OK, so many people make their living online, and you can’t go through a week without hearing about the latest garage coder from Silicon Valley selling off his web real estate for a billion dollars, but there are also many thousands of internet millionaires too, who produce sites that do not put the users interests at heart.

Estimates say that there are more than 100 million active websites in the whole world, and of these there are a handful of household names. Youtube, Facebook, Google, Wikipedia, and Yahoo are just some of the best known, and each of these is notable for the fact that they are websites which do provide a good user experience, and they also offer valuable information and content too.

Wikipedia in particular has become notable thanks to the fact that it provides information in a completely free manner, and does not provide advertising, but the majority of websites now are used to make money, and provide what is called thin information simply to ensure that they can find space to advertise around a small amount of content.

The biggest problem for users caused by the unending proliferation of advertising websites online is that it makes genuine information that is of use to them harder and harder to find. The search engine results become clogged up with more and more sites that simply rehash the same information as other and the user gets turned off by what they can find online.

If you ever visit a webmaster forum, you will always find that the majority of the discussions are about how to improve search engine rankings, and make more money, rather than discussing how it would be possible to produce a much better user experience, and provide more value.

The sad fact is, that now it has become so much simpler to get a website online, and there have been so many different “get rich quick” schemes that have drawn more and more people into the online world, the prime motivator for the vast majority of webmasters is simply to squeeze as much cash out of the web as possible.

The amount of effort that it takes to produce a thin content free website simply geared towards getting the maximum number of hits and clicks on adverts is relatively small, but when this process is being carried out on an industrial scale, by the major spammers, it is a full time job, and takes a vast amount of technical ability.

What a shame that all this effort is not put into making a decent website geared towards users, and where the needs of the community are put first, rather than last. It might make it a longer process to develop a website, and it might well take a lot longer to make money, but the fact is that the money that will be made is a lot more significant, and in the long term, rather than users being turned off the web, they will feel that they are more able to engage with the online world, and be more prepared to trust what they see and commit themselves more fully to purchasing online.