Watch out for ads running for sites that bundle adware

[Marcia]

I've seen several running on different pages out there, and those sites do bundle adware/spyware/BHOs along with their offerings. One site had links to other sites that did that.

No biggie for you if you don't mind being party to promoting those, else if you don't they need to be filtered out.

I'm surprised Google doesn't keep a list of suspect apps and flag them for inspection before running.

[Romeo]

Yes, I have seen this, too.

Quality content sites need continuous monitoring of the ads to keep that stuff out -- together with all those other ads for other low quality content sites -- to not annoy the users.

Regards,
R.

[LeChuck]

It's tiring work to check the ads and keep the blocklist up to date, but it the pay is good.

[Marcia]

It's also time-consuming to report them, but no matter how much a click pays I don't want to be responsible for sending a visitor to site where their computer will get infested, and they'll possibly either have to end up dumping it or call in someone to re-do their hard drive. Some are that bad.

I found one yesterday that's a well known spyware application beyond any doubt, and those ads should be filtered out before they're ever run on publishers' pages. Another I've found is a very popular one, but has bundled applications with carefully obscured T&C.

I'm having to pull all the Adsense off a site because of the number of tacky or worthless ads running. It takes too much time to monitor it constantly and keep putting sites on the filter. Meantime, until I catch them how many visitors are being jeopardized by the bad ones.

IMHO, Google needs to check with Norton and other spyware information resources and automate screening to whatever extent possible. They do contextual analysis of publisher pages, why can't it be done on advertisers' pages? Any mention of the word download on a site should be enough to flag for checking.

[Play_Bach]

"I finally gave up hope, and was just fine!"
--George Carlin

Accordingly, I've stopped using the competitive ad filter and am just going to let Google deal with it - all of it.
Google's certainly got plenty of $ and resources - I don't.

So far, the $ is up and the stress down. If that means more hate mail from my visitors, so what.

[joeking]

One problem is that ads that you see on pages aren't necessarily those served to your visitors - thanks to ad rotation and geographic targetting. So keeping on top of this really needs to begin and end with Google.

[Marcia]

Here's Google's official corporate stance on the subject

Software Principles [google.com]

Usually there are complex business relationships among the companies participating in a bundle. This can result in well-intentioned companies benefiting from the distribution or revenue generated by software that does not benefit you. Getting paid to distribute, or paying money to be distributed with undesirable software enables more undesirable software. Responsible software makers and advertisers can work to prevent such distribution by avoiding these types of business relationships, even if they are through intermediaries.

In this case publishers (and Google, as the ad distribution channel) would be intermediaries, and by allowing such ads to run are enabling their distribution. If we're not part of the solution by bringing it to Google's attention if we catch it, then we're part of the problem.

[Play_Bach]

> In this case publishers would be intermediaries, and by allowing such ads to run are enabling their distribution.
> If we're not part of the solution by bringing it to Google's attention if we catch it, then we're part of the problem.

Since I get zero say about which ads show on my sites, I feel 100% OK with accepting zero responsibility for them too, sorry. This is Google's fight, not mine.

[edited by: Play_Bach at 9:01 pm (utc) on Nov. 24, 2005]

[calman]

Since Google is serving the ads, they clearly should have controls over the nature and content of the ads being shown.

Publishers should not have the responsibility of attempting to control these types of ads after the fact by blocking them. I'm sure that many if not most publishers are totally oblivious to the existence of adware etc. bundled in some of these ads.

[jomaxx]

Nobody's saying you're "responsible" for the adware. But if you care at all about your site visitors, you'll report these advertisers whenever you become aware of them. Spyware is truly the sourge of the Internet.

[icedowl]

I do block ads for known spyware.

Granted, Google should be able to block this before anyone finds it on our sites. But, just like the police can't be everywhere all the time, neither can Google and sometimes the folks just have to do what they can do.

Simply, I don't want my visitors to encounter this crud. I don't want somebody's nice Granny to have her computer ruined. It just leaves a bad taste. A very nasty bad taste!

[aeiouy]

I think as publishers we provide a decent percentage of revenue for managing things. As this segment gets more competitive, we as publishers are going to have to demand more for the % we are giving the middle-men such as google. Included in that is more dilligence in preventing bad sites from advertising on our pages.