Mogul, I admire your ethics and you are the kind of domainer that advertisers would love to work with. But the water runs very deep in domain land, and ethics are not the way that people can use to make good money.
Today, sitting in front of the computer religiously clicking links on 10,000 sites a day brings more to a family in a day than a road-sweeper can hope to earn in a year.
In offline media, advertisers pay per placement. As both offline and online models dovetail, PPP will get increasingly more acceptable (albeit at a much higher cost) as online brand and message recall gets increasingly recognized.
"Traffic" is a digitally manufactured joke for online media, like it or not - scripts, bots, hidden links, immigrant worker farms ...anything that earns a dime will incentivise people to do these things. And on digital media, it is so easy to hide behind ignorance of the technology shenanigans. Gary Kremen recently said "It's not about volume, its about conversion" on the DomainMasters radio show. He should know about traffic.
Worse, with domainers now relying more and more on typos in their pursuit of traffic, that's nothing more than parasiting off other people's trademark eg disenychannel.com. Sure you get curious kids generating tons of traffic off them as kids tend to click on everything and anything. But quality of that click? Kids don't have credit cards to buy stuff. However, the advertiser is forced to shell out for these useless clicks, 5c, 50c, $5...
If click fraud is only 20% of all there is for the priviledge and cost of doing business, then sure it is acceptable. But because of the real gushing money that Mexican immigrant workers can now earn besides the poor pay of plucking peppers on a farm in San Jose, click fraud will over time consistently hit 50%-90% as click sweat shops get more organized and more sophisticated in the use of proxies.
PPC has become far more lucrative than spam. SpamKings?? pah. Today its the ClickKing barons that rule the Internet.
I am not saying that PPC is not a good way to earn good money, All I'm saying is that the industry will evolve, is evolving, new models to counter all this fraud. PPC revenue has been a primary "justification" for driving up the costs of names at auctions to crazy levels never seen before. The symptoms are starting to puss.