Annoying advertisements

[gebik]

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The pop up ad is the problem.

(463.65 KiB) Not downloaded yet

As you can see in attachment, there is new ad type in mobile version, which blocks extra part of user screen in menus...
I have not seen it somewhere else.
Is there something to get rid of it at website side?

[orudge]

Hmm, I'll have a look at the ad settings and see if anything has changed, or if there's a way of customising this. Somebody else reported similar the other day too.

[Chrill]

Hi!

Starting today, I am met with a Russian ad covering the entire page which I have to click away before I can browse. Is there anything we can do about these to make sure they don't show up?

[andythenorth]

AdSense (I think) is serving interstitials currently.
Not frequently, but occasionally.

They're more annoying than the average ad, as they demand a click to dismiss.

If they're on CPC not CPM, they probably won't be earning much from EU traffic, as they're in Cyrillic

[ebla71]

AdSense (I think) is serving interstitials currently.
Not frequently, but occasionally.

They're more annoying than the average ad, as they demand a click to dismiss.

If they're on CPC not CPM, they probably won't be earning much from EU traffic, as they're in Cyrillic

Some of the ads are indeed quite ecentric, so to say

Some that I get shown are in Finnish or Estonian, so that's at least the right continent, while others I hope trace back to shared use of some computers with my wife, as that's not the stuff men normally wear

[gebik]

Necroed thread...

[orudge]

Ugh. Funnily enough I've just seen that too (and in Cyrillic too). I remember when Google Ads were just nice, unobtrusive text adverts... let me see what I can do.

EDIT: How kind, Google has automatically opted the site into an "experiment" to "optimise revenue opportunities". Let's see if I can turn that off.

[Chrill]

They seem to keep appearing. Unfortunately I might have to use Adblock for a bit, hopefully that will catch these even though it removes ad revenue for the site.

[orudge]

I think I've got them disabled now, though I don't know how quickly Google will respond to this change. Sorry for the annoyance!

[andythenorth]

Thanks

[orudge]

I don’t know about anyone else but I now seem to be seeing massive adverts interspersed in forum topic listings, on mobile at least. Sorry about this - I’m going to check what wonderful new feature Google has switched on this time.

EDIT: That's hopefully gone. Remember the days when Google's ads were simple text-based banners? I miss those days.

[andythenorth]

The ads (for me at least) are now stuck in a loop of adult manga content, Shein or Etsy ads for things that look like adult toys that aren't, or 'your download is ready' malware ads.

How much revenue are the ads bringing in annually? Could we crowd-fund buying them out for an ad-free experience?

[andythenorth]

I use my phone quite a bit to read tt-forums, example of typical page attached

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[orudge]

Not as much as they once did, to be fair. It would be nice if Google could go back to the days of a row of unobtrusive text ads, but it seems to make them more obnoxious (funny how it launched to provide an alternative to the obnoxious ads that were then popular on the web). I think I have disabled all the options that I can to avoid ads that float around the place and stick them in places I haven't asked for them, though given they keep changing things it's possible they've modified things again.

[GarryG]

Hi all,

I got that add this morning for the first time so I went to properties on Drive C and ran Disk Cleanup and not had that add since so seems like a spam of some thought. Whether that will work for the rest of you having that problem?

Cheers

EDIT:

The problem has returned. Seems like running the disk clean and CC cleaner works for a while but something allows it to come back again when I click on some links.

[Redirect Left]

How much revenue are the ads bringing in annually? Could we crowd-fund buying them out for an ad-free experience?

This is a good idea, if it isn't much it could be added to the yearly donation drive the forum does, i think its normally £500. Owen gets that fairly quickly each year I think?

[andythenorth]

Scam ads continue (this is on iOS)

Transport Tycoon Forums - Index page.jpeg.png

(1.09 MiB) Not downloaded yet

[orudge]

Is that 'Verify' thing an ad?

[Redirect Left]

Indeed. The quality of googles ads have taken a massive down turn, ranging from factually inaccurate, to outright scammy methods to make you click on them.