If pop-ups and spam are so annoying, why do they still exist?

It's a question we've all asked ourselves. Based on conversational research we've all done, nobody likes ads and nobody clicks on them. It turns out that about 6% of the online population clicks on ads, and most of them are young lower class men who primarily click through to gambling, auction and career sites.

The interesting thing: According to this research, click-throughs do not necessarily mean increased revenue. This is curious, because if true, why would sites and companies continue to advertise online if click-throughs don't translate to money. They may not be paying on a per-click basis, however, but based on what people purchase.

For example, if you have ads on your blog to Amazon. Com, you only get paid when someone clicks through and purchases a product, not just when they click. The advertising industry seems to be catching onto all this.

However, just like television, the Internet is an industry based on advertising and it's something we all just have to live with. If there was really no money to be made online, all the advertisers would disappear and we probably wouldn't have such great sites like Google, Hulu or MTV Music to visit.

They exist because they work and because there is an escalation between advertisers and users on the internet (as well as TV and radio). Users want free content without ads, but there is no way to provide that with the exception of state run projects like the BBC and PBS (which are paid for by tax dollars). However, there are many example of advertising models online that work very well.

When ads are targeted and placed alongside similar content they do well. For example, car ads on autoblog.com are sometimes looked at as *content* by the user. If you're reading autoblog and you see an advertisement about the new hybrid Lexus you might want to click on it and get more information.

Search, however, is the ultimate synergy of advertising and content. Many of the folks who come up in the top 20 results are also in the advertising. In fact, sometimes you'll see the #1-3 advertisements are similar to the #1-3 organic results.

Now, the cost of sending spam is so low for the individual sending it they don't consider the cost of the people getting it. Spammers thing "gee I can send one million spam emails in five minutes and make $100.. I'll do that every day! " They never considered the cost of all that storage, bandwidth and 1m people having to see and delete the message.

Many have considered a system for email online where you have to pay .01 or .001 to send an email to someone. Something nominal, but enough to cost the spammer a lot of money. Of course if you did that then a non-profit with 10m emails on it's list would have to shut down, and an email newsletter like my Jason's List would cost me $100 to send every time and I would have to stop doing it.

Complicated issues. That being said all the major browsers are now blocking popups by default, and email programs are getting better are putting stuff in spam folders. Add to that the recent cases in spammers going to jail and that means it's not really that bad.

Because they have a net-positive cash flow: they generate more revenue than they cost to maintain. And also because we are using technology that is designed for a non-predatorial internet. Our email technology operates on the basis that we want to get any email that someone wants to send to us, when it should operate on the basis that we want to choose those people from whom we wish to receive email.

Until we move away from this technology, we will always have a spam problem, and we will continue to waste time and money filtering out spam. On a practical level, there's not much you can do right now about spam, but if you are still using Internet Explorer I'd strongly encourage you to switch to Firefox. Firefox is configurable to eliminate most pop-up ads, and there are extensions that you can install that perform custom filtration if you want even more control.

Ultimately, though, if you keep going to sites that show pop-up ads, they will continue to show them, so the best way to vote is with your feet: if a site has pop-ups, don't go there a second time.

Popups are no doubt annoying but its a form of advertising that doesn't take your webpage space and gets your attention for sure. So the site owners get a healthy revenue from popups. People make lot of business from popups and spam that is why they exist.

But in a recent move by US by shutting down the scareware softwares news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7779223.stm I think the spammers will have a tough time in future.

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.