Videos and audio will not start w/o your permission. There will be a gray screen with a puzzle piece you’ll have to click to view/listen…….. at YOUR discretion.

I met a guy who makes a living by getting hits on the ads placed on his Youtube site. He gets a certain amount (he wouldn’t tell me how much) for every hit, and more if the ad runs to completion.

On the one hand I can’t blame them and on the other I resent it. I’ll worry about consistency later.

Pure crookedness such as you encountered should be prosecuted, however.

Its not incompetence or sloppy design. Its deliberate and very well thought out. Companies have gotten very clever at getting us to give them money, and at making it very hard to back out of an agreement to continue business with them. Very often, there is no way to even contact the company to tell them to stop sending you more junk mail, or even unordered product (plus the accompanying bill). And once they’ve got your credit card number, the onus to stop the transaction is on you. Sometimes it is extremely difficult to stop service, they keep on billing you, making the act of severing the relationship a burden on you, not the other way round.

Partly, they feel they can get away with it, they figure so many people are subscribed or hooked on online commerce that they really don’t keep track of what they are paying for. And very often transactions are identified only by some impenetrable code number so you can’t figure out just what the hell it is you spent $19.99 last April 3rd. Its not that different from those scammers who routinely send you a bill for just a few dollars, counting on the fact that you probably won’t be keeping close enough watch on your spending to realize its bogus, or you’ll be too lazy to track down the evidence to establish you need not pay it. Multiply a “few dollars” by millions of marks and it adds up. And if a business can figure out a way to do it online or through a credit card, it doesn’t even have to pay for a stamp to bill you. And debit cards really gives them an edge–it comes right out of your bank account.

There are ways to fight back, of course. You pay by cash or check whenever possible. You NEVER use your debit card. You buy online only when inevitable, and then you only use the same card, one you can afford to cancel. And you keep meticulous logs of everything you pay for with plastic. But of course, all that extra hassle negates the advantage and convenience of buying online, which is exactly what they’re counting on.

But even if what they’re doing is technically legal, it reveals something really insidious about what is happening to modern business today. They figure they don’t have to go out of their way to convince you to buy, and they don’t have to spend money giving you decent customer service. They’ve got you by the balls, and they are going to make YOU take the extra steps and aggravation to figure out how to cancel an order or get satisfaction on a routine billing issue. They have become masters of the run-around, the infinitely branching telephone tree, the endless muzak-hell while you wait for an operator, the black hole that swallows your emails with never a response.

They make the customer spend the time and effort to get a problem straightened out so they don’t have to pay some Gupta in India to do it.

Free enterprise only works if the customer can refuse to buy, and if he’s treated shabbily, if he refuses to pay. Without that, its a seller’s market, and they know it, and are counting on it.
The arrogance and contempt they show for their customers is infinite.