Web advertisements encourage low quality sites and criminal actions (15% is Click Fraud).

Most content on the internet is very good, useful, original, funny, educational and so on.

Low quality content

But there are websites that exist for only one reason: Generate cash with advertisements. These websites content generally sucks and they appear high in Search Engine Result pages. Generally they annoy web visitors that wants to complete a simple task: Get information, not ad spam.

These websites place some non-content on pages and further pollute the available space with advertisements, sit there and wait for clicks.

In general content and ideas are copied from other sites and don't even try too hard to disguise that.

• How many articles I can find about 'good' blogging tips.
• How many articles I read about winning SEO tactics (myths).
• How many forums topics have been copied.
• The number of sites with cheap hotels or flights.
• Even worse, the number of pages that are only filled with google ads,
• You will find plenty of other examples when searching on the most popular search terms.

These pages are often filled with ads for more than 60% of the available real estate (excluding the links to other non content)

Criminal intentions

Because there is money (pretty easy money) involved with advertisements, bad guys develop strategies to take their illegal share of it. That is the reason why many malware programs exists and hacking of sites and browser occurs.

Industry Click Fraud Rate at 15.3 Percent for Q4 2009

The business models of many advertisement selling companies encourage bad people to commit fraud on the internet. However Google does it's best to stop click fraud, it can do better. The problem is that the fraud will not directly cost Google their revenue. (However Google does refund the advertiser when fraud has been detected.)

• Malafide adware companies are interested in loading malware on your computer. That malware will deliver you their ads you otherwise would not have received, increasing their click through ratio.
• Another strategy is delivering advertisemsnts from homepages you don't even visit, increasing the revenue of the owners of that site.
• There are tricks circulating in loading tools (or simple javascript) that click on ads. It will look like you clicked on those ads.
• A very dirty technique: Advertisements of a business competitor are being clicked, until the advertisement budget is reached (most campaigns work this way). In this scenario, the competitor has to pay for clicks that in no way leaded to any conversion and the budget limit has reached meaning that no more ads are being displayed to regular web visitors.

What can we do?

I don't know.... Maybe I see it all wrong and are advertisements the enablers of the modern internet?

Anyway, I believe it is not natural or normal that a website should contain adds. That is why I promote the anti adverstising agency (although not really web related, but I agree with them) and I display the ad-free blog logo on my blog.

A few tips for google:

• DECREASE THE PAGERANK OF AD SPAMMING WEBSITES. Put a ranking mechanism on page rank calculations, the higher the percentage of ads on a page, the lower the pagerank.
• Change the business model to a model where only is paid when a click leads to a sale. This will not completely remove fraudulent behavior, but remove some opportunities.

Oohh...Ouch! Google sells ads?