NetZero Selling Ads To Appear on Competitive Sites

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the all's-fair dept

NetZero has a new strategy to sell more ads. Since users of NetZero are forced to have a floating window with ads appearing on their screen, and they can tie the ads to the sites the people are surfing, they’re now making deals that let competitors of the site being surfed place an add that will appear in the box while the user surfs the competitive site. In other words, someone surfing at Amazon.com could find that in the NetZero ad box their’s a Barnesandnoble.com advertisement telling them that Amazon is bad. Or something like that.