CircleID

Let's face it.  The internet is one big AD.

How many people out there really put up a website simply to provide information for the sake of providing information?  I'm sorry, but the genie was let out of the bottle when the very first banner ad appeared and the first affiliate paycheck was issued.

In some places in this world $5 a day is one heck of a good salary.  So of course many are going to jump on the bandwagon and try to make a buck or two.

Sure, there are a few sites out there that are truly just informational.  But I stress the word 'few'.  Everyone else is just trying to make a living.  I know, a bunch of bloggers are going to jump on me in a minute and tell me how philanthropic they are and how they are just providing content for the sake of making the internet a better place, but even half of those people will have some kind of money making mechanism installed on their blog.

I do agree that the internet has become cluttered with ads, but good luck putting that genie back in the bottle.

I'm all for making money for the website you are operating. I have no problem with a bsuiness making a fair profit at all.

I have a problem with people who do not offer anything content-wise skimming of the whole adnonsense thing to where it's difficult to find what you are looking for these days.

As you stated in your original article, if Adsense, YPN and the other big contextual ad companies would actually police the sites like they say they do in their TOS, there would be a lot less junk.  I do agree that there should be actual content in order to be able to use the ads.

But Adsense and the rest are just big greedy corporations.  If they get a complaint about Joe Blow from Kokomo having a website breaking their TOS, Joe's site is going to be down by the end of the week.

But if they get a complaint about the MILLIONS of domains that they have parked with Adsense on them they are going to turn a blind eye.  Why?  CASH!  Millions and millions of dollars are made from the parked domains, Joe from Kokomo only makes Adsense a few bucks a month, so Joe is history, The parked domains get to continue to break the Adsense TOS because of the jillions of dollars they generate.

There is a thread at webpro world that is related to this about the way Yahoo Publisher is not policing their own ToS either. http://www.webproworld.com/viewtopic.php?t=63887 is the thread where it is explained further.

It is too easy to label Google and Yahoo "big greedy corporations" and just feed into the common hype about how big companies don't care to be ethically and socially responsible.

In the case of ghost content, if Google and Yahoo do "nothing", over time the value of their ad networks and their own value proposition will reduce.

In the late 90's the equivalent of this was "affiliate networks" that simply existed to route normal orders using affiliate links.  Over time though, program managers got savvy and now you don't hear much hue and cry about major affiliate fraud anymore.

History repeats itself.

I hope you are right Ram. But about the big greedy corporation thing, think walmart.

Not policing their tos is doing more than hurting their program, it's hurting the Internet in general.

You can hardly do research on the web anymore without finding garbage sites getting top 10 listings in google for the search terms.

I got tired of sorting through the garbage and no longer "google it" to find what I want.

I hope that in a couple of years we will be talking about google the way we now talk fondly of Veronica.

Chris, I think corporate economic interests push to make folks like Google stay on their toes - after all, if users like you and me stop Googling, they're going to lose their market cap.

Veronica was cool, but it didn't have to make money!

Yeah I do miss the gophers! And you are right, the users will migrate and from what I read in forums and I'm not talking about techie or webmaster forums, many people are moving toward MSN, ASK, and others.

Never thought I'd be rooting for Microsoft to be moving up but google needs some stiff competition.