Jon - I think it depends a lot on what you're selling. If you're selling a digital information ebook, then the long sales page is going to work better than most anything else. I've read a lot about this on other internet marketing forums and the consensus is that the longer the copy, the better it sells.

It also depends on your audience too. The people participating in this forum will be a lot more internet savvy than those who aren't. Potential customers wont necessarily be as turned off by the traditional sales page as you.

One thing I'm seeing a lot of internet marketers do now is make long videos - infomercials really. You could try that as well.

I agree. I think they look so 1998. I'll alternate bold text with some text that's blue! Boring, boring, boring. I have no idea why they work...I'm also trying to think up a more interesting alternative.

It's not the long-form sales pages that are the turn-off. If you hook them in the first few seconds with a great headline, they'll want to read the whole thing.

Get their attention first, then fill in the details with the copy.

The headline or topic is what grabs them. The long form is there to fill in the details like JW said.

Even if someone is interested in what you have to sell, they are still looking for reasons why not to buy it. The long form sales letters answer every potential objection as well as provide all the affirmations and social proof of testimonials to give customers no reason not to buy.

You see them so often because they work. Same reason you see so much email spam, paper junkmail in your box, and actual scams. They work. Yes they annoy 90% of the people who see them, but if someone in that target demographic sees them, they are very persuasive.

Jonathan Fields wrote a great post called "Rage Against the Sales Letter" this week asking why these types of sales pages still exist (and still do so well). Highly recommended both for the post content and the comments after it.

Jonathan suggests that it's not the length that irritates people as much as the poor copy or the overabundance of certain elements (highlighted text, supersized font, etc.). I think those same qualities are what tend to make a long sales page feel sleazy too. A well-worded, eye-pleasingly developed sales page that happens to be really long might not have me reading every single word, but it also probably wouldn't make me think it was sleazy or irritating either.

And, as mentioned by Jonathan (in his post) and James NomadRip (in the answers here), long sales pages do a great job of giving someone the space they need to address all of a buyer's potential objections, which is a really effective technique.

I like what Jonathan suggests in the post--that there are ways of bridging the gap between the "long sales copy" format and the less-aggressive, more personable sales techniques that people typically find more palatable. He also gives examples of people who try to do that (himself included).