The Practical Complexities of Adware Advertising

A report released by the The Center for Democracy and Technology yesterday, "How Advertising Dollars Encourage Nuisance and Harmful Adware and What Can be Done to Reverse the Trend", outlines the practical complexities of Adware Advertising. It gives a great overview of the parties involved, discusses a case study "CDT egages the advertisers", as well as outlines a possible solution, namely Adoption and Enforcement of Advertising Placement Policies. Here's a excerpt from the research findings :



"At this point, CDT has set a low bar by merely asking a small group of companies to contact us to discuss their advertising policies in the context of nuisance and harmful adware. We are working to increase awareness of the complex business models associated with nuisance and harmful adware, and we are pointing advertisers to policies and criteria that already exist as a step towards creating and enforcing their own policies. It is also imperative that advertising networks engage in self-regulation in order to aid in this endeavor. Initiatives such as the TRUSTe Trusted Download Program can help to set certification standards and provide public criteria for evaluating adware makers. Advertisers must demand strict compliance from their affiliates and refuse to work with blind networks and other networks that cannot commit to following stringent advertising policies. Without advertising dollars, there would be no nuisance or harmful adware. CDT is committed to working with advertisers to stem the tide of this nefarious form of software."



Now, if major advertising platforms start measuring the maliciousness of the Web, namely evaluate the participants' condition on a regular basis, they will loose the scale necessary for generating the billions of dollars necessary to, sort of, live with click-fraud. In respect to future online advertising trends, I feel that cost per performance/action model, would sooner or later emerge, given the successful collective bargaining of all the sites participating -- I really hope so!



How it would influence Google's ability to perform financially, contribute to the growth of Web 2.0, being among the few companies born in, is yet another topic to speculate on. As a matter of fact, Google recently launched Google Finance, still I miss what's all the buzz all about as compared to Yahoo's Finance Google still has a lot of job to do, given they actually want to turn and position themselves as Yahoo! 2.0 in respect to turning into a Internet Portal -- which I doubt as they tend to be rather productive while disrupting.



Great report, so consider going through it. And, in case you're interested in learning more about the different spyware/adware legislations, current and future trends, you can also check Ben Edelman's and Eric Goldman's outstanding research on the topic.



The post recently appeared at Net-Security.org - "The practical complexities of adware advertising"



More resources can also be found at :

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Security, Spyware, Adware, Advertising, Center for Democracy and Technology