Comment and Opinion

Direct Selling Association

When I started running Google advertisements on this site in late 2005 I mentioned that advertisements might occasionally appear which contradicted the philosophy of the site. The advertisements are generated by matching words on the surrounding page and those words are often about things that I don't like. Google allows me to list up to 200 domain names that will be blocked from advertising on the site, but other than that blacklist I have no way of predicting what will be displayed and no way of knowing what has been displayed unless people tell me about it.

The following advertisement was brought to my attention because the right hand side led to an organisation which actively promoted pyramid scams and their close relations, multi-level marketing schemes. I blocked the domain immediately.

The left hand side appeared to be an advertisement for Robert Fitzpatrick's excellent Pyramid Scheme Alert site. While I was prepared to block the scam promoter's advertisements, I was quite encouraged to see that their nonsense was apparently being balanced by Fitzpatrick's good advice. I say "apparently" because the advertisement was not for his site but instead led to the Direct Selling Association of the USA. This is the industry body for multi-level marketing organisations, and its board of directors reads like a Who's Who of scammery. And why would such a prestigious industry association resort to the deceptive use of someone else's name (even to the extent of registering a deceptive domain name) to divert people to their own site? Because deception is what they do and why they exist.

See some more about DSA deception here.