There seem to be two schools of business; one that tries to beat customers over the head with things, and one that tries to respect the customer as much as poss

There seem to be two schools of business; one that tries to beat customers over the head with things, and one that tries to respect the customer as much as possible. Historically, most web ads seem to have the first view. "Why, of course! All I have to do is treat the visitor like crap: store 75 cookies, throw up new windows, flash some animations, play loud noises, and trick them into clicking on things. Then they'll surely want to shell out cash for my products!" The problem is, after seeing a few of these, I'm not going to spend time weeding out the good from the bad: it's like junk mail, after awhile it's just thrown away, and it doesn't even matter anymore if there might be a hidden gem. I can only assume that a scam is being pulled: that there are ad managers who create annoying systems to meet artificial quotas, and then show their employers how many "millions of clicks or page views" they received. That way, they can demand huge sums of money for all the "exposure"; in reality, I'd be surprised if the ads do much good. If a site is "dying", it's not because visitors block ads, it's because companies are falling for the scam and paying advertisers who are essentially being offensive and misleading about their numbers. Here are examples of effective ads: - Hulu, because they made reasonable compromises to respect visitors. For example, they have far fewer commercials than an equivalent TV show, and an ad is often displayed "up front" to minimize interruptions later. - Google, because they make plain text ads that stay out of the way. Not irritating? Good, now I'll actually read it.