Misleading Ad Offers Appear In iPhone Games
Months after Facebook ordered the removal of misleading ad offers from its platform, TechCrunch reports that essentially the same misleading offers have begun appearing on the iPhone platform. The alleged misleading ad offers appear to be showing up primarily through platforms that aggregate large amounts of ad inventory provided by affiliates, including Offerpal Media, Super Rewards, and Google's AdMob platform.
The primary form of misleading offer appearing on the iPhone platform appears to the SMS subscription scam, where a user takes a free quiz and is then asked to send their phone number in to the quiz service in order to receive an SMS message containing the results. This causes the consumer to accidentally subscribe him or herself to a subscription service that delivers essentially nothing in return for charging recurring fees to the user's phone bill.
The misleading ads were spotted in TapJoy's Tap Defense game, being served by Offerpal Media. Since then, Offerpal has removed the offending ads. It is not clear if the ads are still active on Super Rewards or AdMob.
It's not surprising to see misleading mobile ad offers appear on mobile platforms, as ad offers are still relatively new to this space and the mobile offers are particularly relevant there. Apple does not yet appear to have issued any platform guidelines regarding ad offers on the iPhone platform. According to current Offerpal CEO George Garrick, another problem with monitoring quality on iPhone is a low overall volume of ad inventory.
Low inventory makes it harder for ad offer providers to simply remove all of the ads, as they may have little else to replace them with. Garrick defends the mobile subscription offers by pointing out that most mobile ad services currently run them, even though Offerpal chose to remove the ads from circulation anyway. The main dispute regarding the ads is how clearly they disclose they disclose their terms of service.
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Tagged with: Ad Offer Scams • Ad Offers • AdMob • iPhone • Microtransactions • Mobile Gaming • Super Rewards • Virtual Goods
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