In short, there are two types of advertisers on Cnet.
1.) Direct - Advertisers purchase ad space Cnet sells directly, and the Cent advertising team inspects/approves each ad individually. In the past 5 years, I can only recall two problems, both of which were corrected within a few hours.
2.) Google Syndication - Text ads provided directly by Google. Cnet applies filters to omit known-bad ads, but does not get to investigate/approve each one individually and Google is extremely lax in policing their own ads. Thus, they -- unfortunately -- often contain links to fraudulent and borderline companies/offers.
Thankfully, Cnet remains one of the more trustworthy sites for news, downloads, etc. Nevertheless, the latter is hard to avoid, as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Cnet/CBS, and hundreds of other top companies all use Google Syndication. Thus, I always recommend using an ad blocker, such as AdBlockPlus for Firefox, and exercising caution when following such links, especially those from Google.
Regards,
John
I train people on how to use the Internet and I have often told people that the safest place to download programs is through cnet.com However, I am disappointed that the advertisements at the top of the page always have a "DOWNLOAD HERE" graphic - which for people who do not feel comfortable with the Internet - will look like the link they are looking for to download the program off of CNET.
I want to be able to tell my clients that they can trust CNET, but now I tell them that while they can trust the downloads off of CNET, they can't trust that CNET won't allow its advertisers to deceive them into downloading or buying a completely different product.
Finally, does CNET even check to see if their advertisers are selling safe software?

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