You might recall I talked about SiteTruth a while back, a free service that revamps search results from popular search engines to rate the trustworthiness of advertisers based on a variety of real-world factors. I suggested that they develop a GreaseMonkey script to rate contextual ads, and they went ahead and did just that.
Check out SiteTruth AdRater. It requires GreaseMonkey and Firefox, and it gives you the same kind of experience for many contextual ads that SiteTruth has done for search engines. You can see an example of its ratings for my blog’s home page below.
SiteTruth’s AdRater stepped in to show what it thought of the ads. You can see the Google ads on the right of the screen, with one ad getting a green check, one a red minus sign, and the third a yellow question mark. Now a bad rating wouldn’t keep me from clicking on an ad that really seemed relevant to me, but I admit I would probably give the company a longer sniff test before I actually bought something.
I don’t know if SiteTruth will catch on with consumers, even savvy ones, but this is an idea that makes too much sense not to show up in one form or another. Perhaps SiteTruth should team up with Norton or one of the other companies that markets products to prevent phishing attempts. The same folks concerned about phishing would probably be interested in SiteTruth’s take on the reliability of advertisers.
If you’re an Internet advertiser, check out SiteTruth and see how it rates your company. As the Internet continually becomes a more sophisticated marketplace, you need to be aware of what criteria your customers will use to rate your company, and to stay ahead of the pack. Using offline criteria to rate online ads is an idea whose time has come. Don’t get caught napping with your reputation at stake.
