• ClickZ, Monday, May 15, 2006 11 AM

A nasty little secret that's leaving advertisers exposed has emerged recently: many ad networks don't care about the quality of their referring affiliates, they just want to grow their networks. As ClickZ points out, when massive publishers like Yahoo outsource ad buys to their affiliates, "quality control can be greatly diminished." Publishers do this because it can be lucrative and hassle-free for them. Networks do this for largely the same reasons--but to be fair, legitimate outsourcers are always unaware of sub-affiliates that deal in spyware and porn. Some advertisers looking for volume might not care as much about brand impact, and this is fine, but what about the rest? Make it your business to deal only with networks that reveal all of their affiliates. But what about the following situation: "Consider the ecommerce site that buys media on one ad network that has purchased inventory from another network that's bought media from yet another network that's serving up adware. Then suppose that adware cookies a user so even when the user visits the advertiser's site directly, the advertiser ends up paying a commission to that first network because it looks like an ad served through that adware drove that click-through." Yuck. It's a jungle out there, to be sure. As one Burst Media exec says, maybe it's just the cost of doing business.

Read the whole story at ClickZ »