| I think it is more fair to say that a small percentage of online advertisers fill up a lot of inventory with junk that hurt the large percentage of advertisers that run relevant ads. For most X, you can say that showing ads for X from people who really want to sell it to you makes life better than worse. The least common denominator behind all these scams is: (i) recurring billing, and (ii) high margin product. An early form of it was the "free ringtone" scam which would hit your phone bill for $10 a month. Today it tends to be nutritional supplements. If you can send somebody an $80 a month bottle of pills that you can get made in China for $5, the net present value of a customer is enough that you can pay Yahoo, affiliate advertisers and others involved enough to keep the thing going. There is a group of a few hundred people that could be described uncharitably as a "criminal ring" that are behind this stuff. Seriously, they hang out on IRC. In the world of multilevel marketing the most interesting development is "Ambit Energy" which gets over the problem that it is hard to get people to buy a $80 a month supplement -- everybody needs electricity. However, electricity is a low margin business and Ambit offers very little benefit to consumers other than getting your friends and family members who are Ambit to shut up. In the world of "normal" businesses where you are dealing with people who know more about their product or business than they do about the rapidly changing world of online advertising. (I read technical documentation like some people read thrillers, but reading the jargon around AdTech makes my head spin.) Also they don't have 80% margins. People like that often find it hard to make a profit with online advertising so the scammers take their place. |