You are advertising Skylux on your site and yet the reviews of Syklux are saying its a travel scam site.

You are advertising Skylux on your site and yet the reviews of Syklux are saying its a travel scam site. Have you verified that they are a legitimate travel company?

Great question.

Yep, great pick

Interesting issue.  Their website has a street address of:  268 Bush Street # 4229, San Francisco, which is an impressive looking building in central downtown San Francisco.  However, like a number of similar businesses they are probably just a broker of frequent flyer points and awards.  Reviews of them from some travellers are excellent, whilst others say they offer no service in case of problems, the worst problem being that the airline refuses to honor the flight when checking in.  The best advice seems to be "It is generally best to avoid using such businesses".

They may be a travel company, but whether they are a licenced travel agent in the US is another matter.

As to why Aust Business Traveller is advertising Skylux, it may be part of a package of ads over which they have no control of the specific content, a common problem for website owners.

AFAIK the advertising on AusBT is provided by Google. So AusBT wouldn't be involved in the selection of the particular companies advertised. I believe Alpha Flight Guru was advertised before (a notorious site selling redemption seats in J/F at a discount).

madge & Phil,

Is it good enough to say Google controls it and we do not have a say?

Doesn't association equally tarnish our reputation?

There are ads on the internet??

Why yes, they decided to combine ads and the all new internet to make internet ads. Fascinating, isn't it?

Sorry, my joke was to express surprise that there's anyone out there still not using AdBlock. Seriously folks, it takes about half a minute to install and improves your internet experience a zillionfold.

If only it could stop those auto-playing videos on the Fairfax "news" sites...

Hugo, don't you think it's a bit cheap that you read AusBT for all the information here but use AdBlock to deny AusBT some of the revenue from advertising, revenue which pays their wages and keeps the site running?

Seems a bit unfair - people regularly go to the toilet, make some tea, play with their phone while ads are on TV, and we don't accuse them of being cheap just beacuse they don't watch the ads with their full attention. 

Does AusBT receive any money if you never click on the ads, or buy anything subsequent to clicking the ad?

My limited understanding of how google's ads work is that they don't. In which case, unless you actually click on the ads, people who don't use AdBlock are no less cheap than people who do.

From the internet:

advertisements don’t generate money by themselves. There is no rich Uncle Goo who gives everybody a penny for each ad just for the fun of it. The money comes from somewhere else and it is important to keep this in mind.

So, where does the money come from? Basically, there are two possibilities. One is purchases done on the Internet. The other is investments by companies who usually hope that these investments will help their products sell better. Advertisements are only a mechanism to distribute this money (one of many mechanisms). And usually, the idea is to distribute the money depending on how much revenue a particular site generated for the advertiser. That’s right, it is not important how many ads have been squeezed into each single web page, it is not important how many times they have been viewed, it is not even important how many users have been distracted from what they were doing. It is only important how many people actually decided to click through to advertiser’s site and to buy something, thus justifying this ad (I admit, this is a very simplified view but that’s the general idea).

Now what happens if people start to block ads? First of all, everybody who hates ads and wouldn’t click them anyway now blocks ads. And this can make advertisers really happy because instead of wasting their bandwidth (and money) they now only serve ads to people who are interested in them. They also get better statistics and can see which ads people find more interesting — without having to estimate the number of people who wouldn’t click any ad.

But there is also a second group who blocks ads as well — people who don’t really mind ads but decide to block them because they get so annoyed. I think here of ads that start to play sounds when you enter a site or ads that overlay site’s content until you find the “Close” button and click it. But ads are not like popups, there is no simple technical solution that will block every single ad on the Internet. You need to define a filter for each ad server, with the consequence that the ads blocked by filter subscriptions or private filter lists are likely to be the most annoying ones. I really hope that in the long term that will cause annoying ads to generate less revenue, so that we will finally have an economic factor discouraging annoying ads (good will is obviously not enough).

To sum it up, does blocking ads mean that the money streams on the Internet will dry out? I don’t think so, that would only happen if the amount of money to be distributed becomes smaller — and I don’t see any reason why this should happen. But the distribution pattern might very well change, with the effect that those who really deserve it (don’t inflate statistics by putting unreasonable numbers of ads into web pages, don’t trick users into clicking on ads and don’t annoy users in general) would earn more money.

Where would this discussion be without Alvin and Hugo, don't know about you, but they make my day. 

I understand that the advertising on this site, and the editorial content and forums are managed separately and independently.

Well the Skylux ads are back - and directly hosted on AusBT with a URL that masks a refferal URL back to Skylux. Example of which is in "Etihad opens new Sydney Airport lounge" posted today (8/4).