For the love of god, I don’t want whiter teeth

By Chadwick Matlin

updated 9:48 a.m. ET Sept. 4, 2009

When the ads first descended upon us, they were stiflingly ugly. Scads of them started appearing all over the Internet a little less than a year ago, each one of them claiming their territory with a purposefully garish image. Some had yellow, rotting teeth. Some had flabby stomachs, with stretchmarks Photoshopped in. They promised wholesale physical change at the click of a button. Commit to a free trial and your life will never be the same.

Life-changing? No. Wallet-shaving? Yes. Once you click, you’ve likely ensnared yourself in a murky credit-card scam. Most of these ads are feeders for fraudulent companies who promise free products but then tack on all sorts of hidden fees. When you try to call and cancel the account, oftentimes nobody picks up the phone. Thus, you’re trapped. The ads aren’t just ugly; they’re unethical.

At first I thought the ads were a temporary nuisance, a stray meme that had organically emerged. But then they didn’t fade away. And they still haven’t. They are now both the billboards and wallpaper of our digital lives — impossible to avoid, impossible to ignore. They dominate even reputable news and social networking sites — The Big Money and Slate included — with their before and after shots; tempting us to click and find out how we, too, can trim that flab and whiten those canines.

Enough is enough. It’s time to play the blame game. This is the final piece of a trilogy on the underpinnings of the Internet scam industry. As in any trilogy, the prequels — “Get Your (Not-So) Free Grant Money!” and "The Anatomy of a Web Advertising Scam" — are good primers for this piece. Now it’s time to concern ourselves with who is — or should be — responsible for this dreck. We’ve compiled a list of suspects, and using TBM’s exclusive Rot Rating system, we’ll dole out the blame. The more yellow the teeth, the guiltier the party.

The economy
It’s the recession’s fault these ads are showing up in the first place. Marquee advertisers got skittish when the recession hit, reducing their ad budgets online and everywhere else. In the print world, this means thinner magazines. In the online world, it means crappier ads.

To understand, it’s worth a crash course on Web advertising: Sites you visit have different slots where ads get served, usually at random. Some sites sell that advertising space in-house. Others outsource the ads, allowing the third party who sells the ads to take a cut of the revenue. Sites that sell advertising in-house — most of the reputable sites on the Internet, including those in the Slate family — also rely on third-party networks to deliver ads as a supplement to in-house inventory. This is the key difference between print and online advertising: Just because a site hasn’t sold an ad itself doesn’t mean it isn’t going to run an ad. On the Web, there’s essentially always inventory.

But as the elite inventory — whether first- or third-party — dries up, you start to get to the bottom of the barrel. That’s where our stomach-flattening and teeth-whitening friends came in. They are degenerates who were supposed to be locked away but, for lack of a better option, have been called into service.

The economy, then, opened the door for these eyesores to flood the Web. But it’s just the gatekeeper. It can’t be held responsible for everything that happens afterward.

Rot Rating: One yellow tooth.

The sites
We wouldn’t be seeing these ads unless there were sites giving them airtime. So are they to blame? Couldn’t they censor or block the ads, preventing them from bubbling up?

Yes. And I have a perfect case study for this kind of villainy: The Big Money. We’re as guilty as the rest of the Internet. Here’s how they got to our site: TBM (and all of our sister publications, including Slate and Washingtonpost.com) uses both in-house and third-party ads, as discussed earlier. All of TBM’s scam ads come from third-party networks — Pulse360 and AdBlade , in particular. But TBM doesn’t have a contract with these networks. We do business with a network of ad networks — because one middle man is not enough — called Rubicon. We could tell Rubicon to stop sending us Pulse360 content, but the next ad network might have similar ads. It’s this level of complexity that allows the ads to proliferate. With so many parties involved, the buck has nowhere to stop.

(Msnbc.com also uses ad networks that place these ads.)

And so we come to a philosophical question: Do sites have a responsibility not to offer their readers dangerous content shipped in from outside? I say yes. But they still have to make money, and if this is what the ad networks are serving them, how much choice do they really have? They can block a certain ad, sure, but there are so many variants of these scam ads in the networks that it’s far too arduous to block them a la carte. They need institutional help from the networks themselves.

Rot Rating: Two yellow teeth.

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