Search and viral and social media sites continue to be inundated by spam and malware. The latest study to measure this activity is by Websense, which found in its bi-annual report that as much as 13.7% of searches for trending news and buzz words led to malware.
It is a reversal from trends in the first half of the year when most malware activity was focused on targeting websites. For the...
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A Harvard Business School professor has identified a new breed of click fraud that not only simulates clicks on a Google ad - but also seemingly generates a “real” customer purchase on the advertiser’s website.
Professor Ben Edelman, who has researched such related issues as invisible online ads - sleight-of-hand tactics used by some websites to sell more advertising than they have space for -...
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Controversial adware firm Zango was sold last week, following a bank foreclosure after its failure to honor over $44 million worth of debts.
The company launched over a decade ago as 180solutions, after which it changed its moniker several times: 180solutions and Hotbar, before concluding its trajectory as Zango. Security firms — to which it often conveyed threatening letters, and the...
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In a symbolic stance against its business model, Amazon has stated it will not permit behavioral ad firm Phorm to scan its webpages for targeted ads.
U.K.-based Phorm works directly with ISPs to build profiles of user interests, based on their overall web surfing behavior, and serve relevant ads to them across participating websites.
The company suffered hard times last year after a series...
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We polled marketers with real experience conducting green marketing on what works, where, and with what media and messages. Some results were pretty surprising. Click here to get our executive summary and see some of the key charts.
Click Forensics reports click fraud rates hit 17.1% in 4Q08, versus 16.6% in the same period in 2007.
According to CEO Tom Cuthbert, three components contributed to the rise: more dollars filtering into pay-per-click (PPC); increased competition in the click firm industry; and rises in cybercrime and botnet activity resulting from the poor economy, writes MarketingVOX.
The average click...
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Some 20% of top brand marketers continue to send additional emails to consumers, even after they confirm requests from those consumers to “unsubscribe” from an email marketing list, according to a research study from Return Path, MarketingCharts writes.
Though the study, “Keeping the Subscriber Experience Positive After ‘Unsubscribe Me,’” found that the majority (65%) of companies studied are...
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Without spam protection, the average web user can expect to get 70 spam messages each day, according to a survey by McAfee, the BBC reports (via MarketingVOX).
For the McAfee spam test, 50 people worldwide were asked to web-surf without a spam filter. Some results follow:
* U.K. residents are most likely to receive sex spam, and emails from Nigerian nobles in “dire straits.”
* The most...
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Google is testing ads that target user behavior, reports The New York Times. Ads a person sees on a given Google search may be influenced by what s/he queried minutes earlier.
According to The New York Times (via MarketingVOX), securities analyst Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray discovered this change in Google’s ad targeting methods, shortly after launching a series of tests that examine ads in...
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Consumers prefer email as a primary method of personal and business communication - and will continue to do so the foreseeable future, despite online threats and the emergence of other channels and Web 2.0 applications, according to a Habeas study, MarketingCharts writes.
Users want more control over their online interactions with businesses and have an increasing level of concern over spam...
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An email’s subject line and “from” address are “the most important factors” for getting users to open an email.
The revelation was made by Louise Rijk of Advanced Media Productions, writing for the UK-based Worcester Business Journal (via MarketingVOX). She advised subject lines be eye-catching and less than 70 characters.
As mentioned in MarketingVOX’s “13 Tips for Effective Email...
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