"Nethics" in web advertising

As always, the internet is the most unregulated or unrestrained venue of unsolicited information and still unprecedentedly, the source of intrusive and irritating advertising.

Pop-ups and spam mails are usually the misdeeds of companies that are into affiliate marketing. These forms of pushy advertising have become common and employed quite ubiquitously without shame to promote even the most popular of brands. You will see lots of them in news and game sites, portals, blogsites, and even social in media.

Shoes, telecom services, hotel, forex, mobile apps, diet pills and a gazillion of other unwanted products, litter the internet. This is not to mention the annoying chat messages you receive on Facebook and unwelcome tagging of product photos of sex enhancers, fake watches, china phones, etc. Coupled with all these emo statuses of feeling this and that of your “friends” you do not even know, you either end up getting sick or having a bad day for just reading their ramblings and the flood of unwanted advertising.

Oh Twitter, all the while you thought that those good looking dames who follow you are interested in your tweets, they turn out to be male poseurs promoting malicious links to a porn site and escort services --and I found them on Linked-in, too!

Spam, popups, and rantings consume not only our time but also aggravate our emotions. Despite all these strong filters, block options in our browsers and account settings, they still proliferate and snoop in our inboxes and newsfeeds. And I think this is partly because website publishers leave everything to their visitors the task of filtering. Many publishers, such as news sites, for example, allow pop-ups that force users to view the ad while you’re immerse reading a good story.

Worse, many of these advertising pests are covertly created with no close buttons (and if ever they have, they are unclickable) so you will have to wait until it closes by itself until you lose track of what you’re reading!  I find them not only invasive., they are dastardly abrasive that I promised to myself to never patronize ads, brands, or websites that engage in such kind of infamous and unethical form of advertising.

While website publishers need ads for revenue, they should not forget that their primary responsibility is to service the needs of their readers which is to deliver information in an unobtrusive manner. Publishers should also screen those companies that advertise in their site. Many ads prey on innocent people like housewives to pay and subscribe into some kind of an internet job that furtively says that they can make a lot of money while working at home only to find out that later that they have been scammed. And I still see them in popular websites.

And for companies that hire the services of web advertising professionals or outfits, they must see to it that they are not paying them handsomely to annoy your customers and to the ruin of your brand and your firm’s reputation.

If netiquette requires us to respond to emails in a timely manner, nethics I call it (portmanteau for net ethics) should govern our actions and behavior when it comes to soliciting business in the internet. Nethics should revisit our perspectives in the way we do internet advertising most specially the way we treat personal information of visitors of our website. Just as you thought that our personal information is safe, think again. I am not comforted by the fact that Google and Yahoo have done a great job for coming up with a spam or bulk mails to keep them from invading our inboxes.  The presence of spam mails indicate that our emails have already gotten into the wrong hands. How these spammers were able to get them, may have something to do with the websites we visit and the misleading advertising they host.

I would like to talk more about nethics next time.

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