Forum Moderators: martinibuster
For eg. I am seeing ads for "Buy Adobe Photoshop for $69", "Buy Macromedia Studio MX for $39". Anybody with any sense would realize immediately that there is something shady about this, as the legit copy of the former sells for $599 USD, and the latter for $399 USD. These are the same sorts of scumbags who spam your inbox.
When I go to the advertiser's site, I see that what they are in fact selling, are download links to the ISO image files for unsuspecting or naive consumers to burn onto disk. They tell you that:
2.3. You cannot register the software with the manufacturer and updates are available not for all the products;
2.4. You do not receive printed license documentation;
2.5. You do not receive a copy of the software on a disk.
Yeah, right. P.T. Barnum said it best: "There is a sucker born every minute".
This is an obvious illegal activity, and there are literally hundreds of these ads.
With the proliferation of these sorts of ads, it wont be long until shady advertisers actually outnumber shady pubs, and bleed over into other niches with other sorts of scam ads.
The only real solution here is for Google to manually check all publishers and advertisers out thouroughly before accepting them. Period.
The (good) reasons I am concerned about this are that:
1) These ads damage a webmater's/site's reputation
2) These ads damage Google's reputation
3) These ads damage contextual advertising
4) These ads damage the reputation of other advertisers in the same ad block
5) These ads are enabling copyright infringement
For reference, there was a post a while back in the Adwords forum about a similar experience:
msg #:17
[webmasterworld.com...]
Now the question: what to do about this?
Report the advertisers?
The only problem with this is that there are literally hundreds of them. Maybe thousands. Reporting them one by one to Google would be like killing roaches in an apartment in Hell's Kitchen one by one...
And, is it really my job to do something abou this, and not Google's? My job as a publisher is to publish good content, period. Google's job is to supply me with *reputable* advertisers. But there is obviously something broken here.
The big point is that G should scrutinize both publishers and advertisers better, so this ridiculous burden shouldn't fall on the shoulders of publishers.
Guess this will eventually sort itself out somehow.
I know its a big ask, but I really wish G would try and do something about these sort of issues.
Other adds that have been problematical for me are ones that promote rogue anti-spyware apps and degree mills.
Guess this will eventually sort itself out somehow.
I hope you are right. If anything will sort this out, it is "The Invisible Hand" of increased competition in the area of contextual advertising that will make things better for advertisers and publishers.
Other adds that have been problematical for me are ones that promote rogue anti-spyware apps and degree mills.
The Net is rife with this kind of thing. While my example is one where a software/programming site can be plagued with this sort of thing -- you raise another good example, in that any soft of .edu academic site can be plagued with degree mill scams. I just cant undestand why Google doesnt seem to see how this (rogue advertisers) can damage their good name, and affect consumer confidence.
