Network bars, your opinion?

We've all seen the iNet network bar by now i'm sure...a few other sites have adopted this marketing technique and use similar bars on their networks. There is no denying that the network bar can be VERY powerful and if you have multiple sites with similar content then your visitors will naturally float between the sites.

But does the appearance of the bar outweight its potential for the owner? The reason I say this is, if talkfreelance added a iNet style bar tommorow there would be a large number of members disagreeing with it, I guess it's because people think website owners do everything for themselves and money and are never thinking about their visitors.