This was originally a reply to a comment in Taz's journal. I thought it was worth airing in public. The background is that ICQ now has banner ads in its message boxes. This is obviously annoying, and there's a patch you can download that will get rid of them for you.

Before anyone installs this patch, please at least think twice.

ICQ costs a lot to run. A significant amount of bandwidth is consumed. A significant number of servers churn away 24 hours a day, seven days a week in air-conditioned server rooms to maintain the databases, and keep track of the huge number of users on the service.

Until now, Mirabilis ICQ has pretty much relied on hits to its website to generate revenue. The ICQ service is free, the website has the banners. However, the website advertising thing is having serious revenue problems right now. The biggest of the bunch, Yahoo, had to suspend its stock last week in an admission that getting money back on free web services is really, really tricky.

The ads in ICQ are an attempt by the people who provide the service to get money back on the service they provide. You may not be paying Mirabilis directly, but your eyeballs are paying them by seeing the ads. Thus, if you delete or hide the ads, you are doing exactly the same as you would be if it was a paying service, and you were receiving it for free.

By all means, install the patch if you wish. If you read what I say, and think "so what", don't tell me, I don't care. I just care that people go into this with open eyes - that they realise the implications of their actions. And know that if the attempt to run the service through advertising fails, then either ICQ will switch to being pay-for-subscription, or it will simply cease to be.