A Chumbox is a form of digital advertising that uses a grid of low quality clickbait links to send users to low quality content, other clickbait and Made For Advertising (MFA) websites. Chumbox is derived from “chumming” – the use of fish or meat to attract fish whilst fishing.
Example Chumbox ads – Wikimedia commons
Chumbox advertising often features the following types of advertisements:
- Dubious health or dieting
- Apparently unregulated providers of financial services that require regulation
- Celebrity news
- Clickbait
- Made For Advertising (MFA) sites that feature low quality content but many ads
- Fraud
- “Search” sites which arbitrage and abuse Google AdSense for Search ads and waste the budgets of Google’s advertisers
The Verge on chumboxes:
“Reading news online over the past year, I came to realize that more or less every story now includes a beautiful woman. Tucked into modules with names like “around the web” or “you might like,” there she is, demonstrating her bosom or backside or pearly-white smile. Often she is a celebrity, talking about weight loss, filing a lawsuit, or collapsing onstage. Other times she is a fitness guru, or a fashion expert, or (in at least one case) a “former pole vaulter” who is “still smoking HOT.” The women of “Around the Web” are ubiquitous, they are alluring, and they only want one thing — your click.”
More reading on Chumbox advertising
You might also like this story about weaponized clickbait (The Verge)
Shocking! Why ‘chumbox’ ads are bad by design, yet still in business
The chumbox is still the dirty design secret of the internet
Remember the chumbox providers? This is how they look now
More
What are Made For Advertising websites (MFAs)?
What does a fraud investment advertisement look like?