A big thank you to everyone who has pointed out the weird, spammy ad that’s somehow managed to sneak past the armed guards we have stationed around the Compaq Portable that runs our ad server. Unfortunately, as some of you have noticed, our game of whack-a-mole to knock it down has not been particularly successful. I want to share with you all our game plan for addressing it and some assistance that might be helpful.
We’re on track to have our biggest month ever, and with that increase in traffic comes new problems. There’s a whole host of ads, categories, and ad technologies we don’t allow on this site because, especially as a member-supported enterprise, we want to keep this place clear of Badvertising. I’m sorry these ads are sneaking through, as it means we’re not keeping up our end of the bargain.
The world of programmatic advertising, which is our single biggest source of income, is built partially on trust. For example, we don’t allow ads that reference sex; those advertisers, in theory, are required to accurately identify that their ads reference sex so that we don’t run them. We’re going to have more than 15 million ad impressions this month, and it would be impossible to approve all of those in advance.
When someone has cheated in the past, a reader has alerted us, and we’ve banned that advertiser. It’s clean, quick, and easy. It’s also usually infrequent. Unfortunately, an individual advertiser or cluster of advertisers has found a way to get around our protections. The usual tools have not worked, so we’re taking the following measures:
- We’ve gone in and removed any ads that have high click-through-rates that seem like they shouldn’t.
- We’ve banned any related URLs.
- At the highest level, we are implementing a new technology that’s supposed to weed out this kind of badvertising. It should be rolling out in a matter of minutes. It costs us $$, but that seems to be the cost of doing business.
Here’s where I could use your help. First and foremost, I’m not sure how instantaneous the new filter is, so if you’re still seeing crappy redirects by the time the sun goes down on the Hollywood Sign please let me know. Also, if you ever see a bad ad, please email me and let me know any URL associated with it and what it looks like.
Again, sorry about this. We take this very seriously and will continue to work behind the scenes until it’s resolved.
Top photo: Depositphotos.com
Matt – Would you guys consider offering a “no add / no tracker / no autoplay” tier for members (à la ArsTechnica)? Members are now a small subset of your readers (with your readership/page views getting pretty high), and losing a few thousands advert targets might be easy to offset with a small bump to membership fees?
The issue I encountered wasn’t so much the ad (aside from videos auto-playing – that is obnoxious…at least it is muted), but the fact that, as I was reading an article, the whole webpage redirected on its own with no back button.