Chumbox Ads

[nightstreak]

Do admins of the site have the ability to set preferences for the type of ads that appear here? I'm sure most of us want to support UT but the absolute worst of the worst chumbox ads appear on this site and I can't imagine people tolerating this type of visual clutter for long and giving up and resorting to ad blockers.

Clearly scammy, clearly made with AI, low quality, insult-to-intelligence-spray-and-pray-that-some-poor-schmuck-will-click type ads don't belong on a site like Urban Toronto.

And if that doesn't appeal to the admins here, almost all of these ads are video loops so they have a visible effect on the performance of the site, particularly slowing down loading the forum. It's been pretty bad as of late.

 

[Edward Skira]

We are looking into it. Thanks for bringing it up.

 

[nightstreak]

We are looking into it. Thanks for bringing it up.

Thank you. For what it's worth, whatever you're doing, it's mostly working:

...mostly.

 

[a2z]

Looks like UT, like your typical website, opts in to becoming part of the Google Display Network for ads to get a few extra dollars, which means you'll likely be served something that fits into one of the three categories:

1) Probably the most common as you've noticed - complete junk or clickbait. Pretty sure these actors just spray & pray, and would imagine they exist under a million different aliases so it's probably a game of whack-a-mole trying to get rid of them

2) You are getting retargeted by a website you've visited in the past that really wants you to "convert"

3) Or someone trying to cold target visitors of certain sites for a reason - for instance, the below attribution link for a ButterflyMX ad I got served shows that they are deliberately targeting real estate websites (that I guess UT falls into). Probably the same case with your QTower example that is also probably geotargeted too.

I'm actually a bit surprised that UT doesn't also sell advertising banner slots directly on the forums/site like some websites (e.g. industry-specific publications) - yes I know there are other areas they do sell advertising opportunities, but would imagine the forum has enough relevant visitors that this would be enticing for some companies trying to sell a RE/development-related product.

And it would definitely be preferable to the majority of the Display Network junk, but I guess for now they've deemed it to not be worth the effort / cost of overhead for something not particularly game-changing revenue-wise.