New Evony Adverts Scam For Clicks

Evony, the web-game who use porn-cover stock-photos to get traffic and who sue critical bloggers are up to their old tricks again. A set of new adverts have been appearing around the web on sites just like this one (I first found them here) and are nothing if not devious. The adverts are cropping up with no mention they link to Evony and are designed to blend into pages they appear on.

They are designed to con people into clicking on them by looking like they are part of the site. For example some are simply buttons labelled “download”, some are pairs of buttons labelled “back” and “next” . Worse still, some are simply the RSS logo. On any site that doesn’t label their adverts, this would look exactly like a normal subscribe link. Upon clicking, the user is greeted with a pair of tits and a sign up page for one of the web’s most hated games.

As mentioned, these adverts are appearing here on Negative Gamer and our ad company (Technorati) has been informed. Due to the distancing of editorial and advertising on NG we can’t simply ban them (we have to complain to the ad network and get them to do it).

Things could start to enter oddly murky legal water soon too for a couple of reasons. Firstly, Negative Gamer‘s (and most other sites’) advertising contract states we are not allowed to slag off people currently advertising on us. However, Evony are not advertising through our ad network and are in fact sneaking in via another ad network Technorati uses to fill residual space (likely Yahoo).

There’s also the problem that Evony are more than certainly breaking terms of advertising by making adverts clearly designed to trick users. It’s not only a dick move, but it also goes against the vast majority of advertising contracts they will have agreed to.