The Imus Effect
By Mark L. Johnson I looks like the big advertisers have spoken and taken a stand on their association with unethical andsocially deviant partners. One reason for this is the fact that hot topics don’t easily go away these daysbecause of the Internet. The Internet has a fantastic memory. You can’t unGoogle yourself.With that said, I’d like to examine the implications of advertising practices on the Internet. There arethousands of websites engaged in fraudulent practices like phishing and spamming that have beenenabled by ad networks and affiliate programs from which they are literally “paid to defraud”.Over the past couple of months I investigated and tracked down the advertisers on some of thesewebsites. When contacted, most were unaware that their ads were showing up on these sites becausethe ads were distributed through a though a third party ad network. Although contact with mostadvertisers as well as ad network fell on deaf ears in at least one case the precedent mentioned in thefirst paragraph was immediately adopted by at least one advertiser. Case in point: It was found that ads for a popular website called Zango were being displayed on awebsite notorious for phishing activities called freevegasclubs(dot)com. Within hours of notification,Zango had their security department investigating the problem, immediately contacted the ad supplier,AdBrite, and had the ads pulled. Unfortunately this type of swift and decisive action is not the norm. Ittook several weeks for the ad network(AdBrite) to investigate and cease providing ads for the phishingsite. Although direct knowledge of the fraudulent activity is not evident, shouldn’t these ad networks bea little more careful about where they are allowing ads to be served? The ad serving leader, Google, has a very strict terms of service with their publishers and has beenknown to take action swiftly and mercilessly when a publishers breaks the rules. Other ad networksshould follow their example.Hopefully the “powers that be” on the Internet(ad servers, hosting providers, registrars, etc..) will learnfrom what has happened in television and radio media and adopt this deadly “guilt by association” notolerance policy. Mark L. Johnson is a web design and marketing professional. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Mark_L._Johnson http://EzineArticles.com/?The-Imus-Effect&id=525800 order cialis online from dreampharmaceuticals women who took cialis buy viagra cheap results cialis
