AdSense’s bad sense: Perpetuating scams without giving users proper protection
WARNING TO ALL VISITORS! DO NOT CLICK ANY ADS THAT LOOK LIKE THE BELOW BANNER AD — IT IS A SCAM:
This ad is a scam!
REMEMBER: IF IT SEEMS TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE, IT MOST LIKELY IS! ALWAYS RESEARCH THE COMPANY YOU ARE GIVING YOUR CREDIT OR DEBIT CARD NUMBER TO TO ENSURE THEY AREN’T SCAMMERS!
I visited my site this morning and the above ad appeared on my site. Like many other webmasters of blogs and personal websites (not to mention larger websites like that of the BBC International version), I use Google AdSense to generate a few extra dollars for publishing content in the form of a blog and other web utilities like pgen online, a JavaScript password generator. Google doesn’t charge a fee to use the service and it is quite well designed. However, the above ad impression appearing on my page demonstrates a serious flaw in the Google AdSense system. Here is claim 1 in the AdSense patent which describes in part how the system works:
1. A method for determining if an advertisement is relevant to a target document, the method comprising: identifying targeting information for the advertisement; analyzing the content of the target document to identify a set of one or more topics for the target document; comparing the targeting information to the set of one or more topics to determine if a match exists; and determining that the advertisement is relevant to the target document if the match exists.
In a nutshell, the content (read: text) of your website is analyzed and a “term vector” is created based on the frequency of certain terms. These are the terms that influence which ads appear on the page. This is an ingenious system because it matches content with product description. Let’s say a blog has a post describing how to peel a banana. Pretend a company called SpeedPeel exists that has an automatic banana peeler and for their advertising campaign they bid for the keywords “banana” and perhaps “peeling” in the Google AdWords system. After Google’s program analyzes the blog post, they might create a term vector that contains “banana” and “peel” and if the fictional SpeedPeel company bid enough on those keywords, the system would impress that company’s ad on the blog. The company’s offering relates contextually to the blog writer’s topic.
This is a smart system but it seems that scammers are taking advantage of an easy flaw to exploit. These heartless people have infiltrated AdWords and AdSense customer’s users (likely a webmaster’s site’s visitors) may fall prey to ads displayed by Google that are actually scams. This happened on my blog because my current homepage has two posts that talk about a Google scam called the “Google Treasure Chest” scam. Sure enough, a Google scam ad is rearing its head in my top banner slot. The scammers seem to be taking advantage of those people who report the scam on their blog or webpage that employs some advertising system like AdSense to generate revenue. While this is all speculation, the scammers may bid on words like “scam,” “treasure,” and “chest” which would be close or direct matches to the term vector generated for my blog which would might result in an impression.
I bet Google does do a lot to stop them but these fake company’s mutate like the flu and it may not be possible to detect AdWords publishers who are also scammers. One fix is to stop using AdSense but this option seems unreasonable given that most ads aren’t fraudulent. A better and more immediately effective solution is explicitly not implemented by Google. If I saw an ad that I suspected to be a scam, I could try to block that ad by simply denying that publisher the right to have their ads placed on my blog. In addition, I could guess the term vector generated by my page (or Google could supply it to AdSense customers) so I could disallow AdWords from considering certain keywords in its effort to find a publisher match. A different but even better option would be allow user’s to clearly report impressed ads as scams through a link pops up upon the JavaScript onMouseOver event.
There may in fact be an existing way to block these advertisers but I don’t know how to do it. As of now, Google AdSense is displaying ads for fraudulent publisher’s purporting to to help you make money by using Google (and probably Google AdSense at that)! I’ve seen so many variations that Google needs to a better approach to reporting scams displayed by AdSense. Perhaps the aforementioned “suspect fraud” link or another suggestion or combination of the suggestions above. These are user initiated efforts to stop scams which seems like it would be the fastest way to protect the visitors to website’s using AdSense and probably many other ad display networks. If a webmaster spots a known fraudulent ad, it should be quickly “blockable.” I think it would be even better if the user could to the reporting. Either way, if action isn’t taken, AdSense will have to go.
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Comments
As much of a tirade as you want to go on here, this all comes down to this:
Caveat Emptor.
If you actually fall for one of these ads, you’re not taking the time to make sure it’s kosher. Your blood is upon your own hand.
Google’s motto is “Don’t be evil.” These scams are evil and I hope that corporate responsibility to live up to that motto prevails. These are in fact scams and the Texas Attorney General is taking action and I know from e-mail correspondence in Utah that they too are sorting out the matter. False representation in advertisements is evil and I think much worse than company’s using link farms to boost their search ranking. The latter practice leaves you banned from Google’s search engine. I think these practices should leave the company(ies) banned from AdWords.
Did you write this in the middle of the night?