I am pretty new to the marketing industry, and yea it really is full of people pulling iffy bulls*** to get the sales, but when it comes to the techniques, I have been recently wondering if I've been considering it from the wrong angle the whole time...
Everyone who is here hates seeing these ads, and honestly, we really wish we wouldn't have to pay the CPM to show the ads to you! But the problem is, a lot of people do want to see these ads. We are connecting people who want something with the people who have that to offer. If they were like you and really didn't want the product, they wouldn't have clicked on the ad. If all they wanted was the boobies.... they wouldn't have paid for the membership to Evony... they would have gone to a porn site instead.
Personally, I routinely click on ads on Slashdot to see what the different products are about. Sometimes I've seen cool stuff. That's the real point of advertising.
Does AdBlock actually prevent the ads from loading initially or does it just load and hide them?? I wish there was some easy way to set it up so that people who will never make a conversion anyway could just opt-out of the whole process so we wouldn't have to bother you and you could have a better experience.
Overall, all I'm saying is that the industry as a whole is still learning how to adapt. The goal is sales to people who want it, or convincing people they want it. Subterfuge in this is very wrong and I won't condone it, but this technology is actually showing you something that you were obviously interested in at one point. As advertisers find out that it creeps some people out, they'll figure out ways to make it less creepy so we can get the most people to remember "hey, I wanted that" without scaring everyone else off.