eru - Consoles are a way of life for 4free sites. We don't charge surfers to join so we have to make the money somehow to pay webmasters what we pay them.
We only have 8 consoles..there are several other sponsors that are much worse..trust me..I tried to make ours as painless as possible. The blur loads behind the page when the surfer enters and has no graphics so it loads lickety-split. Surfers usually dont even notice it until they close the site. We use an Apache mod on our server to seperate AOL traffic so that the blur console does not pop over the site when a surfer visits the site in an AOL browser. The AOL browser does not like to recognize blur commands and it pisses webmasters off when sponsors dont realize this and have their AOL surfers seeing consoles over the site they are trying to send them to. The more we make off exit consoles the more we can afford to pay you to send traffic. Of course we realize there is a limit to what surfers will deal with and didn't go for 20 consoles
Rrred is correct about using 4Free programs in cunjunction with each other. Many surfers will join anything that is free on the page so having different sites and sponsors make sense. If they have already joined one site before and you offer them another then chances are you will be a signup richer
