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Hampered by Debt, Zango Shuts Down

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 occasional lawsuit -- gave it flak for installing potentially harmful a  [...]
Posted: Thursday, April 23rd 2009

Spam Spectre On The Rise

Only a few months after the shutdown of San Jose-based web hosting company McColo, which was reportedly responsible for an estimated 75% of the internet's daily junk, spam is back where it was before the crackdown. The report from Postini, which provides e-mail security to 15 million users of Google's enterprise services, states spam is growing faster than ever, with spammers diversifyi  [...]
Posted: Wednesday, April 1st 2009

Boon to Proofreaders: Gmail Debuts 'Undo Send'

Mere days after Google unveiled an email preview feature for YouTube videos, Yelp reviews and Flickr and Picasa photos, Gmail Labs is introducing yet another feature that enables marketers to preempt a botched email blast. Undo Send enables users to effectively unsend emails that were prematurely sent -- or that contain errors. The window of opportunity is a small one, however. "This feature can'  [...]
Posted: Friday, March 20th 2009

How-To: Using SEO to Manage Your Online Reputation

Is there a page you don't like about your company on the web? The best way to "take care" of undesirable material with a high organic ranking is through search engine optimization, writes SEOmoz. Google has posted advice on how to remove unwanted pages, but its strategy is mostly to contact  [...]
Posted: Wednesday, March 11th 2009

Twitter Finally Draws Attention from the Spammer Community

Perhaps as a tribute to its mainstream legitimacy, Twitter's turf has been invaded by at least two spammer-orchestrated scams. In the most widespread of the two, users receive a direct message from a follower, bearing this or similar bait: "hey! check out this funny blog about you...", followed by a link to a webpage. After clicking on the link, victims are presented with a false Twitter login page. Usernames and passwords entered on the page become vehicles for spammers to distribute sim  [...]
Posted: Tuesday, January 6th 2009

'Spear Fishing' -- That is, Personalized Spamming -- Quadruples

"Personalized" spam, or messages tailored to individuals based on personal information stolen from the web, is on the rise, comprising more than 0.4% of all September attacks versus less than 0.1% a year ago. As nearly 200 billion spam messages are sent each day, that means 800 million of them are targeted specifically to an individual, Cisco Systems found in its annual security study. Some 90% of all  [...]
Posted: Friday, December 19th 2008

Ad Clutter Hurts Brand Reps, Numbs Users

Nearly 30% of online adults will immediately leave a website if they perceive it as cluttered with ads. And over 75% of those that remain on cluttered sites pay less attention to the ads there, reports Burst Media (via MarketingCharts).   [...]
Posted: Monday, December 15th 2008

1/5 of Marketers Send Emails After Users Unsubscribe

20% of top brand marketers keep sending additional emails to users, even after confirming requests from them to "unsubscribe" from an email marketing list, according to a research study from Return Path, MarketingCharts writes.   [...]
Posted: Thursday, November 20th 2008

MostChoice to Fork Over $4.8M for Stuffing Rival with Fake Leads

A Colorado District Court jury awarded $4.8 million to NetQuote after ruling that its rival, MostChoice, submitted over 3500 false applications for insurance quotes to its website. After receiving multiple complaints from insurers that it was filing unqualified leads, NetQuote conducted an investigation and discovered MostChoice had hired a contractor, Brandon Byrd, to submit falls apps to its site. Byrd   [...]
Posted: Friday, November 14th 2008

Identity Fraud in Decline, but Costs Up

Identity fraud has declined in most parts of the United States, even as costs to those defrauded increase and fraudsters turn to unexpected channels to commit fraud, according to a Javelin Strategy & Research study released earlier this year, reports Retailer Daily.   [...]
Posted: Thursday, November 13th 2008

Spammers Reap Plenty on 0.00001% Response Rate

By effectively "hacking" an existing spam network, researchers unearthed the "economics" of being an email spammer, reports the BBC. Here's the secret: high volume and a virally-expanding network, which means even the tiniest response rate can produce millions of dollars in profit per year. Computer scientists at the University of California, Berkeley and San Diego conducted a month-long study of the Storm Network, a spam oper  [...]
Posted: Thursday, November 13th 2008

One Easy Fix Could Cure Email Marketers' Impotence

As wallets slacken and consumers grow more conscious of where their money is going, online retailers have become more aggressive about using email to promote discounts. A recent report found online shopping is more appealing as gas prices increase. Armed with this and other optimistic forecasts, nearly three-fourths of internet retailers are prepared to survive the economic climate -- an  [...]
Posted: Monday, October 27th 2008

Q3 Click-Fraud Rate Holds Steady; Botnet Activity Rises

The average click-fraud rate for Q3 2008 held steady overall at 16%, but a 10% rise in botnet activity - and a 28% overall click-fraud rate from botnets - is potentially undermining ad-industry efforts to combat click fraud, according to figures from Click Forensics'   [...]
Posted: Monday, October 27th 2008

Brad Pitt, Beyonce 'Most Dangerous Names to Search'

A recent McAfee study finds users seeking Brad Pitt-oriented themes, including photos, screensavers or desktop wallpaper, have an 18 percent chance of encountering malware, reports Ars Technica. At-risk searchers sometimes click on fake celebrity websites that infect their computers with Trojans and worms. "These websites differ from standard malware landing pads, inasmuc  [...]
Posted: Monday, September 22nd 2008

Predictive Analytics Invade Email, Subscriber 'Personas' Targeted

Email marketing solutions firm iPost has launched a production release of Autotarget, its predictive analytics tool. Autotarget analyzes data from a company's business channels, segments customers into like-buying "personas," then enables marketers to send targeted emails to each group. It works by defining customers that responded either favorably or poorly to certain offers or campaigns, then "predicting" which are most likely to be  [...]
Posted: Friday, August 29th 2008

ListManager 10 Takes Aim for Better Email Deliverability

Lyris has introduced ListManager 10, an email marketing engine that promises "unrivaled email deliverability." A recent Harris Interactive survey found that while 58 percent of consumers consider email a good means of maintaining contact with companies, only 77 percent of invited email   [...]
Posted: Tuesday, August 12th 2008

Public Feedback Wanted on Global Mobile Ad Guidelines

The Mobile Marketing Association is soliciting public feedback for its global Mobile Advertising Guidelines. Like the Interactive Ad Bureau (IAB), which releases guidelines for various forms of interactive marketing, the MMA believes unified guid  [...]
Posted: Monday, August 11th 2008

How-To: 5 Ways to Increase Email Deliverability

Return Path's Q2 2008 Reputation Benchmark Report (pdf) found e-mails sent from "legitimate" e-mail servers averaged a delivery rate of 56 percent. 20 percent were rejected; 8 percent filtered out of the inbox. The rest — 16 percent — were bounces. So nearly half of the time, e-mail marketers' messages don't get through. But there are ways to increase deliverability, insists George Bilbrey, Return Path's general mana  [...]
Posted: Wednesday, August 6th 2008

Gmail Creates 'Never Send it to Spam' Filter

Google's Gmail, which lets users filter emails based on certain criteria (all email from a certain address, or featuring given keywords, can be automatically archived, labeled, or deleted, for example), just added a new option to its filtering system: "Never send to spam." "Ticking this should ensure that a certain email [with defined criteria] will not be accidentally sorted into the spam folder," wrote Blogoscoped. The "Spa  [...]
Posted: Wednesday, August 6th 2008

Online Security a Growing American Concern

Americans are increasingly worried about the safety of their identities and financial information online, according to new research from Mintel, reports MarketingCharts. However, identity theft is actually on the decline, Mintel said. Nearly two-thirds of US adults (65 percent) are more conce  [...]
Posted: Tuesday, July 29th 2008

Click Fraud Stabilizes but Botnets Burgeon

The industry-average click-fraud rate was 16.25 percent in Q2, down from Q1's 16.3 percent but up from 2Q07's 15.8 percent, according to pay-per-click (PPC) figures from Click Forensics and click-fraud reporting service Click Fraud Index, MarketingCharts   [...]
Posted: Friday, July 25th 2008

Spam Still a Problem; 'Finance' Tops Spammers' Favorite Topics

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. For the McAfee spam test, 50 people worldwide were asked to web-surf without a spam filter. Some results follow: UK residents are most likely to receive sex spam, and emails from Nigerian nobles in "dire straits." The most popular offers were financial: usually solicitat  [...]
Posted: Wednesday, July 2nd 2008

ExactTarget Publishes New Rules, Best Practices for Updated CAN-SPAM Act

ExactTarget released a whitepaper (pdf) to familiarize marketers with updated clauses to the CAN-SPAM Act. The CAN-SPAM Act applies to commercial email and requires the following: That all email contain a clear, valid, opt-out mechanism. The opt-out cannot demand a password, or any other email beyond the perso  [...]
Posted: Thursday, June 26th 2008

Marketers Slow to Respond to Problem of Blocked Email Images

Over 50 percent of images in promotional emails are routinely blocked by email and webmail programs, says a recent survey by the Email Experience Council (eec), the email marketing arm of the Direct Marketing Association (DMA), wr  [...]
Posted: Wednesday, June 11th 2008

Google Goes to Court for Deceptive PPC Ads

New Jersey resident Jenna Goddard is suing Google for serving pay-per-click ads that bamboozle searchers into registering for paid subscription services, reports MediaPost. The ads in question offer users ringtones and other mobile services on a subscription basis. Goddard claims Google violates its mob  [...]
Posted: Thursday, June 5th 2008