We made a big change to the website today, but only some of you will see it and that’s a good thing. We would like for none of you to ever see it – the new thing, not the website, we want you to see that.
As most of you know Genealogy Quest has been online and free to everyone since 1998. When Ancestry offered to buy us out, we declined. Obviously we do not want our paying clients to fund the website so we rely on advertising. We do not show controversial ads – no banking, no politics, no sex – just plain advertising that appeals to broad groups of people and this revenue pays most of the operating costs for the website.
Unfortunately that revenue is dwindling because more and more people use ad-blocking software and we do not get paid if people do not see the ads.
Our new update is a request for people to turn off their ad-blocking software when they visit Genealogy-Quest.com. If you have ad-blocking software a screen will come up asking you to whitelist us – this means tell your ad-blocker to exempt our site. You could also pause your adblocker but whitelisting is easier because you don’t have to remember to turn it back on again and it will remember us when you visit again.
It is almost certain that some people will not like this change and we may lose some visitors. That is not what we want to do, but we cannot continue to lose revenue and we felt this was the least disruptive way to keep the website free.
If you have problems with adding us to your whitelist, please let me know which browser and which adblocker you are using and I will attempt to help you.