Details are sketchy as of this writing, but from this article at Tech Crunch it seems that the FTC has fined Adult Friend Finder for some of the pop up ads that have been served around sites that are coming up for some vanilla search terms. We are unsure at this time as to whether or not these ads are being served by affiliates alone or if adult friend finder was itself going for some of the non adult keyword searches.
A chunk of the article from tech crunch:
Adult dating site AdultFriendFinder, rumored to have been acquired in November for $1 billion is on the wrong side of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) with a settlement that restricts AdultFriendFinder’s promotional activities.
The FTC said in a statement that AdultFriendFinder affiliates used pop-up ads to drive traffic to the site, and exposed consumers, including children to sexual explicit images when search for terms including “flowers,” “travel,” and “vacations.” More seriously the FTC alleged that the ads were also distributed with spyware and adware.
The FTC found that “the practice of displaying graphic pop-up ads without consumer consent was unfair, and violated the FTC Act;” essentially saying that porn pop-ups are illegal.
AdultFriendFinder agreed to a settlement with the FTC which sees the company admitting no guilt in return for not displaying sexually explicit ads to consumers unless they’re looking for that sort of content (or are already on an adult site) and to cease using pop-ups. AdultFriendFinder must also force affiliates to comply with the settlement or terminate them should they not comply… more of the article and comments / discussion at Tech Crunch here.
Another big question in our mind is how in the hell is adult friend finder going to go through the tons of affiliates and the insane amount of incoming traffic to determine if people are using nude ads served for the millions of generic search terms that are out there. More to come with this story I’m sure.