There are very few sites on the web that are considered to be of unquestionable authority and reputation but Snopes.com is one of those site - or at least it was until today. It isn’t that their information has become doubtful or that their dedication to busting all those urban legends has waned. What is in question is the ethics of the people running Snopes.com and that in my opinion casts a far bigger shadow over the site.
According to a post today by Alex Eckelberry over at the Sunbelt Blog (their are a security software development company - Kerio and CounterSpy are a couple of their programs) the folks over at Snopes.com have been consistently displaying Zango related popup ads when you visit the Snopes.com site:
I contacted Snopes about six months ago to complain, but they ignored my message.
Note that:
1. This is one of only two popups that constantly come up on the Snopes site (the other one is for a registry cleaner, and that’s probably another story when I have time). It’s not like a one-off bad popup that happens in a rotation with other popups. These two popups are there practically every time you visit Snopes (see for yourself).2. This would mean that Snopes is getting paid well for these popups (either pay-per-click or by page views). Advertisers like Zango don’t pay to run ads that don’t get a good response. And likewise, a site like Snopes won’t waste valuable ad inventory on poorly-paying ads. And I firmly believe that the fact that the ads do well is because of Snopes’ credibility.
In other words, Snopes is pushing adware because it makes them money. And I believe it’s a lot of money.
And that’s not an urban legend. It’s shameful.
For those who may not be familar with Zango - well, lets put it this way. They are one of the biggest adware distributors on the web - especially of the drive-by installation type used by web sites of questionable ethics. So to have Snopes.com profiting from this kind of association and not even being willing to talk about it when the matter is raised is not good. In fact it raises a whole dark cloud of ethically responsibility over the site.
UPDATE: It appears from a post on the Sunbelt blog today by Alex that Snopes has reconsidered the whole thing
Well, it seems the firestorm of protest has had its effect: Snopes (apparently) is no longer pushing Zango. This seems to have changed yesterday evening (the last time I confirmed the popup was at about 4 pm EDT yesterday).
Conversation Tags: Zango, Snopes, Sunbelt, adware, security
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Hes Zango's CTO
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http://smithkl42.blogspot.com/2008/01/regrettab...
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It’s not like a one-off bad popup that happens in a rotation with other popups. These two popups are there practically every time you visit Snopes (see for yourself).
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So you may not get them the first, second or fifth time you visit the sites but chances are very good that at some point you will encounter them.
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