Re: Covering up ads on a free server.

by Collette McNeill <collette(at)mlwebworks.com>

 Date:  Tue, 10 Sep 2002 07:38:17 -0700
 To:  hwg-techniques(at)hwg.org
 References:  dfyh
  todo: View Thread, Original
At 08:16 AM 9/10/02 -0700, you wrote:
>Greetings List,
>
>Back when I made my first geocities page in 1996 all that they asked was 
>that you put one of their banner ads somewhere on your page.  If you put 
>it on the bottom, they were fine with that.  No pop-ups, watermarks, or 
>other fancy drivel.  A simple banner on the bottom was fine with me, when 
>they moved on to other more invasive advertising I dropped them and went 
>on to other free servers for awhile before finally breaking down and 
>getting a real host.  If they'd stuck with the initial system I think the 
>majority of people wouldn't mind and they'd have all those customers they 
>lost who got annoyed with the silly widgets they have now.  I guess this 
>is just a rant about the good old days.

It's tricky and not so sad to me. Ad prices and revenues have plummeted 
since 1999 so the ad-revenue business model simply had to change. Even in 
the good old days, GeoCities' free services cost money to provide.  These 
services are still valuable to people who use them, and paying $5/mo to 
replace revenues they'd otherwise earn by serving up ads on my page seems 
fair to me.  And GeoCities people have to eat too...actually, I think 
they're Yahoo! people now.

Collette.

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