I'm still experimenting with the advertising, so it's all up in the air currently. It's the first time I've considered advertising in over 12 years of working on mIRC, so there's a lot of fiddling going on.
The advertising in the mIRC About dialog was unsuccessful, that's why I decided to try it out on the website - unfortunately ads are more visible on the website because of the minimalist design. Most other websites integrate far more ads into their pages. Even with one ad, it's going to stand out on the mIRC website. The website is currently displaying two ads, one on the side and a banner at the top, which is pretty minimal.
While I used to have a block against advertising, it just completely clicked for me last month that all of my favorite sites have it - from coding to software to news to social networking. I'm still pretty uncomfortable with it - but if it can help support mIRC, like it helps supports all kinds of other projects and websites, it seems fair and reasonable to use it.
I'll be tweaking the the ads over the next week or two, so you'll probably see more changes in the layout as time goes by.
