Sure I guess it got adds but it's rather low-key I think. Maybe you aren't a mac user? ... I hear a lot of PC guys hang out there too. Check it out. (I haven't actually used their service for building a site but I've had some god use of their FTP space you get allocated in the free account.) I haven't been paying as close attention to spymac lately but I think you still get space to build a site plus a fat e-mail account and some FTP space in the free account.
I used geocities for a long time until I got my own domain. I managed to beat their banner ads pretty easily with a bit of experimenting. Other sites have different and often much more difficult to eliminate banner ads, but on geocities all you need to do to eliminate the pop-ups is place the following at the end of all your html pages:
And yes, that is the same </html> that you already have at the end of your documents, just add the rest of that stuff on the line after it.
Oh, by the way, where I have #003399 that is the background color of my webpage. You can replace that with your background color or #000000 would be just fine, it's only a tiny dot at the bottom of your page anyway, you'll never notice so the color is small potatoes.
And yes I'm sure there is a simpler way and a lot of that code of mine is sort of arbitrary, it just has sentimental value to me, feel free to experiment :).