> Well, that's some relief, but I still wonder why they resort to tricks to get a click from you.

I think the mentality is, if they can get you to their home page, you'll take the time to explore and possibly make use of their services. I can tell you from the experiences I've had running advertising on RinkWorks that "click-throughs" are the all-important statistic, even for campaigns that don't pay on a per-click basis. Both the advertisers and the ad broker agency (the middle-man between me and the advertisers) put a lot of emphasis on click-through rates but, at least not that I've seen, almost none on what happens after the click.

I have to agree with the sentiments expressed earlier that this is sort of silly. Generating a click-through by falsely representing what the advertiser is all about can't be a great way to generate traffic. The people who might really be interested in the services may never get there, and the people that do get there may not be interested.

But who knows. Marketers spend a lot of money on researching what advertising does and doesn't work, because there's a lot of money to be made. With that much money on the line, I can't imagine marketers would stay deluded on something so seemingly obvious for long. Maybe the initial click-through really is the critical step and getting the attention of as many people as possible somehow works out to be more profitable than merely getting the attention of the most interested. It's a bizarre world.