well, you may refer to it as cheating, i choose to refer to it as increased exposure for the web site. when you begin seeing an increase in the bottom line, i refer to it as "working." if auto-surfing yielded no increase in $ i would dump it in a heartbeat. in our particular situation such is NOT the case.
cheating? depends on your perspective. from ours, it's producing $. the fact that it showed up in the first 26 days is what i find worthwhile.
however you choose to use them, whether to merely impress visitors or increase traffic to your site, they are excellent for increasing "exposure." when you're looking at just the numbers for example and figuring say 1/2 of 1% or less produce a given amount of $, 400,000 exposures is better than 65,000. hard to argue with that.