While there are obviously a variety of perspecitves on the Hotmail
advertising banner issue, I think a couple points are worth making.

1) Hotmail is not the only game in town as far as free e-mail is concerned.
 To my knowledge, Juno, which is also free, extracts its compensation (in
the form of ads) only from the Juno subscriber, and not from others who
happen to be unlucky recipients of e-mail from Juno subscribers.

2) The Hotmail banners may not be worth worrying about.  But if I were a
list owner and felt sufficiently strongly about banners or some other form
of trouble (like AOL failing to take steps to counter list spamming from
people using multiple aliases), I wouldn't hesitate at all to deal the
problem by cutting off Hotmail or AOL subscribers.

For example, all my lists currently require AOL subscribers to be on
digest, becuase I refuse to deal with the full mailbox errors.  As a
volunteer list owner, I won't suffer from a problem that's caused by
somebody else if I can help it, and if I never speak up about AOL
mailboxes, AOL subscribers will have no incentive to pressure AOL to
straighten things out.

Just me $.02 worth.

-- John