Audio ads actually work very well, according to what I've read. They wouldn't be using them if they didn't work. They're trying to make ads that are much more intrusive though. Ads that go full-screen and are hard to close, ads that start talking and are next to impossible to stop, etc. Blame the people who're actually clicking on the things and buying junk. Spam and spam-sorts of things that are nearly free to display to users and that get thousands / millions of people to look at them only needs to be .01% effective or something like that in order to turn a profit.

The Man: If you ran apache on your computer, it'd probably not give you those connection refused things. Redirecting ad servers to localhost without having anything running on localhost doesn't really upset IE though, if I remember correctly. Just Opera.