As such, even if you are Jesus and raising money for UNICEF, if you are doing it as a “marketer”, you will still be viewed as the scum of the earth until you do a whole lot of explaining. “Robin Hood” is always a tough story to swallow when you’re hearing it from Mr. Hood himself…

There are alternatives. The Amish have their isolated vilages with spartan wooden furniture and oil lamps, me, I prefer sticking to Firefox and AdBlock. In order to support the websites I visit, I do not block text ads that are within the HTML of the page itself (AdBlock Plus does this, I view it as crossing the line into infringement because it makes an edit, rather than a block).

Sometimes I even click the text ads!

Of course, since your industry is completely populated by crooks, thieves, and liars, nobody trusts anyone. Because of this, text-ads served inside the HTML itself are rather rare these days for the simple reason that by default they must be located on the same server as the page being viewed – and you crooks won’t trust each other enough to let that happen. So instead I get flashy banner crap or 2nd gen text ads – slow-loading AJAX-based crap – that will never be speeded up because there’s too much I/O chit-chat with AJAX and the speed of light will never speed up, and none of you will trust each other enough to locate a server a little closer to where it should be either…

As more and more users learn to block ads, clickfraud won’t be your problem anymore. Your problem will be that you never trusted each other enough to not fuck over the very customers you were trying to reach out to in the first place with convoluted multiserver ad-verification schemes that cause all kinds of problems.

THE TECHNOLOGY FOR PROPER TEXT ADS HAS BEEN HERE ALL ALONG: THE ALT TAG OF IMAGES. I really dont CARE how you get paid for using that tag, but know this:

IF YOU RELY ON AN IMAGE, RATHER THAN TEXT, FROM ME, YOU WILL *NEVER* GET PAID, CAUSE I AINT LOADING THAT IMAGE!

Anyways, I appreciate a well-written article and I appologize for my inability to see it outside of the context of the website I found it on. If you are a guest author for adotas.com, I appologize twice… peace.