europeforvisitors - 4:08 pm on Mar 19, 2006 (gmt 0)

Interesting...direct mail and telemarketing still work...That's why you still receive junk mail. That's why you receive spam...it works.

The Internet is different from the offline world, though: Costs are far lower, which means there's no economic incentive to exercise self-control. A junk mailer can send out millions of untargeted e-mails for practically nothing (which is why I get invitations to metallurgy conferences in former Soviet republics whose names I can't spell), and a made-for-AdSense spammer can vomit millions of computer-generated pages onto the Web without having to think twice.

Since this is the AdSense forum, let's leave e-mail and other forms of Internet spam out of the discussion and focus on Web advertising (specifically excessive AdSense advertising and MFA sites). Regulation isn't going to solve those problems; the solutions must occur on three fronts:

1) At the user end. (Ad filters, better-educated users).

2) At the search engines. (Better differentiation between real sites and MFA sites; more aggressive filtering of questionable pages.)

3) At the ad networks. (More aggressive policing of MFA sites by Google, for example.)

I can see two measures that could prove very popular with users and could provide an incentive for site owners and ad networks to exercise self-restraint:

1) More widespread use of ad filters. For example, Firefox could offer ad blocking, not just popup filtering, possibly with different levels of filtering (as described under point 2 below).

2) Search-engine controls that would work like spam filters, allowing users to specify anything from "unfiltered results" to "block all commercial sites or sites with advertising." After a bit of experimentation, even mildly Web-savvy users would find what levels of filtering were appropriate for them, and--over time--owners of Web sites would learn to either practice self-restraint or settle for a much smaller chunk of the Web audience.