Facebook’s 3rd Biggest Advertiser is a Bing Affiliate Scam

Matt Cutts is the head of Google’s anti-webspam team and tonight he came across what looks like a huge trove of scammy, spammy spam – on Facebook. And it involves Microsoft. Advertising publication AdAge reported tonight on findings from advertising analysts that Facebook sold an estimated $1.86 billion in worldwide advertising for 2010, an amazing sum. Who’s spending all that money on Facebook ads? A long, long tail of self-serve advertisers for sure – but near the head of the tail is someone that should have raised a whole lot of red flags.

At the end of the AdAge article is a passing mention that the 3rd largest advertiser across all of Facebook, after AT&T and Match.com, is a mysterious company listed as Make-my-baby.com. That site bought an estimated 1.75 million ad impressions in the third quarter alone. It doesn’t seem like a very nice company. (Update: That word million doesn’t seem right, in order for this company to be the third largest advertiser on Facebook, that’s got to be a typo. It’s possible that AdAge mistyped this, that’s the simplest explanation. I’ve asked the reporter for clarification and apologize for not getting it prior. Thanks as always to our eagle eyed commenters.)

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Matt Cutts did something anyone could have done. He visited Make-my-baby.com – but be careful if you do the same.

What is it? It’s a paper-doll-type site that lets you put eyeglasses and mustaches on top of a funny looking baby’s face. At least that appears to be what it is; before you can do anything the site says you have to install “a browser plug-in to present an enhanced experience.” If you do so, according to the fine print, your browser’s default search and home page will be switched to Bing. Once you do so, the affiliate company behind the toolbar, called Zugo, will capture a slice of the revenue whenever you click on a search ad.

Apparently the whole thing is working out pretty well for everyone involved. Zugo, or whatever company in a chain of affiliates it is that’s behind this, has found a toolbar promotion strategy that converts very well. Enough people install this plug-in, and it captures enough downstream revenue, that it pays off for the company to buy more Facebook ads than any company on earth, except for AT&T and Match.com.

Cutts writes on Google Buzz tonight,

The “terms and conditions” link [on Make-my-baby.com] takes you to http://mmb.bingstart.com/terms/ which has phrases like “If Chrome (“CR”) is installed on your PC we may change the default setting of your home page on CR to Bingstart.com.”

I also noticed this phrase in the Zugo toolbar section: “To uninstall the Toolbar, please visit the Toolbar FAQ ( http://www.zugo.com/toolbar/faq/ ).” Sadly, that url is a broken link. It looks like a few people have had trouble uninstalling the Bing/Zugo toolbar, according to pages like http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/questions/746034 or http://mymountain.blogspot.com/2010/03/how-to-remove-bingzugo-toolbar-hijack.html

If make-my-baby.com is Facebook’s 3rd biggest advertiser, I wonder how many people are installing this software without reading the fine print that says “Installing the toolbar includes managing the browser default search settings and setting your homepage to bing.com” ?

Some might say that all is fair in love, war and affiliate marketing – that this is just smart work by whoever is behind it. Of course these are 3rd party analysts reporting on the advertisers, too. Make-My-Dumb-Baby might only be the 4th or 5th largest advertiser in reality. It may be spending only a few hundred thousand dollars a year, we can’t know from the outside. ComScore, the firm cited for the advertising analysis, does make its very good global name from doing these kinds of estimates well, though.

Either way, I think that prompting people to give access to their browser’s settings under false pretense, and then changing their search provider and home page, is unethical.

It’s pretty remarkable that even at the top of this giant success story of Facebook advertising, and perhaps near the top of the story of Bing’s steady rise as a search engine, is a Web 1.0-style pulling the wool over the eyes of gullible internet users. Is that a sustainable monetization strategy? Maybe it is. There is, as they say, a sucker born every minute. There may well be a sucker found every minute too who wants to customize a baby picture on the internet.

Between the incredible growth of casual games that arguably do little for the collective human experience but consume a growing amount of it each day, and monetization like this, it’s hard sometimes to take Facebook seriously when it says it wants to bring people together and make the world a better place.

Is no one minding the store? Or are they just minding the cash register and turning away from what the customers are up to? It’s in the short-term economic interests of both Facebook and Microsoft to ignore what affiliates are doing. “It’s entirely possible, even likely, that Facebook and Microsoft didn’t realize this was going on,” Cutts said tonight. “I wouldn’t assume they were aware of what was going on.”

It’s notable that this came to light just hours after Facebook posted a late-night retraction of its controversial new feature that allowed 3rd party apps on the site to request the home addresses and phone numbers of users.

To be fair, it must be very, very challenging to run, grow and innovate with a company that serves 600 million people around the world with a radically new kind of technology (social networking).

I emailed press@facebook.com and press@microsoft.com to request comment. The press email to Facebook generally gets routed to the right person to answer a question, though it is after midnight West Coast time right now. The email to Microsoft’s press account bounced.

We’ve emailed Microsoft’s PR firm as well and will update this post with any comment we receive.

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