From the IndustryPace archive. Originally published March 3, 2011. Revisited October 2026.

Right Media Will Kill Facebook Because of Viruses, Malware and Pops

The exchange with the worst malware record in ad tech was everywhere in 2011. Four years later, Yahoo shut it down. Facebook built its own.

By Pesach Lattin

The original text of this post was lost when IndustryPace went dark. This page keeps the original headline and date, rebuilds the subject from the public record, and says what happened next.

The headline was a provocation, and half of it came true. The half that came true was not Facebook.

Right Media's record

Right Media, founded in 2003 and bought by Yahoo in 2007 for about $680 million, was the open marketplace of its day, and it had the reputation to match. In September 2007, malicious banners sold through it ran about 12 million times on MySpace, Photobucket and others. Another malware wave hit it in September 2009. Ben Edelman estimated in January 2009 that at least 35% of its inventory had deceptive characteristics, and in 2010 he showed it upstream of invisible video traffic. A 2014 Senate report later counted about 530,000 infections from one 2010 malware strain through a Yahoo-controlled ad network.

Facebook's exposure

We found no primary record that Facebook ran Right Media on its own inventory in 2010 or 2011. Facebook's exposure to exchange-grade junk came through third-party ad networks inside Facebook apps. Facebook banned two of them, SocialHour and SocialReach, in 2009 over deceptive ads and premium text-message scams, and in December 2010 required apps to use only pre-approved ad providers that certified they were not taking Facebook user data.

How it aged

Facebook did the opposite of dying. It launched its own exchange, FBX, in 2012 and kept control of its inventory. Right Media did die. Yahoo folded it into the Yahoo Ad Exchange in 2014 and shut it to outside parties in January 2015, with AdExchanger citing collapsing volume, advertisers pulling back over quality, underinvestment and the brand risk of low-quality inventory.

The provocation in this headline was wrong about the victim and right about the cause. Malware and junk do not kill platforms. They kill the marketplaces that will not police them.

This page rebuilds a March 2011 IndustryPace post, cited by Ben Edelman, whose original text is not available. Facts come from The Register, Edelman's research, VentureBeat, ClickZ, AdExchanger and the 2014 Senate PSI report. No record of Facebook using Right Media for its own inventory was found; the page says so. The author ran a competing ad network, Vizi, in this period.