After finding your website this past summer, I’ve been completely infatuated with Forex. I completed the school and have been trading a demo account ever since. My only complaint that I did not notice before are the video advertisements that play. Currently, I have the divergence cheat sheet up with some music in the background and every 10 seconds, a new video advertisement plays. I understand that those are your source of revenue but it would be nice if it only played once. There is no pause button either so I just have to let it play over and over again.
Other than that, great website and great community!
Thanks for the feedback. Does this advertisement load up on its own tab, or is the advertisement on our website somewhere? None of our advertisers [I]should[/I] have auto-playing sound, but Google, one of our ad partners, has been changing up some of its delivery lately, so they could be the reason we’re seeing these new ad types. Let me know if there’s anything you remember about the ad in question. In the mean time, we’ll confirm settings on our end and get rid of those autoplay, noisy ads if we can.
Also, make sure to run a malware scan and confirm whether you’re running any search-related tool bars in your browser. Those types of “free” add-ons sometime have advertising built into them, a by-product of the tool/service/utility being free.
I should have asked the first time: is your issue with sound or the fact that the advertisement is animated? If there’s sound, that’s definitely an issue we need resolve. As for animation, it’s a standard practice of ours to allow our advertisers to display animated ads. I took your comment about your music to mean that it was being interrupted by another sound. Is that the case here?
It was definitely a sound issue. It was weird because it repeated itself multiple times. I figured once it finished playing the first time, that would be the end of it. It could’ve just been a bug or something on my end. I just thought I’d point out what happened.
C’mon Babypips, this type of advertising makes this site look bad.
I have several media players on my computer, and they are all up-to-date. If any one of them was due for an update, I would be notified by the software company that created the player, not by some shifty-looking, generic pop-up ad on a website.
In my opinion, only a fool would click on something like this.
That’s a tough one. Did you happen to get a look to where the banner takes you?
Unfortunately, we don’t review each and every advertisement that Google sends us. We’d really love to, but we don’t have the resources to do that every day. What we do is block certain “sensitive” categories, such as “Get Rich Quick”, “Dating”, “Video Games”, “Cosmetic Procedures & Body Modification” and others. We also specifically block all ads in certain “general” categories, such as “Beauty and Personal Care”, “Food & Groceries”, “Dining & Nightlife” and others. While these blocks help, there’s no guarantee that an advertiser categorizes his ad correctly, or if he’s even asked by Google to do so. Many ads are scanned and systematically added to a category without human intervention. And as we’ve seen even recently, there are advertisers who purposefully assign the wrong category or no category at all to slip through the category blocks.
Our options of recourse with Google when a problematic ad is identified are to 1) attempt to block the ad by its display URL or destination URL or 2) report the ad to Google manually, using an online form or 3) block an ad by its design.
We’ve performed all of these methods with varying degrees of success. With option 1, physically, the ads stay the same, but the display and destination URLs change. It becomes a cat and mouse game at times keeping up with the URL changes. With option 2, once a report is submitted, there is no followup from Google regarding whether any action is taken. We’re completely left in the dark. Regarding option 3, not every ad appears in Google’s Ad Review Center. And as I mentioned, the ads change daily. You can create filters to help you identify an ad, but ads such as the one you have reported, are very hard to track down. Google even offers us the option to upload an image of the ad, but that feature has never worked for us. We’ve tried this with your ad, without any success.
We’ll spend more time in the Review Center in hopes of finding this ad. We don’t like it either, and would much rather see it go. If you happen to see it again, please help us by copying the link address. That would be another parameter we could search against.
Pipstradamus, here is another ad, trying to lure us into clicking on some sort of “upgrade”. I saw this one for the first time yesterday (Sunday, October 6).
I didn’t take the bait, so I don’t know what sort of video I was unable to see, because of my “missing plug-in”.
Also, back on this thread, I’ve added a couple of examples of ads which don’t belong on Babypips (in my opinion).
Thanks Clint. I haven’t seen that one. I’ll do some digging and add it to the block list if I find it. As for the other ads you mentioned, we’ve attempted to block half of them by category, design, URL, etc. That hasn’t been successful. We’ll have to intensify our manual reports to Google and cross our fingers that they do something.
