ANSI standard ad-supported piracy?

The Trichordist blog started pointing out the ad-supported piracy problem quite a while ago, so let's have a quick look to see how well the adtech business has done at cleaning up its act.

Should no longer be a story, right? The Internet solves problems on Internet time, after all.

Here's the plan. I'll spend one minute doing a basic check, then go work on something else. It's not as if there isn't enough broken stuff on the Internet I could be figuring out.

So I'll do a web search for

[Michael Jackson MP3]

I'll make it easy for them by picking a well-known non-Creative-Commons recording artist. I'm expecting to come up dry here. (After all, why would any sensible Internet company send me to a pirate site when they could make some money by sending me to a legit music download site, or sell me some tracks themselves?)

ANSI ad on a pirate site

Ouch. Probably the most obvious copyrighted works in the world, and who's got their fingers in the pie?

  • Amazon
  • BuzzCity
  • Google, Google, Google
  • LinkShare
  • LiveInternet
  • OpenX

But turn off your banner blindness for a minute, and check out that banner ad.

It's an ad for The American National Standards Institute (ANSI).

Why is ANSI running an ad on a questionable an infriging site, when it could be buying ads on a legit site that covers engineering and science? Spewing ads into the web's less reputable corners just feeds the growing impression that "technology" is a rent-seeking, deluxe-bus-riding racket that's focused on diverting value from others instead of creating new wealth.

So here are a few questions for ANSI.

  • How did your ad end up on an infringing site? Can you retrace its steps?

  • What agencies or other intermediaries did you work with to place the ad? Did they make any guarantees about what kind of site it would show up on?

  • Have you received a refund for ad impressions on problem sites?

  • If you don't have the information to answer the first three questions, what is broken about the way you buy advertising?

I'll keep you posted on what I come up with.

Don Marti · #