It’s been long in coming, but now MoviePartners is completely ad-free, and will remain so from now on.  There has been a contentious debate going on about it behind closed doors, but I believe that ad-driven revenue for the web is not only antiquated but also detrimental to communities and legitimate Internet businesses in general.

“But, how will we market our products?” Simple. You can still do so, only through the same channels everyone else does. Since many companies seemed to think that ads were somehow negotiable down to the price of something akin to an iPhone application, I don’t see how they benefit my community for the work required.

This is not some experiment to see how well it goes.  This is permanent.  Building and maintaining the ad system, reports and such had become more than onerous, intrusive, and not worth the effort.  As is the slumping economy was any indication, even before that hit, Internet advertising was just not the way to go. As a business owner it did not feel like it was worth the effort and was, again, antiquated. The money simply is not there for smaller sites to make it worthwhile.

This now lays the groundwork for future endeavors with MoviePartners. More in terms of free services, software, information.  But it also means that some things in the future will be on a pay-basis.  Somehow it has to keep going, although we do try to keep things more realistically in line with what the market will bear.

It is my hope that in the near future ads will not be on Screenwriter’s Utopia either, in order to give the best experience possible when visiting such an information-rich site and thriving community of over 14,000 members.