The first thing is that as my mother always says 'Nothing in life is free' and then as has been pointed out by Robert, Bob's web site carries pop up ads and as pointed out by Lindel, so does any web site hosted by rootsweb. Time is a very precious thing, priceless really. Those who build web sites and put them on the web - well, the information they are puting there is free to those who go to the sites - but it's not 'free'. There is a price, that price to those who create the web sites is actually financial as well as the time they have put into creation of the site. The financial part, well, they pay to see films, they pay to photocopy pages, or they pay for pen and paper to transcribe, they pay electricity bills to allow them type the information into their computers, they usually pay a server to allow them connect to the internet and then they pay telephone bills on top of that - the telephone bills are increased over and above whatever is would cost them if they weren't loading information to web sites, because you have to stay on line a long time to load big pages. That's the financial aspect - hidden costs that no-one would normally think of. Then, the time part. Like I say time is precious, but people like Bob and Lindel create web pages to go on their sites and quite simply, creation of a web page can take up to one day or more -depending on the number of links you have on that page. and Rootsweb gives away all this 'free' web space - but management at rootsweb have to pay all the same bills as well - electricity, servers and all of that - so, ok, there is more than just paying bills involved with some aspects, there is a profit to be made from genealogy - but the thing is that no-matter what, genealogy mail lists and genealogy web pages would be few and far between if it wasn't for 'free' space. The alternative to free space is that the people who create these web pages, continue to create them and then pay servers to host them and with that kind of thing you are very limited in the bandwith you get - you pay more for more bandwidth and the thing about bandwidth is this. The more people that visit your web site, then the more bandwidth you need and the more bandwidth you need the more money you pay. The more information you have on your web site, then the more people visit it and back to the more visitors you have, the more bandwidth you're using and once again the more money you have to pay. Bandwidth is space, it's like renting a house, only when there is a queue outside the door waiting to get in, well, then you have to rent a bigger house. Free pages have to be paid for in money terms - albeit the costs are hidden - the alternative has to be paid for too. Money - that's what they say makes the world go round. Appreciate the free pages - they'll probably not be there for-ever and you don't have to visit anywhere that the pop-up ads bring you to. Ignore them, their presence is what you have to put up with in order to get the free pages. Jane