The Unruly Advertising Ecosystem

Kudos to Harvard Asst professor Ben Edelman, for his latest expose of the underbelly of the online advertising environment. Edelman, an FPF Advisory Board member, has been a long time critic of ad networks or advertisers that don’t do enough to control where their ads are placed. At www.Benedelman.org, he has documented ads showing up in adware, spyware, porn sites and other unsavory locations. Here he shows how advertisers themselves are ripped off when their ad networks place ads on invisible, non-existent web sites. No one ever sees the ads, but the advertisers pay-up.

Until advertisers and publishers reclaim their relationships with web surfers, and press their ad partners to do the hard work to support the needed improvements in the areas of privacy, security, and quality, these are the kinds of exposes that are likely to keep on coming.