International Law

Tracy and I need Your Help

The promise of interactive ads, delivered by Adsense, is:

"AdSense for content automatically crawls the content of your pages and delivers ads (you can choose both text or image ads) that are relevant to your audience and your site content--ads so well-matched, in fact, that your readers will actually find them useful.."

Your readers will actually find them useful - that is the pitch that keeps the Google money machine running.

The problem for any consumer/business protection site is that the ads are "not useful" but rather examples of the various scams and frauds that exist. (This is one way I keep up with what is going on -since the vast majority of frauds no longer appear in the print newspapers' classified section.)

Tracy Coenen details her frustration with this type of adsense fraud.

"A few weeks ago, I wrote about my experience with Google's new Ad Review Center. This tool enables you to block advertisements from certain advertisers. When you use this feature, advertisers who want to bid on your ad space must be approved first.

But it's not quite that easy. There are a lot of advertisers who aren't going through the bidding process, so they can still end up on your site without your approval. To block them, you need to use the competitive ad filter.

Initially, this whole process was appealing to me, because I had advertisements for a lot of scam "business opportunities" showing up on my sites. This process helped me eliminate many of them. It's not a foolproof process, and there are still plenty of scams that can easily pop up on my sites."

So what would you recommend?

Full post as published by Misleading Advertising Law on April 24, 2008 (boomark / email).