Oh No They Didn't! Answer Sites - You've been Faked

In The Rise of the Flog, I defined a fake blog as it applies to the online performance marketing world as:

Flog (Online Marketing):
1. Fake blog
2. First-person advertorial phrased in a way that makes it look like an authentic story, presented in a format similar in look and function to blogs

The fake blog was only the beginning. We saw the creation of the fake celebrity site and still running, the fake news sites, all of which necessitated new terminology to encapsulate the evil genius of the marketers. Thus, "fakevertising" became to be.

Today, it is with sad pride that we add to this vocabulary.

Faked (Online Marketing)
1. To have a useful, legitimate business model / site copied for use by a phony entities
2. To have a medium's trust used for profit and threatened

The latest site to become faked are answer sites (thanks to "jl" for one of the tips). With names like "AnswerBankPro" and "WebAnswersPro", they sound legitimate enough, and given how most people find them (via a pop left on their screen), they might assume them legitimate enough too. To any familiar with the fakeosphere, they seem almost like an inside joke - with one flogger personality writing to another.

 

Needless to say, like most sites that have been faked, no much work has gone into them to make them appear robust and legitimate.

The URL is http://webanswerspro.com/computers/internet/google/ (its pop-under origins are clear as there is javascript to resize the page)

Go to the root URL and currently, there is a blank page. Nor did they do a good job for those who might try going to one of the other levels, e.g. http://webanswerspro.com/computers/

Even the ad on the page is just for show, a dish ad with an href of http://webanswerspro.com/computers/internet/google/#.

But we aren't normal web users. Most pay attention to what they want, the marketing lingo that allows them to proceed, the elements of trust such as "Resolved Question," "Best Answer (chosen by voters),and "Question Status: Resolved"

As long as inventory remains cheap and abundant, we will continue to see more of this. It's also a great example of the complications associated with display that allow for meaningful cracks of inventory to continually appear. Right now the best defense is raising the awareness of media owners to know what shouldn't run and to promote innovation in performance marketing instead of the me-too burn and churn approach.

Comments

[Affiliate Marketing Blog]

I was actually never aware with this so far..
I am not so familiar with this fake stuffs.

[MLDina]

It really isn't surprising that people want to make a quick buck, but what does make me question their sanity is the decision to risk messing with the FTC. Do they really think that $300 is worth potential years in jail or hundreds of thousands in fines?

[Strangely]

Hi Jay
Funnily enough I just posted about one of these the other day.
http://strangelyperfect.tv/6406/watch-out-for-cleanup-registry-net/
The scam site (or mainly scam, as it does give reasonable tech info as well) is for IT technical help but was basically lifted straight from an old Yahoo!Answers posting. The rest of the site is similarly contructed using content scraping.

And now we have all the Google Treasure Chest (as an example) help postings on Yahoo! Answers, Google groups, Ripoff Report etc, I can now envisage a fake Scammer Help site using postings from such places to dress up a scam site!

[Gab Goldenberg]

Hey Jay,

I recently wrote a piece for bloguemarketinginteractif.com citing your perfect storm articles, in which I had some additional suggestions to eliminate this junk. In short, the bottom line is raising conversion rates for legitimate sites, such that they can bid more for media and price scammers out of the market.