Yearly Archives: 2021

Adsterra Didn’t Work For Me

I noticed that pages on my site would hang for a WHILE, so I did some investigation.

It turns out that the Adsterra JavaScript code was loading https://www.gatetodisplaycontent.com/7cb8fde86d9eb121ba106553cdc48d1a/invoke.js which would take more than a minute to finish (1.1 minutes according to the browser’s developer tools). It was a blocking call, so my site would not load while this script was executing.

Since breaking my site is unacceptable, Adsterra has been kicked out of the rotation.

That extremely long load time might also explain the terrible fill rate.

Adsterra Statistics

Bidvertiser served 3 times as many impressions on the same site over the same time period and did not prevent my site from loading.

I also noticed some weird behavior and could not easily figure out which script was causing it. Once in a while when I would click in a text box, a new tab would open to product.directredirection.com with a spammy malware site that was trying to trick me into installing a Chrome extension.

The URL:

directredirection.com malware

The page:

product.direcredirection chrome extension malvertising

More investigation revealed that Adsterra has been known to serve malvertising in the past:

https://blog.malwarebytes.com/cybercrime/2016/04/magnitude-ek-activity-at-its-highest-via-adsterra-malvertising/

https://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/news/252473229/Adsterra-still-connected-to-malvertising-campaign-despite-denials

I removed their JavaScript snippet and haven’t had that malware auto-navigation happen again.

Now it’s down to Bidvertiser, Galaksion, and RevenueHits.

Adsaro Didn’t Work For Me

I’m not sure that Adsaro even works. In the past few days I’ve had zero impressions. Maybe I set up their JavaScript block wrong, but the fact that pages on their site take an eternity to load makes me think it’s them, not me.

Adsterra, Bidvertiser, Galaksion, and RevenueHits are still in the running.

Media.net Didn’t Work For Me

I received a message that my site was disapproved today, so they’re the first ones to fail out of my newest ad network comparison experiment.

Looking closer at their policies I see this (bold added by me):

“Our program has been designed for sites with premium content. Sites that promote, contain, or link directly to the following types of content shall not be approved.

  • Adult, Pornographic or any illegal content
  • Tobacco, alcohol, ammunition, hazardous substances, illegal drugs, gore, violence, gambling and racism content
  • Pages containing profanity or content that and/or discriminates or is offensive to any section of people
  • Hate, violence, racial intolerance, or advocate against any individual, group, or organization
  • Sale of prescription drugs
  • Sale of counterfeit products, imitations of designer or other goods, stolen items or any products that infringe intellectual property rights of other parties
  • Contain programs which promote invalid click activity by paying users to clicking on ads, browse websites, read email etc.
  • Websites that contain forums, discussion boards, chat rooms, or any content area that is open to public updates without adequate moderation
  • Sites with content that has been generated using computer programs and hence may not be comprehendible.
  • Bulk of the content is user-generated
  • Sites with fake news
  • Any other content that we believe in our sole discretion to be illegal”

So their network is ABSOLUTELY incompatible with a search engine since it links to everything on that list.

Still in the running are Adsaro, Adsterra, Bidvertiser, Galaksion, and RevenueHits.

New Site Advertising Experiment

I’m trying another round of ad network experiments. These are the 6 companies I’m trying out:

Asdaro

Adsterra

Bidvertiser

Galaksion

Media.net

RevenueHits

I might also add Adcash to the mix if I can get their site verification to work – I signed up but was unable to verify my site because their system was unable to access the website (I’ll assume someone pushed some broken code before the new year).

I have a randomizer in my site template that picks a random ad provider on each page load. It should distribute the traffic roughly evenly among them and as I get data and experience how each company impacts my site, I’ll eliminate the ones that aren’t right for me.

Adsaro, Galaksion, and Media.net are all completely new to me.

I tried RevenueHits before and it it made the experience on my site pretty terrible and glitchy. I’m giving them another chance, but they’ll be the first to be cut out if I find anything annoying going on.

I tried Adsterra before and it worked OK, but earned effectively nothing. I’m giving them another chance since it’s been a couple years and things might work better.

I’ve used Bidvertiser and they were the ad provider that was on the last version of WbSrch the longest. I didn’t have any significant income through them, but their ads were the least intrusive and managed to not be annoying at all. I suspect this one will not be the first one to be cut.

Windows Software by Lambda Centauri

I’ve written a lot of apps for Windows (and other) PCs. Originally I published everything as Zeta Centauri, but it was a weird combination of audio apps and utilities that didn’t mesh well with audio apps (calculators, word processing, image viewer, browser). I’ve launched a new website for the utility apps to keep them separate from the audio apps.

Check it out here: https://lambdacentauri.com