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of the internet
Sex sites' slimeball tactics ease into mainstream
By Marty Beard
As porn sites go, so goes the rest of the internet--at least when it comes to tacky and in-your-face advertising tactics.
A new study documents what every web surfer knows these days: More and more mainstream web sites now use ad techniques first developed on porn sites.
"Over 25 percent of top destination sites are now using one of these tactics in an apparent attempt to divert and capture shoppers," says Brian Murray, senior director of client services at Cyveillance, which did the study.
"There is undoubtedly a growing level of consumer frustration online that poses a threat to global brands."
The tactics serve two purposes. The first is to dupe users into coming to the sites by misleading them about the nature of their content, then to hold them on the sites as long as possible.
The second is to shove more and more ads into the faces of users who come to the sites, as unwitting or even witting visitors.
There are about 10 different sneaky tactics in all, according to Cyveillance, and it has a handy term for each.
Cyveillance considered three factors in ranking the offensiveness of the various tactics: frequency, level of intrusiveness, and potential for damage.
The report deems spawning Internet Enemy No. 1 and estimates that 12.6 percent of the world’s web sites use the tactic, where browser windows are opened up without the web user’s permission.
Almost a third--30 percent--of the top-100 U.S. web sites have adopted the tactic.
Spawning was pioneered by porno dot.coms but first brought into the mainstream by the company that markets the X10 wireless camera.
Besides spawning, there's mouse-trapping, visible and invisible seeding, unauthorized software downloads, spoof pages, typo piracy/cybersquatting, changing home pages or bookmarks, mislabeling links and illicit framing.
Mousetrapping, as anyone who’s ever gotten stuck on a porn site knows, is when a web site makes it all but impossible for a visitor to leave.
This can be achieved in several ways. One method is deactivating a browser’s "back" button so that a shopper or visitor can’t leave the web site.
Another is the spawning of pop-unders that don’t give users any way to exit other than clicking on the ad or downloading software.
Mousetrapping can also be achieved by putting a redirect page into the browser history, so that whenever people click on the "back" button, they go to the redirect page, which puts them right back at the location they wanted to leave in the first place.
Some 5.2 percent of all web sites use mousetrapping. Among sites that mousetrap, 85 percent also employ spawning. Thirty-five percent of web sites that use spawning also use mousetrapping.
Now we come to seeding, visible, ranked eighth, and invisible, ranked third.
Seeding is essentially placing words and phrases, often celebrity names, on sites that may have nothing to do with the site's real content but that will ensure that the site will be picked up by search engines.
Visible seeding is where the phrase or name can be seen by visitors, whereas in invisible seeding the words are not visible to the eye but still are picked up by search engines.
Cyveillance describes the No. 4 ad tactic, unauthorized software downloading, as being particularly insidious and even dangerous.
It’s just like it sounds: A web site downloads software onto consumers' computers without their permission or even awareness. The software can load up unwanted as pages that will continue popping up after the user has left the site.
The technique is regarded as particularly risky, since the software can open the way for identity theft or fraud.
Spoof pages are dummy pages that are created on a site with the sole intent of boosting the traffic to a site via search engines. They will be seeded with specific search terms.
Cyveillance ranks "typo piracy," a form of cybersquatting, sixth in its hierarchy.
That’s when a site registers a web address based on a well-known brand, but the actual name registered will be a letter or two off.
A few years ago the name of search site Hotbot was co-opted by a porn site, Hobot.
Or a web address itself may have a name that’s highly suggestive of an established web site.
Another way that web sites can sneak onto a consumer’s computer is by changing the designated home page or the bookmarks/favorites, which can have the effect of taking users to a given web page, whether they wanted to go there or not, anytime they open up their browsers.
Cyveillance estimates that 1.4 percent of web sites do this.
The ninth tactic, mislabeling links, is a fairly simple one, in which a web site mislabels hyperlinks and sends shoppers or surfers to different web sites than those they meant to visit.
Finally, some web sites engage in a practice called "framing." The user attempts to leave one site for another, only to realize that he or she has not actually gone to the new site. He is still on the old site and only seeing the new site through a frame.
Cyveillance arrived at its results by studying the ad tactics at the top-100 U.S. internet destinations.
December 10, 2001 © 2001 Media Life
-Marty Beard is a staff writer for Media Life.
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