a glob of nerdishness

It is unfair to discuss the problem of spam without bringing up its archetype. Spam is the barbarian offspring of advertising, itself an uncouth tradition. Marketing, and often with it some advertising, is important to good business. That said, it’s disgusting how prevalent and tasteless advertising has become.

The relevance of marketing

The best advertisements still serve their victim: Hey, maybe you haven’t heard of us, but we do X which might help you Y. But even the “spend time with your kids, don’t start forest fires” advertisements are still distractions from the main course.(1) As far as living goes, is spam really much less relevant to me than the hundreds of other ads I see online everyday?

In a sense, web advertising is highly relevant to my online life. Without it, countless online destinations would only be hurt by my tourism (the previous post explains). Google gets about 90% of its incredible income (note those figures are in thousands of dollars!) from advertisment. It’s hard to imagine the “google.com” domain name becoming a home for squatters. Given the fortune Google has amassed, I don’t doubt they could keep paying their top-notch engineers long past finding alternate revenue sources, but many other domains would be in dire straits if it weren’t for advertisements.

The need for advertising

Web sites do need to pay their expenses. There’s not really a good reason for CLICK THE SCROLLING FLAMING MONKEY!!!, or the weird dancing business guy(2). In case you want your memory refreshed, Jakob Nielsen has listed some other sketchy advertising techniques that are still pretty common nowadays. As he points out, nothing good comes out of making users annoyed. There is, however, certainly a place for paying the bills through corporate sponsorships, intelligently targeted graphical links, and even computer-placed text ads with all their mechanised “Sense”itivity. I just don’t see an enduring economy for so many sites getting into the ad-supported model, to say nothing of the aesthetics in that situation.

Getting away from advertisements

To be honest, it was primarily my aggravation with advertising that led me to start this series. I think the Web, perhaps even the whole Internet, is ripe for an idea that can reduce the motivation for all forms of advertising: everything from the spam kings’ unfeeling e-mail blitzes to Google’s sentient AdWords revenue scheme. In my next post, I hope to finally elucidate such an idea. We’ll be back…

1. Although Wikipedia’s eye-opening article ontelevision ads notes that commercials have all but become an essential part of the television experience. I can hardly stand television, but I understand a great many people do. Hopefully this diatribe doesn’t come across as overly cantankerous to my more experienced readers.
2. Do you get those? I keep seeing job site ads with this white-collar worker who was photographed rolling up his sleeve and in other quasi-professional poses, yet is animated to slowly move his legs as if he were proud that they’re put out of joint.