I have this friend.....I dunno, let’s say his name is.....Bart. Now Bart is a smart guy, but when he bought his first computer a while back, he wasn’t what I would call ‘internet savvy’. Don’t get me wrong, he could use the computer and internet, he could check his emails, he could browse websites, selling and buying stuff online. All the sorts of things that you would expect a home computer to be used for, it was.

He’d had the computer for a few months, and it was while were having a chat about ordinary guy stuff, beer and chicks mostly, we got onto the topic of the current climate of internet advertising and it’s regulatory agencies.
Now during this Bart mentioned having been told he had won some money because he was the 1 millionth visitor to a website. Being not so much ‘internet savvy’, he clicked the link, and saw it was really just an advert, and there was no winnings. Being the smart guy he is, he actually read the material first before signing up, he realised it was designed so he could become their little spam trap, they’d flood him with offers that he didn’t really want, and in return, he’ll get pretty much bugger all in return. That is the joy that is FreeLotto.com

But the point of our conversation wasn’t based on the fact that a misleading advert was there, but the website it was on. It was a website that based on it's content he felt it was trustworthy, including their advertisements. But in truth, a lot of these website operators don’t moderate their adverts, some I imagine don’t even check what the ads are for. It’s very time consuming for them to do this.
I recall about a year earlier, I as browsing a site I enjoyed, mostly parody articles, a bit of light humour, I saw an advert for a product I knew was very dodgy and so I thought I’d email the owner of the website and let him know, as he would probably want to remove the adverts for this product. His reply.

‘I’d like to, I just don’t have time, I’d hope the people who visit my site aren’t that stupid’

It wasn't the reply I thought I would get, but I understood his point. Operating and administering a website can take a great deal of effort. If he's being paid only for the placement of the advert, then the actual content can be irrelevant to him. Unfortunately it comes at a cost to the person browsing.
However it seems that there is an irony that whilst some website owners are relying on these adverts to generate an income for them, they aren’t taking the time to ensure the adverts they have are for products or services that actually have value. Some website owners take it further still and get upset that many people block their ads, using useful tools like AdblockPlus, which is a Firefox plugin to block advertising content.

Right now, very few are taking proper responsibility for the content of adverts, whether they are the website owner or the distributor of adverts, and the end result is that you simply cannot trust internet advertising. Below are some examples I took, and I should add, I took these from mainstream media sites, websites most of us would assume we can trust. So my advice.....my really strong advice, the same advice I gave to Bart, is that unless you know the product or brand already, and are familiar with the service, then don’t click it. You could take it further, and if you don’t mind changing browsers, get yourself a copy of Firefox, get yourself a copy of AdblockPlus, start blocking ads, and begin to enjoy again what’s good about the internets. It won't do it right out of the box, so you need to learn how to block different advertising networks, but once you get the hang of that you can really take control over the quality of adverts you see.

Some may feel that this is somehow stealing, and that we shouldn't have the right to alter or restrict website content, but so long as the advertising networks continue to mislead us, I think it's an entirely acceptable approach to physically block adverts we would only mentally block out anyway.

Here are the advert examples, click on the image to see them in all their glory.