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
- “Search” sites which arbitrage and abuse Google AdSense for Search ads and waste the budgets of Google’s advertisers
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
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What are Made For Advertising websites (MFAs)?