Dangerous Click: Why You Shouldn't Click Those Banner Ads

Have you ever been browsing a website and constantly been distracted by the bright flashing ad on the side of the page. Isn't is very annoying when you are trying to read an article, but there is one of those banner ads right next to the text. "No," you think to yourself, "I shouldn't click this". It looks so tempting. It says you are the 1,000,000,000 visitor and you are a big winner!! What have you won??? You can stand it anymore so you decide to just click it. What harm could it do? A lot; but you don't know this so you continue on filling out all you information (Name, email, address, maybe even a credit card number). The next day you check you email, anxious to see if you've received your prize, but you haven't. You just have 200 spam emails. This is the danger of clicking on those ads. This article will talk about the other dangers of banner ads and ways to prevent yourself from clicking them. Read More...

Now you panic: Where did all those spam emails come from?? The next day you get your credit card statement: there are a bunch of charges you didn't authorize. You might even be getting weird mail in your mailbox from some obscure company. Then you remember that ad you clicked. No, it couldn't have been that. Well in fact it was, and by entering your information you will have some serious damage control to do. There is even things that you can fix.

So what do you do? The obvious answer would be to not enter information for those ads, or even click them for that matter. By clicking them you are probably adding spyware to you computer by the form of cookies. Cookies are little files, stored on your computer, that websites use to store login information (Encrypted of course), language, and other information. These uses of cookies are good, but some websites use them for bad. This is why in my Optomize You Computer Article, I suggest using CCleaner to cleanup your cookies or set a setting in your browser to make sure you cookies for third party sites are deleted after your browser closes. To stop the spam you can try some of the techniques mentioned in my Spam Prevention Article, but this will not stop the mail in your mailbox. If you have credit card problems, contact you card company immediately. Other than that there is not much you can do except for wish you wouldn't have clicked the ad.

There are ways to prevent you banner ad clicking. Most of the banner ads are scams, so if you can simply ignore them, you are good. Some people are tempted by their offers (Don't, their a hoax), but there is a solution. The first part of the solution is to get Firefox. I always recommend Firefox over Internet Explorer or any other browser. It is nine times faster then IE and (the new one, 3.1) is three times faster then the previous version. Once you have Firefox, download a tool called Adblock Plus. After restarting Firefox you should get a window asking you what filter to use. Pick the appropriate on (EasyList for the USA) and click OK. You can edit the filters and other features by going to Tools>Adblock Plus. This tools blocks almost all flash and picture ads, but still allows other flash content such as flash games or websites. This is a great tool and I highly recommend it. If you are really paranoid, you can add all the filters just to be safe (Hey, why not). This will assure that you will never click that ad again. And if you ever see one, you can click the block button next to the content to block it.

This information should be enough to convince you not to click on ads, and even if you did, I hope it aided you in minimizing the damage. Like I said before, the best way to avoid them, is to simply not click!