Deceptive Ads On Seesmic App

Seesmic Android App

Seesmic, an app on Android that aggregates your activity from social networks, has started to play around with ads on their FREE app. I started seeing them at the top. I didn’t mind them at first because they gotta make money, and I understand that.

Lately, I’ve been seeing the ads at the bottom of the screen, which is good. It doesn’t distract and collide with the top navigation. The problem I have with them lately is that the ads are very deceptive. They’re designed to look like navigational elements of the app, like a notification message that alerting you of new messages. I’m sure the click-thru rates on these are pretty high, but the conversion rates are probably really low.

I clicked on one of them unknowingly and got forwarded to a webpage. I think they should ban these kind of ads, but I also understand that they have to pay their employees. Hopefully, they’ll get more advertisers and can eventually not accept these of kind of ad buys.

Seesmic is a handy app to keep track of your social networks. I use it to interface with my various Facebook and Twitter accounts. I don’t mind ads, I just don’t like ones that look like it’s part of the app.

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