In a classic “Thank You For Smoking” spin, Zango CTO Keith Smith has responded to my post on Snopes pushing adware:
To be sure, Snopes was pushing Zango: in exactly the same way that it continues to "push", oh, let's see, umm, QuickBooks, the Oreck Air Purifier, eBay, a call spoofing service (served up helpfully by Google), and an e-tutorial service for kids who aren't doing well in school. In other words, Snopes.com serves ads, and makes money from those ads.
This is sophistry at its best and ignores the key fact: This pop-under ad was pushed consistently (at least in my geographic region) and could have easily been turned off through the Fastclick UI. Furthermore, this was one of several pop-unders — it was not a banner ad or a Google adword (which the site has plenty of).
As I’ve said before, I have no problem with advertising. I do have a problem with constantly pushing this type of ad. I did notify Snopes months ago, and they ignored my notification. Perhaps they considered my email spam, perhaps they never saw it, perhaps they didn’t understand it — whatever — but the ultimate point is, it was an ongoing campaign that was prominent on this site.
Later, after ending the original post with “these aren’t the droids you’re looking for" ”Nothing to see here folks. Move along” (yes, he really does say that), Keith then pushes the old “we give great content in exchange for loading your machine up with crap”:
Zango uses desktop advertising to help keep the content we DO install FREE. In other words, if you install our SpamBlockerUtility, you really do get an anti-spam engine that you would otherwise have to pay money for. And yes, while you have it installed, we will show you some targeted ads, a trade-off that we describe no less than three separate times during the install process. But you really (honestly, truly) do get the anti-spam software that the ad referred to.
This is disingenous. You may get a spam blocker, but what you get in return is patently awful.
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