Prevention of affiliate advertising on sites deemed inappropriate by advertisers helps to maintain brand integrity and lower costs

TOKYO—February 1, 2011—NetSTAR, Inc., Japan’s premier developer of URL filtering product technologies and services, today announced that they will provide URL lists to SHIP, Inc., for use in Medist—a new service that detects the use of affiliate advertising on inappropriate sites—which will be released in March of this year.

In most cases, the selection of sites for affiliate advertising on the Internet is automated, and the sheer number of sites on which ads will appear makes it virtually impossible for advertisers to check the content of each of those sites individually. Many advertisers have been waiting for a service that will keep their advertisements off of inappropriate websites—such as adult websites and dating websites—in the interest of maintaining brand integrity and reducing wasted advertising spending.

Responding to the concerns of these advertisers, SHIP is releasing Medist—a service that detects affiliate advertising on inappropriate sites—in March 2011. Medist connects with one-tag affiliate service providers (*1) and automatically checks the URL information of the affiliate website against NetSTAR’s URL list to identify the type of content on the target website. Websites in categories that are deemed undesirable by the advertiser will appear in a warning on a special administrative webpage. In addition, advertisers can use a service that will determine whether or not to allow ads to be placed on sites that fall in certain categories.

NetSTAR was an industry pioneer in 2004 when it began providing URL lists of sites that contain content for mobile phones. Starting in 2005, these lists were being used in many services offered by Japanese mobile telephone service providers, and currently, NetSTAR lists are used in the filtering services of all mobile telephone service providers, and in the anti-spam solutions of some providers. These statistics speak volumes about the reliability of NetSTAR lists, and why they have been adopted for use in Medist.

NetSTAR will continue to collaborate with various partners in an effort to provide services that contribute to the global community by creating a safe, secure, and efficient Internet environment for a wide variety of platforms.

Note: 1. A system that enables simultaneous distribution of the tags of multiple affiliate services through bundling.