If you don't want to pay for a copy of Opera, it's available in an ad-supported version that shows (understandably) banner ads in the upper-right corner. They're really quite inobtrusive - really the only problem I have with them is that I lose a bit of real estate, and I'm the guy who strives to make all toolbars as tiny as possible. But I digress.

I saw an ad a moment ago that has a little grey "X" in the upper-right corner. The X has nothing at all to do with the image, and I wondered a bit as to why it was there before it occurred to me: it's there to trick people into hitting that X instead of the one that actually closes the current tab. A sneaky way of getting a click-through, admittedly.

Which brings me to my point: the people who design these ads don't seem to understand the principles behind advertising. The goal of advertising is not to generate click-throughs; that's just an intermediate step. The ultimate goal is to sell product. And "stealing" clicks through trickery doesn't sell product. It tends to make people angry, and then the company whose product is then displayed will be associated with the feeling of having been "hijacked," which is not a good thing. Now, since internet advertising has already died once, haven't people learned anything?