One site mentioned in the story, Kontraband.com, features nudity and sexual material, mostly of a comical variety, running alongside an ad from Capital One, among others. The publication also refers to an unnamed site where an Equifax ad ran next to video of two women “spreading butter all over themselves.”
Adotas said its interest in publishing the story was not to judge the content of sites like Kontraband, but to point out that advertisers and the networks that place their ads are either purposefully associating themselves with adult-oriented sites or have lost control of their placements.
According to a study by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers, online advertising has grown to nearly $3 billion in the U.S. market. Standard web page banners, such as those at the heart of the Adotas story, account for 20 percent of online advertising.
Last year, MSN and Yahoo both shut down adult communities and chat rooms after several mainstream advertisers discovered their ads were being used to support the areas and pulled their ads.
But Adotas reporter Pesach Lattin speculates that these ad placement networks may not be entirely unaware of where their ads are being placed, saying, “When you are desperate for traffic, it seems that you are willing to place ads on any site that will generate traffic.”
He also points to one IM exchange with an anonymous source from a unnamed ad network who told him, “There is so much traffic made from some of these sites that if we don’t include them, someone else will.”
Kessler International earlier this year published a study claiming that ad networks routinely place tags on sites their clients might rather not be associated with and advised companies to maintain monitoring services to protect themselves from negative publicity.
“[This] can be done by conducting regular Internet searches of the company's name, domain name and key words to see if they are linking to undesirable sites,” CEO Michael Kessler said.