iOS4 Blog: The iPhone 5 News Blog News Feed

Saturday, April 16, 2011

The iPhone 5 News Blog News Feed

More iPhone 5 Bait & Switch: eBay Affiliate Ad Offers the iPhone 5 On Bing

Posted: 16 Apr 2011 04:03 AM PDT

Bing! A new, bogus iPhone 5 ad shows up again.

After breaking the story about Amazon affiliate ads for the iPhone 5 on the world’s best and biggest search engine, the iPhone 5 News Blog has now uncovered a new eBay bait-and-switch ad for the iPhone 5 on Bing.

Those affiliate marketers are at it again at trying to capitalize on the escalating interest in the iPhone 5, and this time, it is eBay that is being misrepresented in search results. A quick search of “iPhone 5” on Bing reveals a sponsored eBay ad that reads, “Get great deals on Iphone 5. Shop eBay today!” Much like the story about the Amazon.com ad for the iPhone 5 that we broke last week, this current ad leads to a related search landing page on eBay for the “iPhone 5″ keyword, which features a series of miscellaneous iPhone parts and accessories.

Needless to say, there’s no iPhone 5 to be found.

Now that the story of the Amazon.com iPhone 5 ad has been thoroughly played out in the tech news, it’s unlikely that many people will be fooled by the appearance of this new eBay ad on Bing. However, the continuing story of false iPhone 5 ads on search engines aggravates the growing frustration of smartphone users over reports that the iPhone 5 release date will be delayed.

With many people already voicing disappointment and frustration over a late iPhone 5 release — and proclaiming that many will in fact defect to a Droid smartphone — these bogus iPhone 5 ads are a nagging reminder to iPhone enthusiasts; a kind of mockery to an already frustrating situation.

Just as it was correctly reported with respect to the Amazon iPhone 5 ads, these new eBay ads on Bing are most likely not being sanctioned by eBay’s corporate headquarters. Instead, eBay sellers and affiliate marketers are at the root of the misleading ads. However, these bait-and-switch sponsored links are proving to be problematic both for search engines and the e-commerce websites that they link to. In a sense, these affiliate marketers are managing to fly under the radar of both the retail platform (such as Amazon or eBay) that they sell products on, and the search engines that they advertise on. Neither entity is pro-actively policing these types of ads, and the end result is an increased skepticism in both the search engine and the retailer.

In short, false iPhone 5 ads like these make Bing and eBay look bad, even though they are not actively involved in creating them.

It is our guess that, just as the Amaon ad was changed, so too will this new eBay iPhone 5 ad be changed as well. No matter how much extra web traffic might flow in from these misleading ads, the extra traffic cannot outweigh the damage that false advertising does to large online retailers like Amazon and eBay.

We’ll be sure to keep you updated on this developing story.