Tuesday, October 27, 2009

ads

I was browsing the Web for Information. There it was, the front page. An annoyingly blinking red-on-green banner was announcing that I am the 999999th visitor and it was congratulating me. I would've smiled if it weren't blinking red-green/green-red. Of course I couldn't have been the 1e6-1th visitor because (a) that's too improbable and (b) that site claims to have one million visitors, yeah right! So I scroll down, trying to ignore the ad, and I see this other banner, a vertical one this time. This one is blinking red/blue. It's saying that I'm the 10000th visitor, but this time, "this is no joke!". This time I laugh. At least this number was plausible, visitor-count-wise. Of course it would've been much cooler to be the 999999th visitor because (a) the number is almost 100 times bigger and (b) it's not one million, it's one million minus one (that's being creative!). But sadly, the lesser number was more probable, and besides, that wasn't a joke. Deciding that I had to settle for ten thousand, I scroll down and laugh again when another red-green/green-red banner (this time neither horizontal nor vertical, but squareish) informs me that I'm the 999999th visitor after all! OK, now I'm confused.
I fire up a new browser but this time under the guest user so that my files would stand a lesser chance of being trashed by malware. Wow, now I'm suddenly the 12796869939th visitor! That site must have a lot of traffic, given that I was at most the 999999th about 10 minutes ago. The "this is no joke" banner disagrees by a much smaller percentage this time, indicating 12769870797. The square one says 12796871217, but there's a twist: I'm the 12796bla-blath visitor to see "this lucky banner", so maybe there are other sites showing the same banner and there goes my "not enough visitors visiting this crap" argument down the toilet. The small difference could even be explained by the different times my browser queried the ad server for the three banners while loading the crap. [must be a very big server.] I hit Refresh and lo and behold, I'm either the 999999th or the 10000th visitor again. This clearly can't be, because I already visited the site before as both the 999999th and the 10000th, under a different identity.

So I hold my breath and click the first banner.

It asks for my name, address, and e-mail address. There you go. Move along, nothing to see here, and quit clicking stupid adverts and quit encouraging spammers by opening their e-mails and clicking on their links and buying their cockpills, because if you encourage spammers and spammers send me spam, then you're indirectly to blame. The fuck!