back to article Google, Facebook and chums launch web blacklist to nail ad scammers

Tech big wigs including Facebook and Yahoo! have forged a giant blacklist to block fake web traffic contributing to advertising fraud, said Google ad man Vegard Johnsen. The Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) pilot program will nix bot traffic using a blacklist which could cut a significant portion of web traffic; Google's …

  1. Pascal Monett Silver badge

    Halleluia !

    Yes, cut them down and smother them in a burning blanket.

    I really hope this will become an industry standard. Anything that cuts into malware revenue is a godsend.

  2. patrick_bateman

    hmm

    Are they really putting the effort in though, after all, when people have a problem, what do they do.. search about it, searching these days is a term also used for 'collecting user information'

    So the link someone clicked on that got made available through facebook creates an issue. the user searches Google for an answer, data collection galore.

    All they are annoyed about is there ads arnt the ones getting attention, that's like spam sender becoming an official company, still sending out spam but saying tut tut to everyone else doing it

  3. Lyndon Hills 1

    DoubleClick Blacklist

    I also blacklisted DoubleClick, and it cut my traffic down too.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Good for advertisers

    I guess this is good, although it affects most users only very indirectly. They're blacklisting fake web traffic that generates ad clicks (fraud), not blacklisting fake advertisement sources which might contain malware. This would help you if you're paying per click for your ads because then (hopefully) you're not paying for bot clicks. It would also theoretically help everyone indirectly by reducing the advertising cost by eliminating/reducing this fraud, although that's probably not measurable.

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