Looks like Fanfiction.net isn't making as much money as they want to.
When I went on the site today, I noticed that the ads, which I thought I'd banished with their Adblocker yesterday, were back. I activated their Adblocker again, and found out you can no longer get rid of them for three days at a time. Now it's down to just one day.
Do you think this little fact is on the homepage?
Nope. Not there. I think they don't want people to notice--though their customer base will realize the change soon enough.
It used to be that you could get a paid account at ff.net. I had one. For less than $20 a year, I had several perks (like traffic stats) and an Adblocker which worked for 30 days. Not just three, and certainly not a measly one. Then, little by little, the paid for perks were whittled away and offered to all and sundry. The paid for account became less and less appealing, then they dropped it entirely.
This just had to happen when I've been getting really irked by livejournal's interstitial ads. I have a plus account (I think that's what they call it), and while I don't mind the banner ads so much (after all, I knew they were going to be there when I signed up for this type of account), the interstitials take up the whole page and usually involve both video and sound. This can sometimes take my touchy sound card down. They also don't always disappear after you click on the "X". The picture might, but the sound remains. Whether or not this is a technical glitch, I'm not sure, but it's certainly a PITA.
If Fanfiction.net wasn't such a central, easy-to-use archive, and the main archive of my fandom, I'd probably not use it at all. I have most of my fics archived at both Lunaescence and FanNation, neither of which have these annoying ads. (I don't consider lj to be fanfic friendly; the only things I've posted here have been on drabble communities.) I'm beginning to wonder if I should post any new stuff at one of the other places and link to my ff.net profile.
It might be a good thing for fanfiction.net to perhaps offer a paid subscription again--if they can come up with some perks that would make it worthwhile. It certainly could help their bottom line, and let the rest of the site go back to a three-day holiday from ads, instead of just one. The way things are going, though, their little Adblocker comment is becoming less and less true. Pretty soon, they'll be giving up that "compromise between showing ads to offset operating costs and crossing the line to the point of annoying our users." In fact. they might already have.