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.
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.
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!