I r muzikal n delishus

1spam n. \ˈspam\  unsolicited usually commercial e-mail sent to a large number of addresses

Millions of dollars are spent every year by companies and individuals combating spam. Spam filters, email systems with integrated spam management, reviewing spam emails for real emails that got inappropriately flagged, storing spam, deleting spam, reporting spam, it all adds up.

There are still websites and advertisers who rely on pop-up ads for revenue and click-throughs. Since every major browser now suppresses these, and for years we have at least had add-ons and 3rd-party apps to do it, it seems counter-intuitive for a company to advertise this way.

In both cases, an advertiser is hawking goods or services in a way that is obnoxiously intrusive to the end consumer. This isn’t necessarily new, even as far back as 1959 there were clearly critics of television advertising, but this somehow seems more offensive. In the case of television, you are getting a fairly expensive product in exchange for your watching advertising. These days, if you want to avoid the ads you can pay more, as it should be. In the case of spam and popups, there is an additional element of outright malice. Never has a television ad, even if it did involve sexual innuendo, been blatantly destructive to the television, the cable box, or the viewer.

In the end, in a survey of “every person I have ever met ever, for real, in my whole life,” it was revealed that everyone openly and unabashedly despises both spam and pop-up ads. The most ironic part of the whole spam / pop-up controversy is this:

They work. (Yale even said so.) If 0 people clicked on the links in the messages, if 0 people saw the banner and said, “OMGWTF!! IHTHT!!” There would be no spam. It would end. Not immediately, but it would decline abruptly. The solution isn’t lawsuits, or government action, it’s each and every end user, every consumer, every man, woman, child, and elderly person on the internet NOT clicking the virus, the ad, the porn.

0 people click, 0 companies pay, 0 companies make money off of spam and pop-ups, 0 spam messages and pop-up ads exist. By maintaining a base-level of plankton-esque internet users to blindly click everything that pops up, the bottom-feeders (who in this example fall ABOVE the clickers) are able to keep making money, and the cycle continues.

Break the cycle. Talk to your mother, grandmother, grandfather, nieces and nephews about clicking stupid things on the interwebs box. It starts with you. And them. And the entire human race.