Scan and Remove all Spyware and Adware !…

Even when I was talking to a girl and it was obvious she was flirting with me I wasn’t sure how to make her really interested in me….

In “How Spyware-Driven Forced Visits Inflate Web Site Traffic Counts” (May 2007) ( http://www.bene...s/050707-1.html ) , I showed half a dozen specific examples. Frankly it wouldn’t be hard to document a dozen more. (If only I had the time.)

In my testing and in my observations, companies in intensely-competitive traffic-based businesses seem to be turning to these practices with growing regularity. I consider that unfortunate — in part because it pressures competitors to do the same, and in part because the net effects include 1) more popups and popunders, and 2) more money flowing to software users reasonably disfavor (e.g. for nonconsensual or misleading installations).

For anyone who is having trouble understanding the practices allegedly at issue, or the general problem of spyware-based forced visits, perhaps my article (and its video, screenshot, and packet-log documentation) can be of some assistance.

Remember that the users who receive pop unders nowadays are those who downloaded screensavers, emoticons and other ridiculous free applications in the past. If you dont read the terms of service, that’s your own fault. Additionally, When U works pretty hard to make every pop under relevant to the searches you are already doing. Bottom line: if pops didn’t “work” for marketers they would be gone. Millions of people click and purchase through them. Sorry, it’s a reality.

From a marketing perspective, there are two ways using this tactic can benefit you: 1) cheap traffic and page views, 2) increased reach and brand impressions, trial of the site, etc.. There are also ways this can sabotage you: negative brand impact, more user complaints, etc.. Yes, it’s true, people hate advertising that’s intrusive, that’s not new.

Either way, it’s a brand decision. There are lots of cheap forms of advertising out there now through networks that make it easier to enter the online advertising game.

As a reformed popunder buyer and someone who is looking for quality impressions vs. quantity (this is hard to find), I now think that these CPA-based networks are causing the slow erosion of value from online advertising. Billions of wasted impressions are being served to the same people each month for products they are not interested in: mortgages, online dating, netflix (yes they use WhenU also). Remember X10 cameras? Smart marketers used to use frequency capping, day parting, demographic targeting and other qualifiers to make sure their ads were hitting a specific audience. Now, online, you can just blast your ad everywhere and as many times as is necessary until someone converts to your product at your set ROI metric. It’s easy and cheap, but also disturbing.

As for SimplyHired, they must have hired a direct marketing person and figured this trick out. More power to them. I wonder how the darling of the job search 2.0 category will fare in terms of brand perception?

1 thing you forgot to check on alexa.com, the # of page views per visit, SimplyHired is 1.7, and Indeed’s is 6.1. One would think, the min. number of page views by a typical visitor would be atleat 2, the home page, and the search results page (that’s if you find something in top 10)…

I would say typos are a good thing, no typos means there were layers of people who edited…and who wants watered down, 5-day old reporting…

That kind of attitude is what killed newspapers. Be careful not to kill your golden goose – suckers like us who read TechCrunch. We already put up with Duncan Riley’s moronic reporting.

Jobamatic has been a great success for SH and probably has been a key factor in the surge.

when is SH going to confirm / deny the WhenU allegations?

SH we are waiting

Drumroll please.

It needs help and I know nothing about them.

SimplyHired integrated into the myspace search bar and the relationship with LinkedIn could be a big part of the jump, but their length of stay (1.18 minutes) and PV (1.6) per visit are both obvious casualties of these relationships with these problems further exacerbated by the rumored WhenU campaigns. I’m surprised they would even consider WhenU after landing what would seem to be strong traffic drivers. In the end, SH needs to provide employers with new potential employees for their business to succeed. It’s not a popularity contest, sooner or later, SH has to realize that the purpose of the site is to help people find jobs. Rumors have been swirling for months that Google was looking at SH, but I’m not to sure about that, since the word on the street is that the rumor was seeded by SH. What’s in it for Google?

This news doesn’t help their buy-out propects or does it? The big question is why sell now? Nervous? One hit wonders? Job board wannabees? Time will tell.

Take a look at true.com They stopped using adware and traffic dived from “40 million visitors” a month on compete.com to 12 million. And hitwise reported they went from 20% marketshare to 4%. Comscore stats were just as screwed up. Right now singlesnet.com is using major adware and show the same inflated rankings.

The problem is most of this stuff isn’t really trackable. Comscore and hitwise will filter out specific URLS of popups IF they can detect them. But when the popup page happens to be a Registration page there is little to nothing they can do.

Anyway, being as how LinkedIn uses SimplyHired as a job search function, I don’t doubt these numbers.

Hey, at least you have a good editorial team built into your comments