Unwanted emails, especially those whose goal is to defraud, are clearly spam. However, consumers' growing intolerance for anything that smacks of unsolicited and unwanted advertising is starting to be viewed in a similar light—even if it is not officially considered spam.
The Online Shopper's Dilemma
55% of online consumers who have shopped in the past 90 days say that when making a digital purchase of under $25 they are concerned that the site will start sending them junk e-mail. This percentage is closely followed by the proportion who cited a concern that their personal information will be sold to other merchants (54%), according to a PaymentOne survey conducted by Javelin Strategy & Research.
Blocking Acceptable AdsLast month when Adblock Plus introduced its concept of "acceptable ad", some of the users went ballistic. The plug-in is among the most popular for Firefox because of its blanket mission of blocking all ads.
Acceptable ads are a default setting on the plug-in, referring to inoffensive ads that are presented to viewers. Users can opt out if they choose. Adblock Plus met with furious resistance, when it rolled out the change, the New York Times reports.
The concept calls for web sites to agree to publish ads that meet Adblock Plus' white list of standards—no formats, for example, that slow down a page's load time. It is, as the Times said, a contractual solution, not a technical one.
Meanwhile Comment Spam Flourishes
The Acceptable Ads appears to have survived the protests. However, such furor has rarely erupted over a separate—and very clear cut—form of spam: comment spam. Leaving a comment with a link to a spammer's site on a popular blog is an easy way to get your site out in front of thousands of readers, All Spammed Up writes in this blog post.
"By flooding the blogosphere, this could lead to hundreds of thousands of Internet surfers seeing a spammer’s 'ad' every day," it said. "Considering the fact that certain keywords are nearly impossible to rank well in Google due to extreme competition, gaining traffic from links that are embedded in blog comments is one of the few remaining methods of free Internet marketing."
