Who REALLY created that banner ad?

I'm not quite sure what this will turn out to be, but the idea was to track a banner ad back to its source (and keep going from there). This one, I happened upon while browsing MySpace. It took a little while, because I had to go out of my way to find a banner ad that wasn't Flash so that I could show it to you (it's actually rather annoying, not being able to find something that normally bothers the crap out of you).

Once I clicked it, I was sent to this site: http://try.starware.com/landing/jokes/jokes_05.php?aff_id=google

"Joke Toolbar." Great.

I tried editing the URL and simply going to http://www.starware.com/. It looks like it's simply a search engine; a Google wannabe.

Because I wanted to know who, exactly, Starware was, I did a whois search, on their domain name, and came up with this information:

Registrant:Starware

143 Varick Street
New York, New York 10013
United States

Registered through: GoDaddy.com, Inc. (http://www.godaddy.com)
Domain Name: STARWARE.COM
Created on: 01-Dec-92
Expires on: 30-Nov-10
Last Updated on: 14-Jan-08

Administrative Contact:
Administrator, Domain dnsdirect@miva.com
Miva Direct
143 Varick Street
New York, New York 10013
United
States
212-231-2000

Technical Contact:
Administrator, Domain dnsdirect@miva.com
Miva Direct
143 Varick Street
New York, New York 10013
United
States
212-231-2000

I thought it was odd that the domain of Starware was, in fact, administered by people whose email addresses weren't registered to Starware. So I checked out www.miva.com and came across this:

"MIVA is the new name for the FindWhat.com Group. In 2004, FindWhat.com undertook an aggressive merger and acquisition strategy, bringing together numerous companies from around the globe, including Espotting, Miva Corporation, B&B Advertising, MVCool and Comet Systems."

Also, I found this page to very interesting: http://miva.com/us/content/advertiser/overview.asp

Notice how they talk about how you, the business, "bid" for keywords. This leads me to believe that various businesses place bids in order to have people, that click on Miva's ads, sent to their site.

(my thoughts were correct: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIVA_Media)


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I thought I might test the reach, per se, of Miva. I followed the url of another banner ad and was brought to onlinerewardcenter.com (oooh, free iPods!). I did a whois search on them, as well, and saw that they were registered by a different company. Dead end.

However, I did notice that both sites' whois pages read "Registration Service Provided By: Enom, Inc".

Enom is a domain registrar, not unlike GoDaddy.

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To wrap things up, the banner was created by MIVA, Inc for the purpose of increasing the revenue of Starware. The only creative thing about it is the fact that it's colorful. I'm sure people would percive it as something mildly interesting, yet not to be clicked upon (as most banner ads are treated). There are no points of view put forth by this advertisment, though one could say that the PoV of the person(s) recieving revenue is, obviously, somewhere in there.

The placement of this advertisment (on MySpace) is something that I would consider to be something like the camera angles/sound in a movie or film. Just like directors choose which shot they want, advertizing executives choose were to place their products. Being on MySpace, the ad will be seen, mostly, by teenagers (thus the cartoonish people and the rediculous "game").