choice, pay or leave, and that I can probably use an ad blocker (indeed that was what the site also advised me - can you believe that?). But the choice is to leave and effectively go back to steam genealogy (or give up) or to put up with trash. Not much of a choice is it!

Thanks Christanel. I use Chrome so that's worth knowing. Firefox has something similar.

Rant over.

[christanel]

Adblock plus seems to have done the job! There are versions of it for each OS.