Pay-Per-Click Speculation Market Soaring

Rob writes "Computer Business Review is reporting that the number of web sites being opened purely to publish pay-per-click advertising links from the likes of Google and Yahoo is rocketing, according to VeriSign, which runs the .com and .net domain names." From the article: "Sclavos said that the company will change the way it reports the size of its domain name business, in terms of active registrations, because of the amount of speculation going on. It will reduce the size of the reported registrations by about 2%, he said. 'Names are being bought and then tested against traffic analyzers...The ones that can generate more than the $6 or $7 [registration] fee per year are kept, the other ones are returned within the five day grace period.'"

Comments

Obvious solution

[ajs318]

The obvious solution is to ban all advertising from the Internet.

Sooner or later though, people are going to stop clicking on advertisements. Basically it's a pyramid scheme; and only the people on the top levels of the pyramid make any money. When enough people realise what is going on, the pyramid collapses.

My new Linux distribution, when I am ready to launch it, will include an advert-blocking proxy with regular automatic updates -- so you hopefully will never even get to see an advertisement. One desktop environment {WindowMaker}, one graphical toolkit {GTK}, one browser {Konqueror}, one office suite {Abiword and Gnumeric}, one mail client {Evolution}. A sendmail/procmail/spamassassin stack and an Apache2 server so you can practice writing your own CGI scripts. And of course, the ability to click a link and download the source code for a package and its dependencies, then compile it.