To be honest, I think I'd prefer PMs to announcement spam...
And I did get a cash PM the day after I posted in here.
It wouldn't really bother me if they continued with it; they were about personal sales, right? And those are different for every person, and most people ignore announcements anymore, so from a business standpoint, I think it was a good move.
Easier to find out if you want to actually look at it or not with PMs rather than announcements that you have to click through every notice to see if there was something good.
On another note, I really wish they would do all the announcements like the ones they had for the shinigami item, I ACTUALLY read those, they were fun.