I added the thankyou.org icon to the left sidebar to help bring attention to the growing animosity towards ads and clicking on them. Most advertisers will instantly remove or ban you from their products for fraudulent use of their systems. However, for a website owner/blogger that pays for their own hosting how do you show support for them and their time? Do you have an adblocker installed in your browser? Well if you do that's your prerogative but think about the cost that is incurred from the little people in this bad economy just trying to scrape by.
I don't ask my site visitors to click on any ads they may see but if you feel like supporting us, your assistance and understanding is greatly appreciated. Click on the thankyou.org icon on the left for a more advanced understanding of what I am trying to say.
Below is a writeup explaining their cause as well.
The more people ignore online ads, they become more annoying, and we tend to ignore them even more. But then, without clicks on ads, nothing pays for all this free content and the ads have to become even more annoying to grab attention. This vicious cycle has two negative effects on the web. First, with rising volume of click fraud and diminishing trust by online advertisers, the payment per click (PPC) is decreasing and website monetization is becoming more and more difficult. This means that providing free content, free forums, and free online communities, becomes more and more difficult with the lack of revenues to cover the costs. On the long term, high quality content and services on the Internet may no longer be free.
The second negative effect of the ignore-the-ads trend is that the ads become much more annoying. The advertisers are looking for ways to grab the attention of potential customers, and if when don’t look at their banners, they make them animated; when we ignore those as well, they make them jump around the site; and when we disregard even those jumping ones, they practically hide the website with full page ads. This is a second vicious cycle. The ads will grow to be noisy, and then we will be forced to opt into paid-for premium services free of ads. Sounds familiar? It’s because we’ve seen it all before several times, with each new medium, and the most prominent example – we pay extra for high end cable TV because we ran away from all the commercial breaks on the regular channels, and these ads couldn’t sponsor high quality shows anyway.
When you click on an online ad with sincere interest, you play a part in the online finical structure. You pay with your attention. Since people’s attention is one of the most precious aspects of modern life, the attention translates into real money through the advertising budgets. It’s like photosynthesis where light is turned into energy and eventually into plants, our attention is being turned into money, which finances websites and turns into free content and online services.
When you click on an online ad with sincere interest, you actually support the freedom of the web, promote free content and cleaner online environment. You say thank you with a click.
The Thank You Click Organization is entirely voluntary and you are invited to tell about it to your friends, post about it in your blog and spread the word.
