Spammy Youtube ad

[trebuchet]

I've been battling these spammy, irksome Youtube ads for the past month and thought I'd share to see if anyone else has come across them.

* The ads are 300x250 and 336x280 Youtube links. They appear to promote things to do in a large capital city starting with 'L', though they seem to have little advertising value, land only on Youtube and contain no onward links.

* They emanate from a Cyprus-based media company xxx.tv and three Adwords accounts.

* I have received several complaints that these ads autoplay and occasionally shift viewports or freeze browsers. These problems are reported elsewhere on the web.

In the past month I've blocked several hundred different ads carrying this same video. If I check twice a day, I can usually find new iterations of the same ad. Sometimes they appear up to 500 times before I can get to them.

Has anyone else experienced this?

[keyplyr]

They appear to promote things to do in a large capital city starting with 'L', though they seem to have little advertising value, land only on Youtube and contain no onward links.

Tourist dollars are huge for some cities.

[trebuchet]

I appreciate that. But these ads are just simple videos with no clickthrough links or landing pages. If it's a campaign then it's a very simple one. And if the ads are annoying users, I can hardly think it's effective.

There's now a fourth Adwords account posting the same ads. I've blocked a couple of dozen of them today.

[keyplyr]

The videos may be doing exactly what's intended... promoting activities in these cities. No click-through page necessary.

[trebuchet]

Regardless of their content, the ads are nefarious. Autoplaying audio or video ads are annoying enough but any ad that seizes control of the viewport to highlight itself is just going go p*** users off quick smart. I suspect the company responsible knows this, which is why they have created hundreds of units featuring just 3-4 videos (I've found another eight just today).

[keyplyr]

I don't think I've seen these. Anything that messes with my browsers would be grounds to block.

Have you reported these accounts?

[trebuchet]

I've reported several of the ads, yes, and received no feedback. There's no option to block the entire Adwords account, as there is with most other ads.

The other somewhat concerning thing is that occasionally these ads are showing up in my 'Reviewed' ads, rather than in 'Unreviewed'. As I'm the only one with access to the Adsense CP, I assume this is a reporting fault.