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This is plainly a scam to suck people in and then have them buy a book if their photo wins. I've seen posts about it in here before but now I see it's an advertising on this site, in the photo contest first page is where I see it.

It disturbs me that byte would have this kind of advertising.

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Sheila,
Thanks for the warning. I'm familiar with a similar scam for poetry that I was somewhat suckered into several years back - poetry.com in case anyone's curious. Never bought the book, though, and every time I check, my poem's still there - but with a different copyright date every year, interestingly . . .

I may be wrong, but I think Byte's sold advertising to Google, who picks the ads that go into that area. I've seen them shuffle over time, but that also means that Byte has no real control over what links are provided. Hopefully Photo Laureates will run their course, and someone new will take their place.

steve

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You're probably right, Steve - byte has no control. Too bad because there are potentially a lot of sitting ducks here.

Sheila.

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Hi,

Just to enlighten you both (and others) a little...
These are Adsense ads and below is a snippet from the Google website.

quote:

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AdSense for content automatically crawls the content of your pages and delivers ads ....... .... that are relevant to your audience and your site contentÑads so well-matched, in fact, that your readers will actually find them useful.

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Even Google uses these ads on their search results pages and are often found on the righthand side of their page.
Google do let us have some sort of control but it's not very efficient IMO. I've blocked this ad, amongst a list of others, from appearing but sometimes it doesn't work.

On the other hand, good relevant ads (not the scams) do help us pay our dedicated server fees and therefore keep this website free.

Hope this helps.

__________________
Kind regards
Stephen

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huh -- i've not noticed it but thanks for the warning - on guard!!!
pippa

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Stephen, I don't have a problem with most ads.
I appreciate that things have to be paid for. Thanks for the background on this and for your efforts to block inappropriate ads.

Sheila

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