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Yahoo Homepage – Now Featuring Extra-Scammy Scams

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Re: Yahoo Homepage – Now Featuring Extra-Scammy Scams

#41

Post by nkozyra »

saiya-jin wrote: post #25
rimantas wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am thinking, maybe I should get an ad-blocker. Not tu reward the webistes, but stop punishing poor folks who buy ads and then waste money showing them to me, because I never click them…

ads are paid by click, no? so if you don't click, no harm done

Some are CPM/RPM, some are CPC and some ultimately require an arbitrary "action" which can sometimes be a conversion.

There are plenty of ad networks that will pay you some nominal amount just to display an ad to 'users.'

Re: Yahoo Homepage – Now Featuring Extra-Scammy Scams

#42

Post by eli »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #13
bad_user wrote: post #9

I was originally against ad-blockers, because it provides me with an incentive to look for alternatives and I also want to reward websites that don't do this shit. However, it's because of scams and malware pushed by means of ads that I started using ad-blockers myself and I recommend it to all my non-technical friends. It's also the reason for why on my Android I'm now using Firefox. For Google to not provide at lea…

We tell our customers that ad blockers are their first line of defense against malware on the web, and it's true. Web ads have been bad for years and continue to get worse, and content providers aren't doing enough yet to police the advertising on their site. Did you happen to see the recent link about the AdSense redirects? e.g. http://blog.sucuri.net/2015/01/adsense-abused-with-malvertis...

If your customers have machines that can be hijacked by drive-by malware, then blocking ads is not going to help them much in the long run.

Re: Yahoo Homepage – Now Featuring Extra-Scammy Scams

#43

Post by jerf »

bambax wrote: post #24
dredmorbius wrote: post #18

99% of online advertisers give the rest a bad name. Not only is this why online advertising is ultimately doomed, but it's why we hugely and desperately and badly need to find another way of paying for content. The alternatives for the moment are gratis, patronage, "native advertising", and subscriptions. Few of these strike me as ultimately scalable. I've been a fan of Phil Hunt, of Pirate Party UK, and his broadban…

> 99% of online advertisers give the rest a bad name So true; remove "online" from the sentence above and it's even truer. > it's why we hugely and desperately and badly need to find another way of paying for content Not sure about that. Here are the ways I can think of we gain access to content: - by directly paying for it (books, movies, etc.) - by indirectly paying for it (ad supported newspapers articles and such…

Patreon is saving the world, not AdBlock. It's still early but I expect in 10 years that "trying to make money via ads" is going to see "very 2010s", due to the lack of words for "something done from the late 1990s to the late 2010s".

It just doesn't work. It almost works. It is so painfully close to working that we can taste it, which is why it has hung around so long. But eventually, advertising corrupts all souls. People respond to incentives, no matter how hard they try not to, and nobody sane should really try to build a quality content-production regime on people trying really hard to act as if the incentives they are operating under aren't the incentives they're operating under. Even when it "works" for some period of time I question the effects of such long-term self-deception.

Re: Yahoo Homepage – Now Featuring Extra-Scammy Scams

#45

Post by coldpie »

rimantas wrote: post #20
bad_user wrote: post #9

I was originally against ad-blockers, because it provides me with an incentive to look for alternatives and I also want to reward websites that don't do this shit. However, it's because of scams and malware pushed by means of ads that I started using ad-blockers myself and I recommend it to all my non-technical friends. It's also the reason for why on my Android I'm now using Firefox. For Google to not provide at lea…

I am thinking, maybe I should get an ad-blocker. Not tu reward the webistes, but stop punishing poor folks who buy ads and then waste money showing them to me, because I never click them…

You should definitely get an ad blocker, for many reasons. If everyone blocks ads, content won't stop being produced. They'll just figure out another way to fund it.

Re: Yahoo Homepage – Now Featuring Extra-Scammy Scams

#46

Post by coldpie »

r1ch wrote: post #15

Adwords is becoming increasingly bad with these kind of ads lately. Yahoo are lucky that they don't have the automatic redirecting version that simply takes visitors away from your site onto these fake landing pages. Most of them seem to be coming from compromised adwords accounts. As a publisher it's very difficult to do anything about this since Google apparently let adwords publishers insert arbitrary javascript i…

I have no idea why ad networks don't have two fields for advertisers: a plain PNG image and a URL to link to. I guess the answer is somehow "money," but I feel like client websites would have enough incentive to switch to the network that works this way to avoid this BS for their users.

Re: Yahoo Homepage – Now Featuring Extra-Scammy Scams

#47

Post by dangrossman »

mirekrusin wrote: post #30
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it won't help much, because they're all shell companies intended to be cheap to dispose of whenever the backlash strikes - and before that happens, they will already have whisked any proceeds away.

payment processing companies should be partially (fully?) responsible for this kind of scams. this seems to be reasonable force to make them find ways of filtering rouge clients. some of payment processing companies will freeze incoming payments up to 6 months for high risk clients for example. that's a good start.

Payment processing companies (of the traditional variety; I'm not sure about the newbies like Stripe) also require a list of the company's principals with their social security numbers when you open a merchant account. The purpose of that is to add those individuals to TMF/MATCH if the account is closed for some kind of abuse, like excessive fraud. Other banks check those lists before opening a new payment processing account, which theoretically stops you from using shell companies to perpetuate credit card fraud after termination.

Re: Yahoo Homepage – Now Featuring Extra-Scammy Scams

#48

Post by kogepathic »

slipstream- wrote: post #29
martinko wrote: post #10

Hm, now the link in the article (www.discoverpresentsonline.com/david-brain/report.html) just redirects to the real discover magazine.

I curl -i'd it. It gives a 302 redirect but also serves the content. As in, someone did header("Location: ..."); but forgot to also die();.

If anyone wants to read the page, here's a copy of the page content (images are linked with relative path and thus broken): http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=7yEUirQf

Re: Yahoo Homepage – Now Featuring Extra-Scammy Scams

#49

Post by coldpie »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #12
shawabawa3 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the article it mentions it only lets you see the article if you have the tracking cookie from the ad

That part made me scratch my head a bit, because they shouldn't have access to Yahoo cookies. I think the article meant the http referrer needed to be yahoo?

Possibly. Can you set cookies over JavaScript? Ad networks allow ad providers to inject arbitrary JavaScript into their clients' websites.

Re: Yahoo Homepage – Now Featuring Extra-Scammy Scams

#50

Post by skylan_q »

easytiger wrote: post #38
dredmorbius wrote: post #18

99% of online advertisers give the rest a bad name. Not only is this why online advertising is ultimately doomed, but it's why we hugely and desperately and badly need to find another way of paying for content. The alternatives for the moment are gratis, patronage, "native advertising", and subscriptions. Few of these strike me as ultimately scalable. I've been a fan of Phil Hunt, of Pirate Party UK, and his broadban…

> Not only is this why online advertising is ultimately doomed, but it's why we hugely and desperately and badly need to find another way of paying for content. Another viable option is letting a lot of the content die. I'm sure we can all live without knowing that one neat trick that you won't believe. In your proposal: > ... constant challenge for any creative type is making a living. Well perhaps if that's the cas…

... constant challenge for any creative type is making a living.

Well perhaps if that's the case what you do is not valuable to anyone.

People have trouble coming to terms with the fact that they don't necessarily deserve to earn a living because they're doing something they like. It's like people are incapable of growing up anymore.

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