Is it moral to click on web ads over curiosity?

[jack]

Is it moral to click on web ads over curiosity? OK, it matters very little. But what is right? It's most honest to, if you see the link, click on it. However if you just want to laugh at their name, if it's a click-through ad, you're costing them money. Would it be better if only people interested clicked through, and you copied the address manually? On the other hand, presumably they want as many people as possible to see their web site, so you should click to show their ad did in fact interest you. I guess it depends which half of the process they're working on -- is their website a good sell but they want more people to see it, or do lots of people see it but they want more people who are actually interested?

This musing occurred to me after seeing some really quite amusing entitled google ads:

* "Afgan Poetry"
* "Join the Fake Society" ["The society for societies" No idea what it actually is, though]
* "Six Thinking Hats Course" [Depressingly, some sort of business awareness technique]
* "How to kiss a girl"
* "101 Cookbooks, a Twist on Guacamole."
* "Does 1+1=3?"
* "The atheist's riddle: cosmicfingerprints.com" [The riddle is: DNA is a language. All (other) languages are invented by a Mind. Then why isn't DNA invented by a mind?]
* "MCSE Boot Camp £3995."
* "2,000 DVDs for only 35p." That's a pretty good deal, even just for filler. Imagine, for 35p, you could wallpaper your room.
* "Emo goths -- Date emo goths" [Seriously wtf?]
* "Female Cougars: www.DateACougar.com" [Seriously, what the fucking fuck? A closer examination, however, reveals that cougars are a sort of woman. In fact, both this and the previous one look very suspicious, more like a front page than a site really for goths.]

Comments

[pizza.maircrosoft.com (from livejournal.com)]

care to tell us what the searches / emails that threw up dateacougar.com were?

my latest clickthrough was these things though: http://www.scottishwoodland.com/
I'm sort of drooling...

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I've no idea. There was nothing recent that was obviously the cause. I guess an email mentioning "dating" was probably one cause, but I don't know what keywords would cause "cougar" -- I guessed there were many such fill-in-the-blank websites promoted fairly indiscriminately, although the goth one made me think it was somewhat targeted. Either there was a keyword I used coincidentally, or the subject of the dating was just random, I'd guess.