Avatar site pushes Zango installs and Gambling adverts to kids

Check out the website to the left (click to enlarge). I want your honest opinion.

Bright pink - logo looks like it contains a trio of Paris Hiltons (scary thought!) - big pile of IM avatars, generally of Britney Spears, the Olsen Twins (on the "Animals" page - lol), cute fluffy cats and piles of flashing images so beloved by fourteen year olds. Would you say it was for kids?

Sure you would.

Nobody on Earth could convince me Doll Avs is aimed at anything other than kids. At the very least, nobody under 18 would be seen dead on this site...so you would think. In fact, I just asked random people on MSN - the best source of authority ever - what age range this site was aimed at, and the general consensus was around 12 to 17, tops. Someone said "early teens", and another chap stated "teens, specifically Myspace users". Hmm.

So tell me, why is it that you can happily right click and save the images to your PC for use with your IM Client, but should you actually click into an image.. ...you get redirected to a big splash page encouraging you to install a bunch of Zango Adware? Apart from the fact that the statement at the top is completely incorrect - you don't need to install Zango to "access" Dollavs (because you're already using it), nor is the site "free" when you download Zango (because five minutes earlier I was happily downloading every icon in site, for "free"), the box containing the EULA is so laughably narrow (less than 2 cm in height) that trying to read it is almost impossible. Especially as the EULA itself is three thousand and thirty one words long.

Doh.

Of course, I also wonder how many users of that site are actually old enough to use the Zango Adware (eighteen or over) in the first place.

All in all, strangely reminiscent of a site explored by Ben Edelman a while ago - Dollidol, a flashing, garish monstrosity that gave you "free" IM avatars in exchange for Zango. The thing is, everyone thought it was aimed at kids except for 180 Solutions. Of course, I wrote about it here and noted that Sean Sundwall of 180 Solutions posted a whole bunch of comments with the below as his first point:

1. DollIdol is a child's site - this is patently false. DollIdol.com is not targeted at kids, period. Suggesting that a site is targeted at children because it has animated characters is a bit naive.

....lol. No, of course a site made in bright pink with flashing, cutesy characters and a school section isn't aimed at kids. How utterly naive of me to think so.

Gimme' a break.

I wonder what the reaction will be to this latest find - I can't say I'm holding my breath. Oh, and one final slice of wonderful coming up. If you click an icon on the site, you don't immediately see the box asking you to install Zango. Why?

Because a fullscreen popup covers the page below it, and you either get an ad for 888.com or Partypoker.

Note that the popup completely covers the desktop - and regardless of whether the end-user installs the gambling software, once they close that popup they still have the Zango page to deal with.

Get gambling, kids!


All in all, another perfectly avoidable website. Won't be the last, either...