Current publishers place too much poor quality advertisements on their internet pages and sites , which turns the whole Web space into a clickbait labyrinth. As the loads of information on the Internet increased too much, it became too hard to track all the traffic. In addition, this is the opportunity for shady resources to publish ads as the established publishers. They use such situation to deceive ad metric system and to monetize so-called phantom website visitors, or the visitors, who clicked the link unwillingly and came to their site with this popups. Established publishers refused to use Google as a platform for traffic, and they started to deal with shady brokers to help them earn money through unwilling visitors.

Due to these conditions smartphone industry and apps creators are fighting together against online ads hell, by producing and developing different ad-blockers. In case the ads industry wouldn’t care about consumer’s desires and needs it’s future can be predicted as a strong decline and, as a result, the total crush.

This overload with shady website link ads on Google and other searсh platforms made people to use Facebook and other social media as a main mean to get news. Moreover, Facebook is leading as a news resource comparing by traffic volume with Google.  Outbrain and Taboola as traffic brokers became popular too. Advertisement publishers are not interested about the place from which their audience is coming from, as well as the place where the ad was shown until it isn’t connected with the illegal or adult content.Virtual assistant is a great resource to hire an assistant to solve the problem of ads and shady websites, as virtual assistant can prepare the list of such websites and find specialists to find a clear platform and ad publisher for your business.

 Talking about the tendency of shady resources to publish ads as the established publishers: for example, let’s look at toastedballs.com. It has 50 mln viewers a month, mostly, males, with an incredibly miserable interaction of users with content, but virtually this website has no backlinks, inappropriate traffic. This situation means that all these viewers were bought with adult popups, the ad tech is from Criteo, paid on a CPM base. Criteo is not interested about the place from which their audience is coming from, though they rely on algorithms. Analyzing such type of approach, it’s easy to come to the idea that Criteo investing into a useless website to earn cash from adult traffic.

 Traffic brokers are proposing traffic laundering through creating a chain of many shell sites to redirect traffic, which was gained through unwilling visitors, deceived by popups, fake browser tabs or pop-unders and the most part of these viewers are lead to the low end web sources. All this system serves to overcome the ads’ metrics and monetize the “empty” numbers of visitors.

You will be sent for less than a second to different shell sites in case your IP shows you’re valuable for the ads tech business. The purpose of such algorithm is to raise the rate and quality of visitors for these web resources. It allows them to conclude contracts that are more profitable and earn more money. (Scheme #1)

 Even the huge brands and worldwide known labels like Adobe, Alliance Data, Omnicom display ads through these shell sites, nevertheless, it’s not their fault, it’s because of their advertising agencies, which failed to find out they’re dealing with “bad guys”, who are gaming with ads tech.

 Problem #1: 

 The scheme is designed for websites, which has no possibilities to convert traffic into money directly through ads as the content they have is not legitimate. You can recognize these websites with the help of Alexa, all of them were launched in autumn 2015, and their audience coming from traffic brokers. The demographic map is remarkable: for example, rich males from Caucasus, well educated, at the age of 25-44.

 Couple years ago Google was the ruling authority on the Web, and all the publishers played according to it’s rules to get the higher place in the list of search results. But recently, as social media conquered the Internet and users started to pay more attention for recommendations from social media, ad tech creators has concentrated on catchy headlines, forgetting about clean HTML. Such conditions lead to the clickbait boom on the Internet. (Problem #2)

 Problem #2: 

 Another way to get money from the number of visitors for traffic brokers is to conclude long-term contracts with huge established labels (for example, Times Inc) to place their banners as a recommendation under each article with a catchy headline (rumors about celebrities). These banners have to attract new visitors on a regular basis through clickbait.(Problem #3)

 Problem #3: 

Recommendation banners leading to shell websites

The links such brokers demonstrate through the banners are differs a lot from the content on the webpage, as well as from the IP of a user. What’s even worse, is that about 50% of them sent the user to different shell sites, overloaded with ad. Nevertheless, it’s quite enough to pay 3 cents to Taboola for each viewer as the CPR is high. In this way OutBrain attracted Times Inc to conclude a contract in 2014 with an income of $100 mln for Times, but according to the information above this deal would bring more damages than profit for the brand, as Times readers will be constantly sent to shady websites with trashy content.

 Users are so over fatigued with tons of ads and clickbait hell, so that smartphone designers and Google started to produce adblock programs, the popularity of adblockers is a protest against new format of the Web. But the further popularization of this tendency would bring losses for all. The problem is that ad blockers can’t help to end up the main issue, the evolution of the Internet is highly needed.

 Problem #4: 

 The wave of adblock programs and other browser programs to avoid ads made digital marketing ineffective. That means ad tech needs evolution too, until they wouldn’t change, the situation will be getting even worse.

 Problem #5:

 Ad publishers are focused on short-term perspective, not caring much about the quality of the content, trying to maximize the income and save more money on advertising technologies.

They have to interact with Internet users to understand which kind of ads is appropriate for them, because ads is the necessary evil to keep the Web free for use.

 In case both users and ad tech producers want Internet to stay free, they have to think how to create a system to satisfy common needs and find a respective compromise. Ad designers need to assess the nature of advertisement space and concede that Internet clients can’t perceive huge loads of various advertisements, also, they should concentrate on quality. The payment for the prime promotion space must be reasonable, to provide the rules maintenance by ad publishers, and stop to sponsor traffic brokers and other shady structures.