> Basing a business plan on advertising is a decision to provide a cheaper/free service at the cost of deliberately worsening the UI and, ultimately, the user's

> Basing a business plan on advertising is a decision to provide a cheaper/free service at the cost of deliberately worsening the UI and, ultimately, the user's experience with your product. That's a serious trade-off indeed. Actually, ads on Skype probably would have been fine, if they'd done it many years ago. When Skype was new, it was an incredible deal. Voice chat! To anywhere in the world! For free! (Or a small price if you want to use the phone network at either end.) That was such an incredible deal that nobody would have minded if ads were included as part of it -- what else you gonna do? Pay long-distance rates to the telephone company? Nowadays we're all spoiled and accustomed to the fact that we can video-chat with anyone at any time for no money and no ads, so this sounds just plain annoying.