Sitting at work, I’m watching the bits fly by and get a query from someone about their inability to get some stock quotes from CNN Money. I look, and the widget on the page that he’s wanting to get quotes from has a click-thru link that, regardless of whether you wanna do it or not, you get redirected to an ad server and are forced to suck up yet another dose of blatant commercialism.
Seriously? People so freakin’ averse to actually clicking on advertisements on the internet that companies have to now resort to what basically equates to click fraud in my mind. They’re getting advertising revenue whether you actually click on their stupid ads or not, and you have no recourse. Want to block ads? Too bad, that means the content you want is blocked too.
It’s a silly situation, but there’s little we can do about it. Hey, it sucks for them that legitimate clicks on their products’ ads just sit there without any action, but to force people to “click” the ads to get anywhere? Seriously? It’s like a bad form of capitalistic terrorism. We see pop-up ads everywhere (adopted early on by some of the most dubious businesses on the internet), on many pages there are more advertisements than actual content, the usability of these ad-laden sites is mediocre at best (and confusing), and what’s worse is that people *SHOULD* be afraid to click on advertisements! There’s so much malware and software exploits out there that clicking on the wrong albeit-harmless-enough-looking advertisement can result in the loss of personal information including but not limited to the theft of passwords, account information, real time, and real money as you try to repair the damage that whatever junk has caused.
We can assume security companies are all trying to keep us safe like with Microsoft Security Essentials but as the almighty dollar continues to be easily obtained and the internet continues to provide unscrupulous companies with the possibility of earn tens of thousands of “pennies” per day on click through revenue we’ll continue to be subject to the rules of the people with the money.
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