Many of the participants banner ads are unprofessional and of poor quality. These banners may clash with your professional layout and graphics. You might have gotten there from a search engine s results page, hoping to find something about your search query. This is a popular trick site owners use to get free promotion. This is how it works.
Someone signs up with as many banner exchange programs as possible.
They create a page on a free web server like FortuneCity or GeoCities and place all the banners on this page. They use every dirty trick in the book to get people to visit the site. By using timely keywords like Columbine in the page, they can get thousands of hits in a day. Their account is credited and they use the free impressions to promote their commercial site. Most exchange programs don t view the participating web pages to check quality.