The latest AOL attempt to profit from advertising has caused a wave of indignation among its paying email subscribers. The reason is that several weeks ago AOL started to show ads along with email messages to increase the delivery of its online ads.

This Tuesday AOL spokesperson claimed that before starting to deliver ads along with the email messages, AOL surveyed its subscribers and ran the test the results of which showed that the inclusion of banner ads will not generally bother them. At the same time, thousands of subscribers are greatly irritated with those ads distribution as animated banner ads disturb them from reading their private mail and are not even targeted to users based on content of the email.

To my mind it is twice unfair to distribute ads the way AOL does it – unfair relative to customers who pay for their email accounts and should not be obliged to view annoying ads as well as unfair relative to advertisers that pay for distribution of their ads along with irrelevant content and to the users that are not interested in the product. AOL, is this a ethical way to raise funds?