Some of you are blowing this way out of proportion. Yesterday there were only 28 users who did enough volume to see the ad more than once. 8 were paying members and thus didn't see it at all.
So that's 20 people on the entire planet who could have possibly seen the ad more than once yesterday. And that's assuming someone who did 52 actions saw it twice, when in reality they probably only saw it once. The actual number is probably closer to 9 who saw it more than once. Thousands of users in that same time period saw it at most once, or not even at all. Those are tiny numbers.
The most anyone could have possibly seen the ad yesterday was 3 times. A total of 2 minutes and 15 seconds of his life wasted in exchange for using the site for hours yesterday. You know how many searches he's done without subscribing? 24,980. I think he got his money's worth on that exchange.
I hardly think the site is ruined for seeing a 45 second ad every few days, let's not be melodramatic. I woke up today, on my birthday, and had an email from someone saying they hope I die of Coronavirus because of the ad. You know what's funny? That person hadn't even done enough searches to see the ad. Unless his IP changed recently he was just jumping on a bandwagon, and either way he's a garbage person.
Let's look at some examples, most people fall into the bottom three tiers:
50 Search Actions / Day: You'd see it once per day at most.
20 Search Actions / Day: You'd see it two to three times per WEEK.
10 Search Actions / Day: You'd see it once per WEEK.
7 Search Actions / Day or Less: You'd literally never see the ad EVER.
At 100 searches per day, which there is a single-digit number of people who hit that level, you'd be giving up 90 seconds a day but using the site for hours per day. Hardly a big deal.
To answer some of your questions:
I will experiment with the time that the ad shows. The 45 seconds was in place because when I removed the close button I originally had the ad automatically closing itself after that time, so I wanted to give people enough time to read it and act before it disappeared. Then I thought it would be better if the ad just reveals a close button, since the user might have walked away or switched to another tab. With the ad not closing automatically any more, such a long time is probably not necessary. Give me a few days to get baseline measurements, then I'll drop it to 30 seconds and see what happens, and after a few days I'll drop it again. I'll go as low as I can without seriously impacting clicks. I doubt 45 will be the final number.
I didn't intentionally make it restart at 45 seconds if you refresh the page, just to be vindictive. It was just more work to have it keep track of how many seconds you already watched, rather than just keeping track of if you let it finish or not. I removed the anti-refresh thing for now though, if you're willing to lose your search filters and/or pagination just to get rid of it I probably shouldn't stop you.
Nobody will just come to the site and immediately be greeted with the popup. It doesn't show up until you've done at least 50 homepage actions in the past week. So there's no concern about the popup being someone's first impression of the site, it isn't possible.
There will be four ads in rotation, one of which is our membership banner. There's already one in a 25% rotation, I'm still waiting on the other banners. It won't be the same ad every time.
We're not going to become a members-only service. When we launched memberships we didn't reduce the free functionality one iota to encourage signups. In fact, we did the opposite and extended the free benefits by letting you have 50% more results if you register for free. There are too many new domainers in developing nations that need the data to learn and be successful, and we don't want only people who are already successful and can afford the membership to have access.
I think that covers everything. Thanks again to those of you who are level-headed and were supportive and understanding that a free service needs to make money, and that this is the only banner ad format that really works these days. To the rest of you, please, take a breath and realize it's only 45 seconds a few times per week.
