> > 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.
>
> Perhaps they just want to compile a list of live email addresses to sell to other spammers. To them, any click is a good click, because it gives them your address.

This is actually not true. It's not normally possible for a remote web site to get your email address unless you give it to them. What they CAN get is what browser you use and what IP address you come from. IP address *might* be sufficient to track you down, but if you're a regular home user logged in through a home-user Internet Service Provider, it's only good enough to narrow you down to which ISP you use. Either way, that still doesn't narrow you down to an email address.