Please, Facebook, enough with the tacky belly fat ads

I used to think it was just me: me and my belly fat. Well, me and select others whose information online, posts on social media sites, and choices of articles to read apparently marked us out as idiots likely to fall for some of the stupidest ads ever to appear on the web.

Prime example: the “weird old tip” for getting rid of belly fat. And certainly from the same source – going by the poor English and strange phrasing – images of some older woman who apparently makes doctors “hate” her because of her tips for miraculous, wrinkle-free skin.

But it seems just about all of us are being fed – no, reluctantly stuffed like a goose for foie gras – with those infuriating, tiresome, ugly ads and their Photoshopped faces and badly, hand-drawn belly fat animations.

These are called direct-response advertisements. You – or rather, someone less sensible and intelligent than you – sees them and thinks, “I want to learn more about that one weird old tip”, or “I want to buy that magic wrinkle cream”, clicks through, and is taken to a site selling a service or product. Typically, they link to a number of websites, often mocked up to look like a local company or bizarrely, a local media site promoting the product.

According to an article written in 2009 in Ad Age, the proliferation of belly fat and muffin top ads was due to poor levels of online ad revenue and the desperation of web publishers "reluctant to leave any available ad budgets on the table, even those attached to unappealing ads". Many of the advertisements came from what the article termed "some of the web's shadiest advertisers". As the article notes, the ads are there because people click on them and buy the products.

One source estimated the ads were being served by half the US ad networks, could account for up to 30 per cent of revenue “and can bring more revenue than a display ad sold on a cost-per-thousand-viewers basis”.

At first, I thought the belly fat and wrinkle brigade would appear for a time, annoy and then vanish, as often happens with these advertisers and their campaigns. But no. Four years after that Ad Age story, I see more rather than less of them. They have the holding power of the ubiquitous email spam messages about male "girth" – and that doesn't refer to belly fat.

I get belly fat ads no matter where I go on the web: upmarket news websites; blogs. At times I have had nearly the entire column of ads on Facebook filled with these tacky ads.

For a while, I wasted time clicking on the Facebook tab that lets you tell them you want to hide that ad. I click the “spam” and “deceptive” options on the reply form. I’ve added notes saying “Please, enough with the belly fat ads”.

Did it make one iota of difference? Of course not. I got even more.

It did make me wonder why Facebook bothers to ask users for feedback if none of it is then applied to filter the advertisements one receives.

This week, Facebook announced that it had reached one million advertisers, from small advertisers to large brands.

In the EU, Facebook claimed 1.2 billion connections between Facebook users and local businesses, and 270 million views of local business pages in a single week.

Going on my ads, a heck of a lot of those “local businesses” are actually not nice local companies, but the belly fat and wrinkle scammers using local contact points.

If you go to the "Facebook for Business" page's "success stories" (facebook.com/business/success), you get the English Cheesecake Company and Tropical Sky.

Come on, Facebook – we all know the real success story is the “one weird old tip” for belly fat, as you easily feed up more of those, and its variants, than any other advertisement. But I suppose it is embarrassing to admit it.

To be fair, according to Ad Age, it is hard to filter out such ads, even for publishers that don't wish to run them, because (like all spam) they deviously divert to fly-by-night website URLs and phone numbers, and are placed by a wide range of media companies.

But for the sake of our collective sanity, I hope the online advertising market eventually lifts enough to price these bottom feeders out of the web advert business.