ADS EVERYWHERE!

So, I signed into Deviantart and there are ads everywhere. Not just static ads, but moving, bandwidth-sucking ads that expand when you roll the cursor over them, hammer my connection and slow my browsing.
But wait! It's okay, because apparently you can get rid of the ads by paying money to upgrade your account! Hurrah! What a fantastic idea - annoy your entire user base into paying you until you stop annoying them! Unfortunately, this marketing strategy usually leads to the opposite result. Annoy people and they leave.

DA has a terrible reputation online as it is. To quote one well known site, "DeviantART's population consists mainly of emotionally-unstable artists who aspire to move to Japan and become famous manga artists but instead they end up as Cosplay enthusiasts that earn a living off the Harajuku by exchanging odd jobs for food in the back alleys behind the clothing stores."
In politer terms, DA is known as Conceptart.org but with terrible artwork by nine year olds and lens flare everywhere. DA has made some steps to becoming respectable in the past, with many fantastic commercial artists having galleries here. And then they turn around and pull this epic campaign of spamming ads down the throats of the people who use the site.
Nice move! It certainly hasn't irritated me at all.

PJ

EDIT - Sorry, my fault. I forgot that I just did a system restore, and it restored back to a point before I had Adblock installed. The above points still stand though.