Is it Time for a New Search Advertising Model? - PPC Pays for Spyware, Adware
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Lots of people hate click fraud, domain tasting, and MFAs. I don’t know anybody who likes spyware or adware either (or at least, nobody who will admit to liking it in public). But strangely enough, the PPC advertising model also supports the makers of this reprehensible software. I wrote on the Google connection to spyware back in 2005. Harvard law student and spyware researcher Ben Edelman discovered a very tangled web in this area that left egg on the face of many companies, most notably Google.
Basically, what happens is that respectable companies go to advertising firms for ad placement; they also want search advertising. These advertising firms, in turn, go to intermediaries that already have something set up with Google. There might even be another link in the chain. However it works, what eventually happens is that some sites download spyware or adware onto the computers of web surfers, often without their knowledge or consent (sometimes piggybacked onto other downloads to which they did consent). The spyware then pops up to display ads whenever the web surfer visits certain other sites. For example, 180solutions at one time popped up ads for Expedia whenever the computer it had infected with spyware visited the American Airlines web site.
While not all of the ads that the makers of spyware and adware showed were from Google, a surprising percentage of them were in fact Google AdSense ads. If you follow the path of the money, then, this meant that Google was indirectly supporting these people. Worse, advertisers were unwittingly using a form of advertising that they probably never would have condoned had they known about it in advance. It can be difficult to erase the stigma of having been seen as an adware or spyware advertiser; no one wants that kind of bad publicity.
Think the issue has gone away by now? Think again. In May 2006, Yahoo faced a lawsuit over a similar issue. The plaintiffs claimed that Yahoo was showing their ads “in ways that contravene defendants’ contracts with its advertising customers.”
Ben Edelman weighed in on the side of the plaintiffs. “I now have many dozens of different examples of Yahoo pay-per-click ads shown with spyware,” he said. Worse, in some cases, “spyware completely fakes a click – causing Yahoo to charge an advertiser a ‘pay-per-click’ fee, even though no user actually clicked on any pay-per-click link. This is ‘click fraud.’”
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