Genealogy Chat

About a week or so ago a new facility appeared on the GR homepage - Access to Britsh censuses from 1841 onward. Great but the catch was that it's user pays._ Here in Australia we're supposed to spend $10AUD to buy 50 credits that must be spent in 7days. But does anyone know how much you get for 50 credits? Before I found FreeBMD I subscribed to a similar service to get access to GRO Indexes, but we had a much longer time frame to spend them. To night I got an email from GR announcing that they had turned up a possible relative. When I clicked on the link it led straight to some 54 possibilities-all on census and each with the nag screen demanding prepayment for credits. Is this really being helpful or is it just targetted marketing of a captive clientelle ie SPAM. I regularly use our local LDS Family History Centre, partly because they have free access to Ancestry. Last week LDS received a letter from Ancestry out of the blue stating that the free access will be stopped at the end of March. To rejoin will cost $1,000. As there are some 30+ centres in australia, that's >$30,000 pa. Not to mention what they would receive from the USA, UK etc. Not a bad little earner. Seeing that the announcements on GR and Ancestry were essentially simultaneous, does anyone know if/what commercial arrangement has been made between these two near monopolies? BTW what are members in other countries being asked to pay to buy credits? Nick