In recent weeks, more and more companies have been trying to scam ad networks by spawning pops off of regular banner ads. These scammers–usually unknown third parties–think that they can make “free money” by buying cheap banner inventory and using that inventory to sell pops. This illegitimate business hurts everyone in the entire industry.

At first the pops spawning off of banners (“banner pops”) were mostly limited to third party tags. In recent weeks the problem has spread to actual flash creatives as well. Scammers are embedding some bad javascript code into creatives which run infrequently and are often targeted to only show to certain geographical regions. Sometimes they even pop at certain small time intervals throughout the day! These companies set it up so that the networks that they buy from never actually see these pops. 

Everyone gets hurt by these scams. Those on the front line, the publishers, have to fend off complaints by their visitors about bad pops showing up on their sites. They, in turn, complain to the networks, who have to track down the bad creative (which of course can be nearly impossible if it’s set to only pop at strange hours of the night in Canada!!).

The Right Media tech team is working on several tools to both detect bad creatives before they hit publisher’s sites and help users track down misbehaving creatives faster. We also work around the clock making sure we track down any bad creative that gets reported to us. Moreover, we’re always trying to pinpoint the companies that are perpetuating the scam, and keep them out of the marketplace.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 9th, 2005 at 12:00 am and is filed under Publishers, Ad Networks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.