Out of place ads on Polycount
polycounter lvl 5
Recently I've noticed that there have been some ads that don't feel like they're supposed to be on Polycount. I know the 3ds Max/Maya etc. ads have been here forever, but these are most definitely new.
This one leads to a website that looks like this...
I've also encountered some popup-ads telling me I've won a free iPhone, and sometimes there's a video of some random bald dude that plays automatically when the page is loaded (and it's so damn loud). There are some more ads, like the typical "Doctors hate him"-bullshit.
I know some ads are shown to users based on their internet usage, but as far as I'm aware I haven't been looking at Russian dating sites nor random furry stuff. These ads don't seem to come up in the banner ones, they only appear underneath the avatars of a post's OP.
Previously I've had Polycount whitelisted in my Adblock settings but because of these ads I've had to enable it on the site, too.
Has anyone else noticed this?
This one leads to a website that looks like this...
I've also encountered some popup-ads telling me I've won a free iPhone, and sometimes there's a video of some random bald dude that plays automatically when the page is loaded (and it's so damn loud). There are some more ads, like the typical "Doctors hate him"-bullshit.
I know some ads are shown to users based on their internet usage, but as far as I'm aware I haven't been looking at Russian dating sites nor random furry stuff. These ads don't seem to come up in the banner ones, they only appear underneath the avatars of a post's OP.
Previously I've had Polycount whitelisted in my Adblock settings but because of these ads I've had to enable it on the site, too.
Has anyone else noticed this?
Replies
Mostly static ads, a couple animated/video ads with no sound (World of Tanks, surveys). The kinds of ads I'm seeing: car, art school, thermostat, 3d software, game, college loan. I'm in the US.
Your IP is in Finland (so is your avatar apparently
Okay, so I tried using a VPN to see if that has an effect. Tunneling through the US I'm mostly getting car, loan, PayPal and clothing ads. Through the UK I kept seeing this single ad for an art exhibit. Through Sweden I got some miscellanious ads, but none of them were inappropriate. Without a VPN I mostly see ads for Russian dating sites and furry livestreams. Brilliant lol
It's odd how it's just the ads underneath the avatars. They are from Google Ads, the same place where the banner ads are being served from. It shouldn't have anything to do with my web history, as I run CCleaner almost daily on my PC, and that should take care of most of the cached data my browsers have collected.
I'm not seeing those ads on any other site, though. Elsewhere the ads usually fit the context of the site.
EDIT: Great, so I'm not alone on this @SveinY
I haven't seen any of the ads OP mentioned but I do get random ads like F2P games and surveys.
Curious, has anyone been able to auto-block the ads on Artstation? Apparently they use some interesting techniques to subvert ad blockers.
The main thing that they are doing differently is that they host advertisements from their own image server and almost all adblocking happens through domain blacklisting/whitelisting. Their advertising url just isn't in any prominent blocklists.
Anyhow, a bit OT.
The under the banner ads are still relevant however. Perhaps the ads served under profiles don't have the same settings?
Just ran a multi refresh in incognito mode, low and behold:
The adsense is probably at fault, it did take around 100* refreshes to get this. Contact your ad supplier?
/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
I deal with this in work a lot. Sometimes it can be content being injected into the web browser though a adsense or similar program installed on the host machine. Vpn's can change the way they interact with ads which can explain the differing results. Check for anything installed on your machine that shouldn't be there. Check through task manager to see what tasks are running. Check through chrome task manager and see if anything is there too. Try purging your full browser history of everything.
Other ways to check are to create a new account on the machine and log in and check that way. Crap can be saved to the appdata folder on a windows profile which can change behaviours. Incognito mode can also check this too but it can be less successful than a fresh account test.
Just a last FYI, the ad sense on polycount are tied into your browsing history. I currently have Jobsite advert on mine as I was looking for new work after my contract finished however that was over a month ago ( new start tomorrow). If you don't want to see things of this nature then maybe you should think about your cookie footprint on your machine and change up the way you browse recreationally. Again incognito mode will prevent cookies and trackers for recreational sites bleeding over into work and day to day life.
Yes, I have had this conversation with pretty high level staff where I worked xD
Lastly the adverts may have been tagged wrong on the deployment end hence the bleed over. Normally they do require triggers though as I've not seen any dubious adverts on polycount using multiple machines on many networks. If more people respond seeing these adverts it could be the adsense however it's looking a lot like a local machine issue.
@Lazerus Reborn how are you getting @Bluestemos account screenshots? Work at the same place?
@Eric Chadwick Could it just be that that specific ad is broken? It's the only ad on Polycount that displays out of context stuff for me. The banners seem fine, showing ads for Knald, 3ds Max, Maya LT, Daz3D, etc. As I said earlier, Polycount is the only site I've encountered these ads on.
They host their own ads, and they only allow art related ads, so no real reason to block since it`s mostly ads people hanging around artstation would be interested in.
Yeah it's looking more like a adsense issue, I ran checks off a clean virtual machine to check it out earlier and it came up there
@Eric Chadwick
I just opened the thread in incognito and used a batch refresh:
I guess my snipping tool skills are on point. It does seem that the profile advert is linked to browsing history. I saw a fair few related things to what I've been up to. Take the above 123reg advert, I've been working with a client on designing a training system for him and his host is 123reg. I have never seen any out of context adverts on polycount using my profile yet but when I swap over to private mode it starts throwing out a few wobblers. Not many, most are pretty related such as networking, 3d related, TV/internet/tech.
Maybe it's defaulting to a set of adverts when there is not enough information to build a advert profile? I mean as smart as these systems are, distasteful things will always creep in despite the criteria being the most innocuous thing. Take the google image challenge by googling any random word without safe search, you'll hit porn within a few pages.
It could also just be a rogue set of adverts in the adsense which have been labeled incorrectly. Not much else I can gather on this end.
I've got all of my google adsense turned off - for both signed in and signed out, so there is no adsense profile for me, and like Bluestemos, i run CCleaner regularly, and my Norton removes ad focused cookies regularly.
I also use privacy badger, which blocks about 20 domains (all ad related) on polycount - I allow ads to render, so that polycount gets revenue, but I block all of the associated cookies
So i think adsense is maybe throwing out some random ads because it can't build a profile to render ads for that user, so instead of the ads being community / industry specific, it's as Lazerus says, is trying to be user specific based on an adsense profile (which doesn't always exist)
Your ISP can see everything you do on non-https sites and they don't need local cookie storage to track you so an incognito window won't do anything.
I don't really mind any sort of ads, but the kind that starts playing videos with sound, even if it does include cats, burn it.
Haha wow, this is getting bizarre.
It was pretty much a curse.
I don't mind images, but videos, even without auto-sound, can make a page heavy, and take longer to load. I've had a polycount page freeze up for 5 seconds or so recently. I can only assume it was because of a video ad.
Example:
I did lot of light refernce google searches to day.
First ad I saw here today was for home depot, light fixture ad.
I dont mind but that is what I am getting
Almost all of the other ads I see are for gameart/cg related things.
lmao :') This guy deserve a medal
But today I got my first non-relevant ad as well.