I get lots of offers of "whitepapers" on how to manage my nonexistent IT department to help maximize the profits of my business, which is also a complete hallucination in the minds (or corrupt databases) of those who keep sending the offers.

These whitepapers are simply blatent advertisements for whatever program is being pimped by the people who push them, but they do sometimes hint at interesting information, and once in a while I look at one.

A recent trend is for claims that some data managers allow advertisers to pay only for, or to pay more for, "qualified clicks." Automated "click analysers" check on whether the person who clicks remains at the target site for a specific minimum time, or sometimes may log only those who "click at the site" to show an actual interest. An apparently popular "selectiveness" is to pay a minimum amount for any click, but to pay a little more for the lingerers or for those who are clicking on the page during visits.

It appears that there are still sufficient advertisers who just pay the same for every click to justify satisfying fairly indiscriminate curiosities, and obvously if there's a choice about how to get to something, getting there from here is quite helpful.

Fortunately there sometimes is a way to improve the choices.

Several of us have noticed that after we've "Googled" for something, ads for similar stuff often appear in our browsers here for a while. Google is very good at following you and putting the "tailored ads" they manage in front of you wherever you go. Some cookie blockers can hinder their ability to do this, but without paranoid settings it seems to persist for many of us.

Google for what you're interested in first (especially when you might be looking for something to buy). Other search engines may do the same, but it's most noticeable here with Google? Then you may get links you can click on here that are at least vaguely related to what you were interested in. (Even a link that you looked at when it came up in the search may show something different about the people who put up the ads when you click in from a different place.) It's impossible to say which ones might change the amount the 'cat will earn, but it might possibly give you more interesting reading (and you might find something useful that didn't come up in the search results).

John