(Examiner)  Longtime readers of venerable pubs such as Time mag must worry about whether their fragile online ad offerings will sustain their rollover from print to pixels. We do fear for the health of our free reads, when it seems that they are being over-run with vermin of the seediest sort.

Internet advertising is a rough-and-tumble game, and the amount of money at stake is fundamental to all of the players involved. PPC or “Pay Per Click” ads are the engine of publishing right now, and like any font of cash flow they are attracting the heavyweights and sleazy insiders we used to associate with pool halls, chewed cigars and bad boxing movies.

Despite its august reputation, you can probably find an ad for whiter teeth! or a flatter belly! in any recent issue of Time, and in a hundred other respected publications, each identical and all working on the same principle. They offer an attractive and inexpensive deal or service, with the intent of signing you up for unwanted other products, memberships, assessing you fees, and never, ever answering their phone when the magic unravels. Not to mention that they have tarnished much of your privacy with your signup.

These are classical “bait and click” ads that will always be with us, are semi-legal and disreputable, yes, but most adults see right through them and are not harmed by them, anymore than a hawker or carnie at the state fair is anything more than a colorful, if lamentable figure.

Is this a Private Scam, or..?

What is at issue with these advertisements is just who is profiting from them, and who might be hurt by their presence. We all know that there are dangers in dealing with hucksters, and we avoid them, but what is more interesting with PPC is who’s zooming who.

Google has been accused of being complicit in this chicanery because it gets paid regardless, for presenting these ads, be they good or evil. The scammers must be making a profit from the more impressionable among us–we do know that, or the ads would soon be gone. Clearly the website owners or publishers are doing OK by this game. As in Vegas, the suckers will always be with us too.

There is one more party involved, however, and that is the visitor to these websites. Should he or she care that such practices threaten to raise Net advertising costs to untenable heights? Need they cringe before, or show any interest in the spy-vs-spy contest going on behind the scenes, to stamp out fraudulent ads and bogus click counts? Not at all.

Always Leave a Tip

The patrons and visitors to these websites can participate gladly in this carnival through simply clicking on the offensive ads. By looking for particularly slimy offers and scams, and then banging through the link, they can air once more these adulatory orations that sing the praises of ripped abs in two weeks, and the babes that must follow.

And just as abruptly the reader can then move on to the next site, unscathed, as intended. Thanks for providing us with a tip jar, Google!

Stepping on the scam artists, while supporting good publications and writers, is a most fitting finale to a page well taken. No doubt they’ll figure it out someday– in the meantime enjoy the issue!