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p2pnet.net News:- You can expect a very large surge in both spam and online advertising in the New Year.
Spammers use fake messages to get you to where they want you to go, and the likes of Google flash a massive raft of so-called ’services’ to pull you into their tacky ad traps.
But when you get right down to it, there’s not a whole lot of difference between hard-core spammers and hard-core advertisers. Both make huge wads of cash, enough to keep third-world nations afloat, by shoving ads you don’t want down your throat, whether you like it or not.
‘Good’ ads are dressed up to look like an information post, or something similar: something you want to see. ‘Bad’ spam is dressed up like a genuine email message: something you want to see.
Spam is hard-core. It’s fired at you by any means possible.
MySpace says it’s a “place for friends.” Increasingly, however, it’s also, “a place for unfriendly attacks from digital miscreants on the prowl, luring users to sexually explicit Web sites, clogging mailboxes with spam messages and playing on the trust users have when speaking to ‘friends’ to obtain passwords that could lead to identity theft.”
So says The Associated Press, going on that ease of use is one of MySpace’s draws.
But what’s good for users is also good for the crooks who can, “make it look like an innocent user has sent spam to the same long list of ‘friends’,” says AP, going on, “One recent scam works this way: A spammer posts a number of phony profiles featuring pictures of cute women, often promising nude photos. A ‘friend request’ with the woman’s photo is sent to hundreds of users.
“Once the fake profile loads, a blue screen descends, saying the profile is protected by the ‘MySpace Adult Content Viewer.’ Unsuspecting users who try to download the viewer instead get a worm that installs adware on their computers.”
Advertising is soft-core and while it can be seen as, “necessary for economic growth, it’s “not without social costs,” says the Wikipedia. “Unsolicited Commercial Email and other forms of spam have become so prevalent as to have become a major nuisance of users of these services, as well as being a financial burden on internet service providers. Advertising is increasingly invading public spaces, such as schools, which some critics argue is a form of child exploitation.”
Advertising techniques are, ” The tools you use to attract attention, engage minds, trigger emotions, and change what people think,” says AdCracker. Change what people think? Yup. “Techniques” such as promising a benefit, injecting drama, taking a positon and exaggerating can, “lead to sales. Or votes. Or clicks.”
Spam or ads, it’s largely unwanted junk and,”One scholar has argued that advertising is a toxic by-product of industrial society which may bring about the end of life on earth,” says theWikiPedia, which has chosen advertising as a way to boost its new search service.
Meanwhile, “In the closing months of 2006 spam volumes jumped enormously. According to e-mail filtering firm Postini, spam volumes increased by 73% in the three months to December,” says the BBC, quoting Dan Druker, spokesman for Postini. “That’s the highest it’s ever been.”
Other email security specialists haven’t reported such big leaps, “but all say that they are seeing more spam than ever before,” says the story, which has McAfee’s Avert Labs spokesman Dave Marcus saying spammer software tools have in the last year, “got much easier to find and use”.
And spammers have also become much better at, “managing the platform they use to send junk mail, he said,” and, “80% of spam is shot out through botnets of some form,” he says, according to the BBC. And, “malicious software was becoming more targeted”.
Not only ‘malicious’ software.
“Microsoft Corp. is making a global push to sell targeted online advertisements using data gathered from users of its Hotmail email service, the Wall Street Journal reported on its Web site on Tuesday,” says Reuters.
“Microsoft, the world’s largest software maker, is aiming to grab a bigger slice of the online advertising market for its msn.com news page and other Microsoft-owned sites. It currently lags behind Google and Yahoo.
“The company has begun combining personal data from the 263 million users of its free Hotmail email service with information gained from monitoring their searches, the paper said.”
“Data gathered from users”. And the hapless users thought providing it was just to help Bill an the Boyz provide better ’services’.
So where’s it going?
Among other places, here’s where, says Rebecca Lieb who just before Christmas, “Sat down with the ClickZ editorial staff to “brainstorm” 2007.
Ads on apps Microsoft and Google spent a lot of this past year moving productivity suites onto the Web as APIs (define). Expect ad sales offerings to be formed in 2006, either on the apps directly, or as contextual/behavioral offshoots of all that consumer-generated content.
And ….
Blogs will grow ever-deeper roots Blogs will lose their novelty value. They’ll come to be considered just one more publishing, marketing and media opportunity.
And …
There’s no such thing as a free iPod Online lead-gen will continue to develop more legitimate practices. At the same time, the more unethical side of that game will get even uglier.
And …
Social media copycats will abound There will be ever more branded MySpace pages. More CGM film festivals. More brands and agencies launching stores/hotels/agencies/real estate offering in Second Life. And we here at ClickZ are subsequently going to have to figure out where you draw the line at “news.”
By way of extreme cynicism…
Word to the wise: Watch the pubcasters. The BBCs and NPRs of the world are at the vanguard of online innovation insofar as content offerings are concerned. That’s because they don’t worry so much about advertising. These companies are forging trails online mainstream media should be following very closely. They can almost be considered the new porn, insofar as pornographers have always been fastest to grok, and to monetize, new forms of media. Moreover, their sites are worksafe. [Our emphasis]
And last, but by no means least:
E-mail list rental will resurge after a long absence from legitimate marketer’s consideration set. Lists will be rented only for hyper-targeted offers based on super-fresh registrations. Caveat emptor has sunk in at last.
Caveat emptor means, “let the buyer beware”.
If your Net access is blocked by government restrictions, try Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. Go here for the official download, here for the p2pnet download, and here for details. And if you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent web site blocking outside of China. Download it here.
Also See:
The Associated Press - ID Theft Growing Concern for MySpace Users, December 27, 2006
chosen advertising - Wikipedia search on the way, December 26, 2006
BBC - Spam surge drives net crime spree, December 26, 2006
Reuters - Microsoft in push for targeted online ads - WSJ, December 26, 2006
ClickZ - Whither Online Advertising and Media in 2007?, December 22, 2006
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