I’ve removed Galaksion from the add networks being used on my site.

It’s a shame that I had to, because I had a generally good feeling about them. I liked their website, their publisher dashboard, and how easy it was to sign up and set up my site to use them.

Their ad fill rate was not great, but I don’t expect that of a new site that hasn’t been sent much traffic yet. The ads that did fill at least had a non-zero CPM rate.

But there’s one thing that happened that I can’t live with.

While testing some updates to my site I clicked on a text box to edit some details. A new tab automatically opened to some ad-based destination. I did not click on an ad to get there. I might have inaccurately attributed an auto-navigation to AdsTerra a few days ago, but they would have been removed anyway due to their slow script and poor reputation and I don’t care to do the research to figure out which of the two was the real culprit in that particular malvertising navigation (that was probably AdsTerra, I’m just not 100% confident).

Anything that will clickjack or hinder my site’s functionality is not welcome, so they’ve been removed from the rotation. Now we’re down to just RevenueHits and Bidvertiser.

I really wish this process involved me removing providers because I didn’t earn as much with them rather than dealing with technical issues that break my site. How is above-ground malvertising and clickjacking even still a thing in 2020? I should have to scour the dark web to find ad networks that behave that way.

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.

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:

The page:

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.

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.

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.