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Sub-distributors Place Marketers' Ads On Spyware Programs

Google and Yahoo affiliates are getting themselves into trouble with the firms' many national advertisers, according to a Business Week article. It works like this: the Web's biggest sellers of advertising space often sign up partners to distribute advertisers' ads on other sites in return for a small fee. Sometimes, those partners sign up other partners who sign up other partners whose business it is to show ads via programs that are surreptitiously installed on users' computers as they surf the Web. That's called spyware, and spyware companies make their money by showing contextual ads pop-ups and pop-unders gleaned from the surfing behavior of users, who are tracked by the spyware program. This is not stuff that either Google or Yahoo want to be related to, and it's definitely not something the Web's biggest advertisers--like eBay or AT&T--want to be involved with. Business Week points out that certain hacker sites are breeding grounds for these spyware programs: a user who installs an illegal copy of Windows XP would be asked to install software, usually ActiveX controls, in conjunction with the program. He might also unsuspectingly download several pieces of spyware, which would then show him several pop-ups or pop-unders per minute. Big advertisers who buy from various networks often have no idea where their ads end up. Ben Edelman, a noted spyware researcher, says he recently tracked a Vonage ad that went through as many as eight sub-distributors before popping up through one of the aforementioned spyware programs.

Read the whole story at Business Week »

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