Like most of you I am an avid internet surfer, and I gotta say that 9 out of 10 times the ads I see on the sides of the pages aren’t for Target or some targted ad for the things I shop for (15 inch black double sided…you know what let’s say “apples”) but they are these godawful “Language professors hate him! How to learn a new language in 10 days!” or “Get muscle using this simple trick!”
I know there are plenty of stupid people out there, but there seriously cannot be enough people out there buying into this BS to fund the amount of money that is being put into advertising these scams. So how do these companies have enough money to flood the marketplace like they are?
These sound like scams, but at least they promise some kind of product or service that someone might want. There’s a common genre of “ad” I’ve seen even below this, that tries to trick people into clicking on it without actually advertizing anything.
It’s an interesting question, I look forward to seeing an answer for this one.
The companies running the scams typically aren’t the ones taking out the ads. Generally these are affiliate scams, run something like a pyramid scheme.
You’ve seen ads like “my sister’s mum makes $x a day on the internet, here’s how…” right? If you sign up for that, you’ll be talked into paying to buy into a get-rich-quick scheme. That scheme instructs you how to take out advertisements (at your expense), that one way or another funnel through to the scammer’s sites. They extract money from the victim somehow (by selling them something or by signing them up to the scheme) and you’re supposed to get a commission.
Of course you probably won’t see your commission. You’ve paid money to paint someone’s fence. The victim will be ripped off one way or another, either by paying for something they never receive or is fake, or by becoming part of the get rich scheme. The scammers get free advertising, an additional layer of obfuscation to hide behind, and more victims than they know what to do with. You wind up doing the dirty work, and probably breaking the law, or at least the terms and conditions of ad networks and PTC programs, which of course makes it that much harder to do anything when you do get ripped off.
Sometimes the scammers will insert themselves as middle-men for a legit product. Let’s say Reputable BigCo is selling widgets online. To help improve sales they offer a 10% commission for sales referred via special tracking links. The scammers will take advantage of this by having their get-rich-quck students run advertisements and spam that redirect people to Reputable BigCo referral links. The scammers pocket the commission on whatever products they do sell. What Reputable BigCo doesn’t know is that their products are being misrepresented in advertisements and spam. (Often this is done with services: referrals for dating sites that pay a referral commission for new signups, for example).
While it might look like the scammer is selling weight loss pills or ugg boots or whatever, the goods are irrelevant. That’s just a carrier wave for their real business, which is a type of pyramid scheme. It works even with no goods at all. Typically, though, the scams are a front for businesses set up for this specific purpose: dropship sellers of pills and knockoff merchandise that sell solely via affiliate schemes.
Although many of these products are sold via affiliate links, it is not part of a pyramid scheme.
Most of the type of ads you have described make money by offering a low cost or free introductory offer, at the same time (usually as deceptively as possible) sign you up for a recurring, much higher charge that is automatically charged after a certain period of time.
For example, your “just pay $2.99 for our secret guide” starts dinging your credit card for $50 to even $100/month for some additional service that was mentioned in some very very very small text when you signed up. These recurring charges are also notoriously difficult to track down and cancel.
So not surprisingly, companies that rip off people for tons of money are able to pay high commissions, so the ads are very common.
Also sad, but in spite of the shady billing practices of these companies, they are still shown on major web sites.
For an example, an ad shown currently on MSNBC.com (health main page):
Ad text:
Offer on landing page:
Terms & conditions, only displayed when clicking on a small link on the bottom of the page:
In addition, you probably won’t even receive your free trial until AFTER the 10 day trial period has expired. So in the case above, you would be charged $97.88 10 days after your order, and probably before you even receive it.
So here’s the other way of looking at it: Why aren’t more internet ad spaces sold to more legitimate-looking businesses? The fact that these “scam” companies are profitable enough to afford the ad spaces doesn’t explain why they seem to dominate them.
I reloaded this thread 5 times and got ads for Jeep, Colorado Tourism, Toaster Strudel, and M an Ms. The 5th time was a “free $1000 Walmart Gift card”. So a lot of companies are to a degree. But I’d speculate that the conversion rate on online ads is so low that legetimate companies don’t devote a lot of resources to them even though it’s only nickel and dimes compared to TV ads and whatnoy.
