bedelmanPremium
join:2004-06-20
Cambridge, MA | reply to NetWatchMan
Are anti-spyware pgms paying spyware pgms for ads? NetWatchMan, I've observed the kind of rseult you describe. Receive a spyware program, it opens search engine results pages for "spyware", and legitimate or semi-legitimate products come up very high on the rankings, including in the top position.
So the question arises: Did the legitimate companies intend this result?
I have reason to believe that they often did not. In your example, StopZilla might have placed a bid with Overture, Kanoodle, FindWhat, or some other PPC search engine for the term spyware, and might have outbid all other competitors so as to reach the #1 position. In the course of submitting this bid, StopZilla was surely never told that the resulting PPC listings would be shown by traffic hijackers, and showing results via traffic hijackers is probably a breach of the PPC search site's rules.
That's not to say StopZilla might not ultimately figure out what's going on -- if I were spending big money on a PPC campaign, I'd definitely want to know where my results were coming from. And that's not to defend companies (both advertisers and PPC search engines, in this example) who choose to remain ignorant, rather than learn where there money is going.
But your first paragraph "supposed anti-adware utilities ... paying adware companies to advertise" is probably true only in the most indirect sense (anti-adware companies paying PPC indexes which then get traffic from adware companies). In general, I don't think we've seen reason to believe that the legitimate companies have actual knowledge of what's going on. |
| said by bedelman: In general, I don't think we've seen reason to believe that the legitimate companies have actual knowledge of what's going on. Thanks for the education on how PPC works...however, any legitmate anti-spyware company better damn well know who is and how their products are being marketed. What I'm seeing is akin to an anti-spam product marketing itself via spam.
I could probably put 5-10 anti-spyware products out of business by posting an expose of the inter-relationships between their products and a single piece of adware I've analyzed. Fortunately for them I'm not able to do that at this time for reasons I can't go into.
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Lawrence Baldwin
myNetWatchman
The Internet Neighborhood Watch |
