No, no, not the Somali pirates that have faded into oblivion:
"Online pirates feed on legitimate ads" by Ryan Nakashima | Associated Press June 04, 2014
Where is the NSA when you really need them?
LOS ANGELES — Movie and music piracy thrives online in part because crafty website operators receive ad dollars from major companies like Comcast, Ford, and McDonald’s.
That’s the conclusion of several recent reports that shed light on Internet piracy’s funding sources.
Content thieves attract visitors with the promise of free downloads and streams of the latest hit movies, TV shows, and songs. Then they profit by pulling in advertising from around the Internet, often concealing their illicit activities so advertising brands remain unaware.
I paid for the printed paper as well as access to the Globe's website, and there will never be advertising here. I will simply stop blogging.
Pirate websites run ads that are sometimes covered up by other graphics. They automatically launch legitimate-looking websites as pop-up windows that advertisers don’t realize are associated with piracy. At the end of the day, the pirate website operators still receive a check for serving up a number of views and clicks.
The illicit activity is estimated to generate millions of dollars annually. That’s only a small portion of the roughly $40 billion of online ad spending every year, but it is helping to feed the creation of millions of copyright-infringing websites that provide stolen content....
Related:
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That clear things up for you?
The study, commissioned for the Digital Citizen’s Alliance, a Washington-based group that advocates for a safer Internet, sampled 596 of the worst-offending websites. Researchers discovered that the infringing websites were displaying ads from 89 premium brands like Walmart, McDonald’s, Google, Microsoft and Ford....
That’s similar to an estimate from DoubleVerify, an online fraud protection company. According to a DoubleVerify report released last May, rogue website operators cheat mainstream advertisers out of $6.8 million each month, mainly by ‘‘laundering’’ ad traffic in ways that are hard to detect.
‘‘There’s growing awareness of the unscrupulous tactics that sites will go to to collect their dollars,’’ said DoubleVerify chief operating officer Matt McLaughlin.
Several advertisers and top technology firms that operate ad networks — like Google and Microsoft — say the fraud is difficult to stop. Ads for Google’s Chromecast streaming device and Microsoft’s Bing search engine were among those that appeared on pirate websites.
The Interactive Advertising Bureau’s chief operating officer, Patrick Dolan, said in an e-mail interview that despite efforts at certifying ad networks that follow strict guidelines, it’s an insurmountable task to track the trillions of ads and millions of websites.
‘‘New sites are created every day, names change, URLs change,’’ he said. ‘‘It’s impossible to always stop the ads appearing in real time.’’
John Montgomery, chief operating officer of major ad-buying agency GroupM Interaction, said that by blacklisting some 4,000 pirate websites, his digital ad agencies withheld some $8 million from pirate websites operators in 2012 and $13 million in 2013.
But he says GroupM and other advertising agencies need to get better at choking off the flow of funds.
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