It serves the victims right for using a broken business model in the first place! I have absolutely zero sympathy for the advertising industry and their increasingly-annoying attempts to bombard me with advertisements for things I neither need nor want.

I have SpamAssassin to filter out most advertising e-mail. On the Web, I use a proxy server as an advertisement blocker. As for the TV, I have Sky Plus; so I can start watching a TV programme late, rewind to the beginning and fast-forward through the adverts.

Get this through your heads, advertising industry: If I want to buy something, I will ask for it. If I didn't ask for it, that means I don't want to buy it. And if I feel a product has been aggressively advertised, I am likely to choose an alternative.

Sounds like click fraud should be encouraged. Anything that hurts people who pester us with ads should be encouraged.

Now where did I leave that LoadRunner licence...

Doesn't it occur to you anti-advert zealots that without advertising revenue websites like El Reg wouldn't be able to employ journalists to provide the 'free' content you come here to read?

Click fraud is aimed primarily at those nice little adverts displayed via your Google and Yahoo! search results. These adverts are not really very intrusive at all, unlike rollover and the likes (dig at ell reg for its nasty ads!)

I have an on-line business and a few hundred extra fraudulent clicks per day via search engines and I would be outa business pretty fast, thankfully this does not happen in my area... However click fraud might actually be doing me a favour in the long run as Google are now testing out new systems where you only pay for results. Sound great to me!

Anyway. Wack a cake in that piehole Mr Stiles ;-)

"Doesn't it occur to you anti-advert zealots that without advertising revenue websites like El Reg wouldn't be able to employ journalists to provide the 'free' content you come here to read? Dave"

It did, but bear in mind that the only people to be badly hit would be those who depend on pay-per-click revenue. I doubt if that includes the likes of Cisco, Microsoft, IBM or HP, who advertise heavily on The Register. (Anyone from El Reg care to confirm?)

Pay per click ads are the most tiresome and irritating of the lot, as they use such aggressive tactics to get you to click on them. They're the online equivalent of door-to-door double-glazing salesmen. The Big Issue sellers of the information superhighway. Scum of the bloody earth.

Advertising has its place, no doubt about that. But right in the user's face is not it.

Pay per click is a clear case of an idea that wasnt completely thought through, by anyone.

Anyone who signs up for such a scheme is incredibly silly. The only people this works for is the guy showing the ad, and the guy who recieves the money.

I mean come on, if you got paid depending on how many times someone clicked something, how many times would you click it?

And its not as if this problem hasnt already been solved, I remember thehungersite used to limit you to one click per day, if you tried it again, it just told you to come back tomorrow.

Pay-per-action (such as a payment per signup or completed sale) is clearly a more sensible solution

"It did, but bear in mind that the only people to be badly hit would be those who depend on pay-per-click revenue. I doubt if that includes the likes of Cisco, Microsoft, IBM or HP, who advertise heavily on The Register. (Anyone from El Reg care to confirm?)"

Perhaps, but those kinds of companies would only pay for advertising on very large sites like El Reg.

Most smaller, more specialist sites run by individuals cannot attract those sorts of sponsors, and depend on things like Adsense to survive.

If you don't like sites with advertising like that, don't visit them.

But if you DO like those kinds of small Adsense-supported sites, then it's the advertising that's paying for your enjoyment, and you shouldn't be knocking it.

"Pay per click ads are the most tiresome and irritating of the lot ... the Big Issue sellers of the information superhighway. Scum of the bloody earth."

You think Big Issue sellers are the scum of the earth? Perhaps you think the Daily Mail is a balanced and intelligent newspaper?

Most of the Big Issue sellers I've bought from have been perfectly polite and friendly, far more so than the braindead shop assistants you get in actual high street stores.

The real big issue sellers always wear an ID badge on their coat or bag, but perhaps you've come across some of the fake sellers who buy one copy, then use it just to beg instead of ever actually selling it.

I personally would rather use a system like the killed-off cybercoin. I would happily pay $.05-$.10 per story on El Reg which would cost me about $4.00 per month (similar to a print magazine, but filled with content I want and no ads.)

A subscription service would be acceptable (just) but is not an option at any of the info sites I go to.

Perhaps someone will find an even better alternative to the models we've seen.

My $.02 worth.

Are there adverts on The Register? They don't make it through my proxy!