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.

 

[nightstreak]

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

Almost certainly this and I won the game of whack-a-mole when I got a DNS blocker and blocked only these three notorious chumbox websites from serving me ads:

outbrain .com
taboola .com
admaster .cc

I stopped seeing ads on UrbanToronto altogether (sorry, not sorry) because all of them had been being served from those providers. In the last day or so, I've started seeing ads again because I didn't intend to block legitimate advertising (I do want to support this site) and ads for cars, real estate, from the city of Toronto, etc have started punching through. The forum's load speed has also regularized.

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.

It is difficult to run your own ad sales these days, because Google and Meta have a complete stranglehold on the market, which is the entire reason for Bill C-18: it's killing news organizations because their entire business model relied on ad sales and Google/Meta give them pennies on the dollar and loss of control over data. The same I imagine applies to Urban Toronto but I think you're right, a website with this much specificity should be able to sell ads to the real estate and development industry. It's probably not worth the pennies UT gets from Google's Display Network with ads that insult users' intelligence and damages the site's brand.