This is a good point, and the kick in the teeth I needed myself… I’ve never gotten a Pro plan because all the features I care about the most are free (I use the desktop site exclusively), but I’ll happily pay to support community courses.
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A post was merged into an existing topic: Rollout of the new dashboard and learning sessions experiences to all our customers
You know, I’d be more inclined to buy a subscription if instead of focusing on adding more aggressive ads to the app every few months, you guys would instead sort out the bug where a review session on the app doesn’t get synced with the website and has to be done again there, which is a bug that’s been plaguing the app for years.
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It doesn’t get synced if you’ve been doing it offline, because it doesn’t have the way to sync up… Or am I wrong? I have experienced this only when I did an offline session and didn’t go online on the phone after that.
You can’t even do it offline to begin with if you don’t have a subscription.
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A fair point and I could afford it. I was close to paying for premium a while back but I wasn’t sure if the premium features were worth it. Getting rid of adverts on the app might be though. I think the main thing that put me off though was the thought of subscribing to something that seems to just keep getting worse with each update. It’s still as usable and useful for me but it’s much uglier and the appification of the desktop site and seeming inability to sync daily goals on app and desktop is annoying. I’ll never get used to the ‘yellow theme.’
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‘‘thought of subscribing to something that seems to just keep getting worse with each update…’’
lol. Those words probably sting them pretty hard.
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Memrise needs to have a word with Google about suitable ads for the app. I was rather unpleasantly surprised to have this garbage show up in between review sessions while waiting at a store. If I had the sound turned on, it would have been even worse.
It’s perhaps not particularly clear from that screencap, but the ad was quite brazenly presenting the lead in to a sex scene that surely doesn’t exist in the actual game, but it’s not like mobile ads are ever known for their honesty.
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Hi Cerzel, you should absolutely not be seeing this, on Google Ads we have disabled the showing of ads from all adult categories and other categories that we don’t want to be associated with. Of course this relies on the advert being categorised by the service and unscrupulous advertisers can file adverts in the wrong category until Google takes them down.
If you see one again, then every advert from google should have 2 icons in a corner, one of which lets you report ads to google to help this unscrupulous advertisers be taken down.
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Alright, fair enough. Is the report icon supposed to be that tiny “i” in the bottom left?
That’s right.
I recently started trying the Memrise mobile app again after not touching it for several years, and I haven’t seen any full screen ads yet, or ads that play sound. Although I used to have a paid account (Memrise premium), I discontinued it after a few years when it became clear they weren’t going to un-break the community courses. I never paid for features, I only paid because I wanted to support Memrise. But since I don’t have a paid account, I figure I should be seeing the ads people are complaining about, shouldn’t I?
[ Also, to be clear, if I ever did get an unwanted ad that starts playing sound, that would make me quit the app immediately and probably not come back. Ads that play sound when you didn’t expect it are truly obnoxious! ]
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The only reason I was using Memrise is because there were no obtrusive advertisements. Considering most people are making their own study sets and using study sets from others… how can they justify advertisements?
I mean, if lots of people are seeing advertisements while studying a set that I made… shouldn’t I get paid too?
I have been providing g Memrise with my hard work in the form of well curated study sets, and this is how they repay me? Obtrusive advertisements?
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This just means I will look for another free flash card app with no obtrusive ads. I don’t use your materials, I only use my own study sets and those from others. How can you justify making money from advertisers on the study sets created by users for free?
Will I start getting a cut of that money from advertise to on the study sets I made for free?
Because I’m about to just change all my sets to private otherwise. Why should I provide Memrise with quality content made from many hours of my hard work? I did this with the understanding that my work was helping other people like me study for free. And now you are making money from my hard work. Shame on you Memrise.
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But that’s just it, you aren’t paying to support community courses. People make those courses and they don’t get paid, only Memrise does!
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" Considering most people are making their own study sets and using study sets from others"
I’m afraid that is categorically not true. It may be how you use it, but our official content is used far more than the community courses.
To the wider point, there is a cost to providing the community courses, someone has to build and maintain the software and pay for the servers. Doing that for millions of users is a very substantial cost that we cannot support without some revenue from users.
We are not banking billions from adverts, you can look up the revenue per thousand ads if you like, it’s country and format dependent but if you’re making $3.50 per thousand ads you would be doing very well (we make less). So think how many adverts you as an individual may see in a year and so how much revenue we will receive, it is not much and we just try and offset some of the costs of providing this free service to you. There is not some massive pot of money we make that we’re not sharing with course creators.
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Memrise is hosting them, though, so subscribing presumably helps support server costs.
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The ads are incredibly intrusive and disruptive. I’m a language teacher and these full-screen, full-sound interstitial ads are basically how you drive users/learners away. Especially from community courses, where volunteers are doing all the work for free.
I’d be happy to pay for a full-featured course that included speaking exercises and the photo lens feature, but the Irish course is literally an Irish government course from the 1960s that includes none of the app features. You can buy the full set of books and cds for less than half the cost of the app.
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This screams desperation on Memrise’s part! It appears since the major aesthetical change of the brand and the whole 2019 shenanigans with decks: less emphasis on the community courses, and the erasure of mems; a lot of long-term users have outwardly stated that they will either downgrade or stopped using the app entirely. It was completely foreseeable that Memrise has lowered its prices and has been repeatedly shoving discounts in users’ faces. To top it off, there are now extremely intrusive adverts which would undoubtedly drive more users away.
There isn’t anything enticing to being a pro subscriber anymore; the whole community side of the app appears dead. This is merely my opinion and based on the observations since being a user back in 2013 when I believe all the features were free and a premium subscription was on the horizon.
Numerous long-term users have seen an array of erroneous decisions and changes made by the team at Memrise: customer loyalty has been thrown out the window. Consequently, it is not surprising users are not wanting to support Memrise. I hope things improve: it has been too many years, and hope has effectively diminished.
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I could be wrong, but I believe that Memrise is a commercial business that needs ongoing revenues from operations to have a future.
I do use the App version frequently, and I don’t find the ads very distracting at all. And I recognise that they contribute to company revenues at no cost to me.
Optionally, Memrise offers enhanced functionality through Pro subscriptions. I have no problem receiving Pro subscription marketing emails, including offers of discounts - this is all very normal and expected from a company selling a commercial product.
As a user since 2013, I’ve seen many changes. Most are good and, on average, I think they’ve been very positive.
Currently, I see Memrise as the best available tool for foreign language vocabulary learning - when using both official and community courses. Keep up the good work!
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