RightMedia will Kill Facebook because of Viruses, Malware and Pops.
According to InsideFacebook, the website all about Facebook and Facebook stuff, Facebook has started to institute a proactive white list of advertising providers. These providers, according to InsideFB, are networks that have signed their Terms and Conditions and basically promised to be “really, really good.” However, I see a serious problem in this list when more than a few of them are known goons that have used less than ethical and often illegal methods to promote adware, pops and viruses in banners. In my opinion if Facebook allows these to be “whitelisted” the have a very, very serious problem that is going to occur very, very fast.
The real problem is many of these “whitelisted” companies (networks) are nothing more than seats on Yahoo’s RightMedia exchange, allowing any and all advertisers to buy space on their often crappy placements on sites like ThePirateBay. I’ve personally documented over the last four years hundreds of examples of how the RightMedia exchange is basically a sesspool of questionable advertisements and websites as has leading fraud and adware expert Ben Edelman.
Even if the companies involved aren’t involved themselves with the scams (many of the offshore ones are indeed the culprits), RightMedia still has a huge problem that on a daily basis advertisements with malicious code is still placed on its exchange by scam artists who realize that with hundreds of exchange partners they can always find someone desperate enough to look the other way when offered good money. Even if that isn’t the case, RightMedia continues to allow almost anyone offshore with a checkbook to enter the exchange, after losing some of their biggest clients to DoubleClick and other ones creating their own platform. Additionally, despite making a promise to me that they would take seriously some of these issues, their compliance department has basically ignored my phone calls from myself and other experts asking questions on why, for example, they allow advertising to be placed on illegal websites.
Facebook needs to immediately examine this decision of allowing anyone who uses RightMedia to be “whitelisted” as part of Facebook, if not only because the RightMedia advertising platform itself is horrendous and tends to slow down sites because of all the “jumps” between advertising servers, but mainly because it will cause a horrendous user experience. Facebook cannot afford to become the company that is known as perhaps one day the biggest distributor of a virus that destroys millions of computers. Until RightMedia can guarantee that no virus or malware is distributed via their servers 100%, then Facebook needs to keep far away from these networks.
(C) 2010 Pace Lattin. It is the policy of this blogger to not edit or remove any content and comments, unless it is specifically attacking a protected group or irrelevant to the conversation, such as a spam. These are the OPINIONS of the respective writers, posters, commentators. All DCMA Notices shoudl be sent to pace@pacelattin.com