[MINDsprinter]

A very interesting article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/11/te...gy/11push.html

Seems sites like concierge.com and forbesauto.com are using Zango and other adware services to pop up content and articles instead of just ads and counting them as pageviews:

Entrepreneur.com’s pop-ups were unusual because they contained news content, like articles on how to start a small business, making them hard to distinguish from an intentional visit to Entrepreneur.com’s site. This hailstorm of pop-ups more than tripled Entrepreneur’s reported traffic before it was detected and factored out a month later.

Looks like another way to defraud advertisers and affiliates.

[Donuts]

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The disappearing act came when Nielsen/NetRatings, a leading company in measuring Internet traffic, sharply cut its previously reported statistics for the financial Web site Entrepreneur.com to 2 million unique visitors in April, from 7.6 million.

Why the change? For millions of Web surfers, Entrepreneur.com visited them — and not the other way around, the measurement company said.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Devaluing Zango pops, love it. Gotta ask why they'd ever count them in the first place. Faking traffic means charging higher ad rates, among other things.

The lies are beginning to take their toll.

How long until we see somebody buy a website to learn the traffic was fake pops, and the buyer sues in court for damages done by the seller by misrepresenting actual traffic with fake Zango bullcrap...