The Adware Crisis - An Insider's Perspective (DELL, GOOG, MSFT, TFSM, TWX, VCLK, YHOO)

An industry insider (who wants to remain anonymous and is therefore using the pen name AdwareAdvisor) left a detailed comment on What Is Yahoo's Exposure to Adware and Spyware?. It's informative, carefully written, and worthwhile for anyone in the industry or investing in search, affilliate and Internet advertising stocks. Here it is:

It is perhaps worth noting that the quality of traffic from adware sources is typically quite high. Much of the traffic is sourced from piggy backing (if you are polite) or stealing (if you are not) the traffic from the major search engines which is widely recognized as the source of the best quality traffic on the net.

This creates a dilemma for all affiliate networks. Everyone knows that that adware related traffic is questionable from an ethical perspective (and possibly/probably legal as well) but if it is delivering high quality converting traffic to the advertiser base, there is a strong financial incentive to continue to facilitate that flow of the traffic.

It is extremely difficult for an affiliate network to scrub its network of adware related traffic. The traffic is sourced only from machines that have the adware application installed and can be easily made to look like “normal

Comments

[ASFCAPITAL:]

David,
wouldn't Answers.com, which eliminated most of the
adware in their search engine, benefit from yahoo's
problems.

2005 Sep 06 08:51 PM