Facebook Bans Two More Platform Ad and Offer Networks
This past July, following increased concerns about the ways Facebook Platform ad networks were incorporating user data in their ads and landing pages, Facebook released updated Platform advertising guidelines that more clearly stated what was and wasn’t permissible on the Facebook Platform. A few weeks earlier, it had suspended two Platform ad networks from operating on Facebook altogether.
Facebook told developers it would take new measures against scams in offer networks last week. But now, after a week in which offer networks have come under increasing scrutiny for running deceptive ads, the company has announced that it has banned two more Platform offer and ad networks “who have repeatedly violated our policies.” According to Facebook,
First, deceptive ads are a widespread issue on the Web and one we fight aggressively. This battle is not new and it’s far from over. We faced stimulus scam ads on our own system earlier this year and pushed them off the site with rigorous enforcement. We did the same months later when deceptive ads from third-party ad networks appeared in applications. We’re doing that again now as we see them appear in the form of offers.
Since introducing updated policies for third-party ads on Facebook Platform in July, we have disabled two entire ad networks and suspended or brought into compliance over 100 applications for ad-related violations in regions around the world, over half of which had more than one million monthly active users.
We recognize that monitoring ads isn’t the first area of focus for an entrepreneur just getting started with social applications. That’s why ad networks that don’t play by the rules should expect to be our first point of contact in our line of enforcement. Our policies are clear. If you’re an ad network and don’t comply with them, you are doing a disservice to your customers, and you should expect your business opportunities on Facebook to cease.
In addition to legal notices that have been sent to many ad networks to mandate ongoing compliance on Facebook Platform, today we are disabling two additional offer and ad networks who have repeatedly violated our policies.
We don’t know who they are for now. We’ll be updating with more.
Update: Still no more word on the identity of the two ad networks. If you know more, please let us know at mail AT insidefacebook DOT com.
November 5th, 2009 at 8:41 pm
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November 5th, 2009 at 8:55 pm
Haven’t the big boys been quite bad at this lately? Surely it would be a bad sign to nail the smaller companies and leave the big ones intact?
November 6th, 2009 at 5:39 am
Great job to facebook, myspace just lets these scammers sit there and they wonder why they are losing the social media war.
November 6th, 2009 at 8:08 am
Let’s hope it’s evony and cartoonify. Worst perpetrators of false advertising I’ve ever seen. Evony uses sex to sell a medieval farming sim and cartoonify uses professionally designed charactures to sell an mii-like avatar generator. I’ve noticed cartoonify running some adds that more accurately portray their service lately, but I’m still holding a grudge.
November 6th, 2009 at 8:55 am
@Joseph, those are advertisers, not ad networks.
November 10th, 2009 at 10:48 am
[...] card or free gift online they’ll follow up by using the card or buying a product. Besides deceptive ads, increasing the number of branded ads that users truly find valuable is one of the major challenges [...]
November 11th, 2009 at 8:14 am
I am a student studying computer games design at uni and decided to investigate Evony.com.
Just to see what some of these games are like etc. etc.
The game is actually kind of cool (found myself addicted and even spent a little money on it).
But I started to notice HUGE bandwidth use by the site as I played.
I am not the only one either, there are comments on the evony forums about this.
This is odd because all of the client info, the animations etc. are all downloaded in one big download at the start.
There is no streaming media so I began to wonder what was going on.
To cut a long story short I decided to break the law and reverse engineer Evony’s client.
Not to cheat. Not to rip them off or even to use even a scrap of the code.
But just to poke about a bit and find out what was going on, maybe even offer them some ways to improve things.
Aside from the fact that the whole thing is very poorly constructed (it is really very beginner coder level stuff. Reminds me of a lot of
what the first year students produce for assignments) it contained some very interesting information.
Included with the client are 2 peices of tracking software that monitor your web use and which applications you have open while the client is running.
These do not install independently on the machine though due to the limitations of flash and do not actually damage anything.
But they harvest massive volumes of information. My firewall was blocking a lot of outgoing transmissions and it turns out that these
were the data trying to be sent out. So they know nothing about me. lol.
However there is a LOT of data coming IN over the ports the client uses. In otherwords it is downloading something into my cache for use later.
I have bandiwdth restriction which slows these types of tricks down and I completely clear my cache every couple of hours if I am heavily using the net.
I also noticed that all the varanbles etc. are named Civony still and that there are multiple references to UMGE.
Even a couple of folders are simply called UMGE, one of these folders contains one of the spyware programs.
So I can only guess at where the data would end up if I didnt have a good firewall.
There are also commented out sections in the code which contain references to UMGE and Lam himself, though low on details.
Thank you for reading this.
Lee
November 17th, 2009 at 12:12 am
[...] just throw any old application up on Facebook, for instance. There are rules which must be followed or else. Maybe Facebook hasn’t tried to directly monetize its position as much as it theoretically [...]