There’s a new web site that has hit the Net and trying to gather a bit of attention called ZangoBlacklist (I’m not going to give them a link). While they seem to be attempting to hide their true identities (e.g. Blocked Whois), they seem to be some adult (aka porn) webmasters out of Canada.

The site lists “20 Worst Offenders”. By worse offenders they seem to mean web sites who buy advertising through Zango and that they “ranks these properties by the volume of unique sightings”. Unique sightings by whom? Well they say they have ZangoBlackList investigators out there continually at work. They also have a place on their site where complaints (aka Zango Advertiser sightings) can be filed with them.

When I looked at their top 20 list of worst offenders, I was rather surprised and displeased to see that 15 of the 20 sites they list (that’s a whooping 75% of all their reported sites) all came from my research devleoped over many months time.

AffiliateFairPlay.com is making the following official statements:

AFP had no prior knowledge nor did we authorize our research to be used by or published on the ZangoBlackList web site. Indded, AFP holds the position that ZangoBlackList has violated our copyright policies.

AFP is NOT a data source for ZangoBlackList.

AFP does not endorse ZangoBlackList. Indeed, we have been very vocal in the past on our stance regarding blacklists, which we oppose in general.

In no way did AFP make any claims that the sites listed in our research were “Worst Offenders” for advertising through Zango.

In no way did AFP state that TheHomeMarketPlace bought ads through Zango directly (listed as the second worst offender for advertising through Zango by ZangoBlackList).

AFP has no knowledge of the forthcoming API tool from ZangoBlackList. Nor do we have any knowledge regarding “offending tracking ids” which evidently will be part of that API. AffiliateFairPlay.com has NEVER provided affiliate ids to ZangoBlackList and we have no intentions of doing so knowingly in the future.

AFP is pursuing the legal avenues available to us to have our research removed from the ZangoBlackList web site per copyright infringement laws.

A settlement between the FTC and Zango over Zango’s distribution methods of their adware was released today. The complaint can be found here.

According to the FTC complaint, Zango has been installed on U.S. consumers computers over 70 million times and has delivered over 6.9 billion pop ups.

The short story of the settlement is Zango has to pay $3M in fines over a 12 month period. This would seem somewhat chump change for what must have been made off of 6.9 billion pop ups. And well Zango has to stop doing those bad installs and hard to do uninstalls. I could have sworn Zango has consistenly stated they’ve never engaged in such activities. They’ve just been providing a much wanted piece of software to consumers keeping the Internet free. Of course, the settlement does not mean Zango is agreeing to any wrong-doing on their part…yada yada legal stuff.

Glad Zango got their wrist slapped and that’s what I see this as, a wrist slap. That’s better than nothing I suppose. Mean while their software will continue to provide a platform for this kind of stuff. But then the FTC isn’t addressing these types of issues arising from adware. For now it seems online adevertisng fraud is something we need to address within our own Industry.