Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Today's AdSense numbers so far have been a lot higher than anything I've seen for months for us. So I decided to check out the high eCPM pages and see exactly what new ads are showing. To my horror, I find that all the pages are showing that obnoxious blinking animated .GIF that seems to be showing up on every site for the past few days.
My first reaction was to immediately add it to the Competitve Ad Filter. But greediness got the better of me and I decided to leave it alone and take the money. At least for now. :)
oh it's that word that rhymes with "Shore" then.
I had the same thing happen with one ot the big shopping sites last Christmas. Great money, then on 12/15 they dropped to a few cents and gutted me for three days until I could filter them out.
Hint #1 was when I did NOT receive a bunch of "Yeah, I decided not to block that obnoxious ad" or "I did decide to block that obnoxious ad" replies. But I figured people may have thought they weren't contributing to the thread.
Hint #2 was when eCPM started to fall and I decided to block the advertiser. Right-clicking on the ad didn't show the usual adsense link. But I figured that because it was an image ad, maybe it didn't have the usual link structure of text ads. So I used the domain listed on the ad.
Hint #3 was when I saw the same ad on Hotmail. But I figured that if the advertiser was spending gobs of money on AdWords, he was probably doing the same on MSN.
Hint #4 was when I kept seeing the same type of fairly risque ads on Hotmail as well as other sites. But I figured maybe Microsoft is just getting deperate for ad money these days and will take anything. :)
Hint #5 was when I noticed the ad was still showing on my sites a day after I added it to the filter. But I figured the URL on the ad wasn't really the domain, so it wasn't being blocked by Google. Although I DID finally start getting suspicious with all these hints building up...
Hint #6 was when I noticed that I never saw the same ads on my home computer as I'd been seeing at work. Hmm....
Hint #7 was when I decided to do a bit more investigation and tried other computers at work and remoted to other computers and didn't see the same ads. More Hmm....
Hint #8 was when I checked with Firefox and didn't see the same ads. Okay, the lightbulb is finally begining to turn on. (I guess that's what happens when you replace all your bulbs with flourescents!)
Finally decided I somehow picked up some adware/malware, so am now scanning the system with the usual assortment of *ware detectors/killers.
But bringing this back on topic, it's interesting that this thingee went after just about any type of advertising in a browser- it looks like it was throwing up its own ads on top of regular banners ads and AdSense. (I just tried going through some other pages on my site to see if it overlayed on every different type of AdSense ad block. But unfortunately/fortunately, it looks like the *ware has been removed now.)
I consider myself pretty tech savy and have several anti-virus/anti-adware programs running, never click on suspicious links, and haven't installed any new programs for several weeks. If I could get infected, it's a good be that Joe Internet User could as well. So for those of you seeing declines in AdSense or other advertising revenue, it's possible that some of that is due to *ware on your visitors' machines.
I'm now all *nix: Mac OS X laptop, Linux and Solaris servers. Not invulnerable by any means, but so far in at least 20 years of running my own *nix machines, not so much as a hint of infection, in spite of at least an attack per minute since ~1993 when we connected to the live 'Internet' as an ISP. B^>
Rgds
Damon
I'm now all *nix: Mac OS X laptop, Linux and Solaris servers.
I don't care what they say... Commodore C64 is still the best!
