By EMILY STEEL

Kraft Foods, Greyhound Lines and Capital One Financial have bought some strange ads on the Internet lately. What's so strange about them is that they're invisible.

The companies might not have known about their invisible display ads—the kind that are supposed to appear alongside content on Web pages—if not for Ben Edelman, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School who studies Internet advertising.

Mr. Edelman says his research shows that all three marketers, and many others, have fallen victim to Web sites that use such ads as a way to sell more ad space than they have.

The Web sites can get away with it, he says, because online advertisers don't always audit their campaigns for proof their ads are appearing. It isn't clear how common these ads are or how much they cost marketers.

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Mr. Edelman and other Internet-security experts say the ads are created with the use of computer code that makes it look to marketers as though their ads are showing up on legitimate Web sites. But consumers who visit those sites can't see the ads because they have been placed on invisible Web pages.

In one example, visitors to a site called MyToursInfo.com saw an ordinary-looking Web page with one ad for Verizon Communications and another for a weight-loss product. But, Mr. Edelman, who studied the site in January, said software code running behind the scenes opened more than 40 Web pages, each including three ads from marketers such as Domino's Pizza and Capital One, which were invisible to visitors.

Mr. Edelman's analysis of the code was confirmed by computer-security experts at Symantec and McAfee as well as online-ad advisory firms DoubleVerify and Anchor Intelligence.

MyToursInfo.com has since shut down, and efforts to identify its operators were unsuccessful.

Domino's Pizza says it is aware of sites like MyToursInfo.com and is taking steps to protect against them by buying display ads it pays for only when a consumer clicks on them. Capital One said it wasn't familiar with the situation but said it keeps "a close eye" on its online ads.

Verifying that ads appear is an issue that has long plagued traditional media, particularly commercials on local TV stations. But a single online ad campaign can appear on thousands of Web sites, making verification even harder.

Advertisers often buy display ads based on the number of times they are loaded onto a page, rather than the number of clicks they get. Over the past, year, an increasing number of scams have sought to take advantage of that pricing system as advertisers have started buying more of their online ads via middlemen called ad networks, instead of directly from the Web sites themselves. These networks sell ad space at cheap rates across thousands of sites, and they don't always weed out illegitimate players.

Several such networks, including Burst Media and Tribal Fusion, sold ads that appeared on the MyToursInfo.com site, Mr. Edelman says, according to his analysis of computer code.

Tribal says MyToursInfo.com isn't included in its network now but can't say whether it was in the past. Burst says MyToursInfo.com was included in its network earlier this year but isn't now part of its network.

The ad networks say they use a combination of high-tech scans and manual processes to ferret out unscrupulous sites.

"Unfortunately, these bad actors are kind of like ants at a picnic. You constantly have to be vigilant," says Chuck Moran, Burst Media's chief marketing officer.

"It is one of the big challenges of running a network," says Toby Gabriner, president of Tribal Fusion. He said his company now is working with Mr. Edelman to help detect possible fraud across its network. Mr. Edelman does similar consulting work for clients including Time Warner's AOL and Microsoft.

Ads are typically rendered invisible by manipulating computer codes called iframes that determine how a Web page appears on a visitor's computer screen. Iframes allow one Web page to be built inside another, the procedure used to make display ads. But, programmers can also make iframes invisible, so that computer users don't see anything contained in them. In the case of the invisible ads, they typically use multiple invisible iframes. In the case of the invisible ads, they typically use multiple invisible iframes.

Mr. Edelman, who trolls the Web for examples of invisible ads, says ads for Kraft Foods and Greyhound Lines recently ended up buried on invisible pages on a site called MyProfilePimp.com, which offers games, photos and other ways for consumers to personalizetheir profile pages on social-networking sites like Facebook. Mr. Edelman says a visit to the site in June opened a series of invisible pages on the visitor's computer with as many as 46 ads. He says none of those ads could be seen.

MyProfilePimp.com declined to comment.

Kraft says it monitors its online ad purchases but wasn't aware of the MyProfilePimp.com ads. "We are looking into it as we would with any other possible violation of our agreements," it said.

Greyhound was similarly unaware of the case and said that the site shouldn't have been included in any of its ad-network buys. A spokeswoman says the bus line is working to "safeguard against fraudulent activity moving forward."

Write to Emily Steel at emily.steel@wsj.com

It's hard to avoid the conclusion that the flames of protest are being slowly smothered in the streets of Iran. Still, even that will leave behind embers of opposition, and the key question in weeks ahead is whether there are any forces within Iran able to keep those embers smoldering.

Anyone who has followed recent Iranian history knows there are two places to look for the answer to that question: the military and the clerical establishment. If cracks in the support for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad start appearing in those institutions, the Tehran Spring set off by protests over Iran's presidential election could evolve into a movement with reach and consequence, and not just a short-lived outburst of frustration.

It's hard for any outsider to know what currents run through these two opaque institutions, of course. At this point, though, a reasonable guess is that the clerical establishment is a more likely source of meaningful opposition to the Ahmadinejad regime than is the military -- but that neither is emerging yet as a real force for change.

Look first at the military. Iran essentially has two different military forces -- or, perhaps more accurately, two and a half.

It has a traditional military, the descendent of the Shah of Iran's imperial army, which is in charge of defending Iran's borders and maintaining a traditional military infrastructure.

But the force that has the real power is Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps. The Revolutionary Guard is a parallel military organization set up after the 1979 revolution to ensure that clerical leaders would have at their disposal a force with unquestioned loyalty and a check on traditional military officers, who were suspect because of their roots in the Shah's regime.

During the long and grinding Iran-Iraq war, the Revolutionary Guards also developed a kind of junior offshoot, the Basij militias, to bring more idealistic and fearless young men to the war front. Mr. Ahmadinejad himself is believed to be a former Basij member, and the force now has evolved into loosely organized civilian militias spread across the country.

The Revolutionary Guards appeared to back Mr. Ahmadinejad when he was first elected four years ago, and appear reliably loyal to him now that his re-election has been questioned. Indeed, the Basij have been brutally active in putting down protests.

But this parallel military structure has, as one would expect, bred deep animosity among regular army officers, who resent both their second-class status and the drain of weapons and resources going to the Revolutionary Guards. "It can't be overstated, the hatred the regular army feels for the IRGC," as the Revolutionary Guards are known, says Joseph Lydon, an intelligence briefer for the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard who specializes in Iranian affairs.

That means the regular army, with ample reason to resent Mr. Ahmadinejad and his Revolutionary Guard loyalists, is a potential force to power the opposition. One U.S. official says there are reports of "discomfort" among some army officers -- and even among some leaders of the Revolutionary Guard -- at how opposition is being crushed within Iran.

But the regular army has been cowed over the years, and there are no indications of organized opposition taking shape. "The big players in the Iranian military are just standing by and watching," says one analyst. That could change if protesters manage to keep their movement alive, but for now the traditional military seems far more likely to follow a sustained opposition movement than to lead one.

The story might be different inside the nation's clerical establishment, where at least some voices of protest have been heard over the way the presidential election and its aftermath have been handled by Mr. Ahmadinejad and the nation's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

For instance, one cleric, Ayatollah Asadollah Bayat Zanjani, initially called the election a "gross injustice," and in recent days has defended protesters.

But the great hope of reformers is former President Hashemi Rafsanjani, who is one of Iran's most influential clerical figures and a longtime critic of Mr. Ahmadinejad. He also is chairman of the Assembly of Experts, a group of 86 clerics charged by the Iranian constitution with the task of overseeing the supreme leader -- and vested with the power to remove him.

Mr. Rafsanjani has periodically, but unreliably, been reported to be working behind the scenes to organize clerical opposition to Mr. Ahmadinejad, and possibly to Ayatollah Khamenei. But the hope that Mr. Rafsanjani might lead a charge to overturn the election or force regime change cooled a bit over the weekend, when he issued an elliptical statement calling for a thorough investigation of election complaints, but also saying "suspicious hands" were trying to drive a wedge between the public and the government.

So for now, those hoping for change in Iran, including the U.S. government, are left to wonder and hope, mostly helplessly, about the country's key institutions. "It is utterly impossible to predict revolutions, and the only time revolutions succeed is when the regime loses the will or the capacity to use violence," says Kenneth Pollack, director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. "And I don't see any evidence this regime has lost its will or capability to use violence."