Finding Free Advertising on the Web
The Internet is a valuable resource for advertising. Predominantly, businesses pay top dollar to have ads on websites.
While this does not come without its risks, such as not achieving the desired result or even having the ad pulled by an administrator due to complaints of it being grossly inappropriate.
However, there are many places that offer free advertising in exchange for giving them traffic or some other form of exposure. These can range from social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to blogs (of course) to article directories and video sites. You can also purchase banner space on search engines such as Google and Bing, both of which offer free ads through their AdWords service.
And many of these places have ad formats that are free to use. Facebook allows you to create simple image banners and post them to your page.
Google offers a few different sizes for their text ads, and Bing's text ads differ from Google's, but these ads are all free.
For video sites, like YouTube or Vimeo, many will allow free user-generated content (UGC) in the form of video thumbnails, which are small advertisements at the beginning of a video that entices viewers to click on the video so they can watch it in full. Sites like Newgrounds even offer "free" games, which users play while being exposed to advertisements.
The point is, there is no shortage of advertising opportunities on the Internet. However, not all advertising is created equal – and some are far more effective than others.
So how can you differentiate between the good, great and bad?
The first tip that comes to my mind is to always look at the site's reputation.
If a site has a good reputation, then it means that it will be able to deliver on what it promises. And that could be as simple as advertising for free in exchange for exposure or creating a new account with an obsolete username and password then submitting it to a site's database of registered users in order to spam advertisements from your account.
If a site has a bad reputation, then you should not be doing business with them or they are likely based on falsified accounts.
The second tip that comes to mind is to always look at the site's popularity on the Internet.
For example, if another website surfaces an ad that contains a link to your page without you asking for it, then chances are that this other website has a secret database of your email address(es), username and password(s) (if any). This means that their website can be used as a spamming aggregator by sending out thousands of emails from your account in one go. If you notice this happening, please report it to us immediately from the Help Center .
You should also know that there are many other types of undesirable sites that facilitate spam, a couple of which are listed below.
Malicious or Non-malicious?
There's a new type of site available on the Internet, which has flooded the web recently with advertisements. They have not been labeled as spam yet and have been mistaken for legitimate ads on multiple occasions. They are malvertising - malicious ads. These malvertisements will usually lead to malware sites or fake antivirus sites that trick you into downloading a virus onto your computer without you knowing it.
As far as I am aware, there is no way to avoid these malvertisements because they are injected directly into webpages through their advertising network and is run through their servers. So for now, I would advise you to use a protection like Malwarebytes in conjunction with Adblock Plus.
However, many users have noticed some rare advertising sites which do not look malicious. These are websites that have a slightly different format compared to the rest of the Internet, though this is not always the case.
The most popular format is one banner at the top of the web page that looks like this:
This ad is from Facebook and offers the opportunity to create a new account with an obsolete username and password and send out thousands of anouncements from your account, but this time through ads on websites other than Facebook. This is the same as spam. It is the same as sending out thousands of emails through your account; unless you have permission from the administrator of the site that you are sending it to, it is illegal.
The second type of format I have seen is a single ad at the bottom of each page that looks something like this:
This ad is from Wikipedia and will usually only appear if you are viewing an article with a lot of ads already running on it, like text ads and video ads (which will usually be in UGC), or if you are viewing the page on mobile view. Clicking on this ad will then take you to a different site. One thing to note about Wikipedia ads is that they usually appear only once near the bottom of each page, so if you keep checking back and you miss it, you may not find it again. This is also the same as spam and should be reported by clicking on the Report link that appears next to these ads – at least until they make an effort to stop showing them in this way.
Finally, there is a very small group of advertisers – usually only 3 or 4 - that have created ads that look like they are legitimate and try to appeal to the average person. For example:
This is from Amazon and will appear on pages with a large amount of text ads running or on an article that has almost no text ads running at all.
Clicking on these ads will then take you to a different site, where you can shop for items at Amazon, but probably for very expensive prices. If you're ever unsure about an advertisement, please report it using the "Report Ad" button that appears next to each one.
The last thing to note about these ads is that they do not appear on every webpage. They only appear on very specific pages with a large amount of text ads already running or mobile view on the website, but this is not always the case.
So what does this mean for you?
It means that you need to be very careful about where you are clicking or browsing and make sure that you're aware of what websites are running these adverts, especially if you're going onto a website for the first time. There are hundreds of support tickets being made every day reporting people who have been scammed due to an ad that appeared on their computer from an unknown site, which cost them money and personal information.
Conclusion
The last thing I would like to do is remind you again that all forms of brand advertising on the Internet are illegal and can lead to the creation of fake accounts and deleted accounts.
I have provided this article for information purposes only, as I personally have not used these sites personally and have no idea whether they are safe or not, but I would suggest that you always use adblockers to protect yourself from being scammed by others. They can be found on almost all modern web browsers at the top of your browser bar.