Dating Site Ads

[rubysmama]

Anyone else getting dating site ads. Link address below was to meet Russian girls. It was on the right hand side on the "Home" page. I've seen it a couple times. Sorry didn't get a screenshot.

There was also a different dating site ad on the top of the "Home" page, at the same time as the Russian girls one. Sorry didn't get the link address.

AnastasiaDate is the place to meet thousands of gorgeous women from abroad and chat using a range of great features

 

[Merlin77]

Yup, me too. At least a few times. It's like:

"Woah, I'm here to talk about kitties. What does dating have to do with that?"

I'm not sure why it's happening though.

 

[Anne]

Thank you for reporting this! Dating ads are basically not on topic and untargeted. It's bad for us and for the advertisers. They're not always easy to filter out but I will see how we can tweak the settings to prevent them from showing up.

Again, thanks for the reports! They really help us weed out bad ads.

 

[rubysmama]

Thanks for looking into it. Obviously I didn't click the link, but the displayed ad pic isn't explicit, but still not something I expect to see on a cat forum.

 

[Anne]

Are these ads still showing up for you? rubysmama Merlin77
We tweaked our ads system this week so this could have had a positive effect. However, if you're still seeing them we'll try and track them down in the new system.

 

[rubysmama]

I haven't seen the "meet Russian girls" one.

But I am so sick of another "dating site" one. Probably picking up the words in this thread, but if you can make it stop appearing that would be wonderful. Right now it's on the top and bottom of this page.

https://s0.2mdn.net/8231341/728x90.jpg

Romancetale.com - Online dating site

 

[Merlin77]

For me, I haven't seen one in a while, but I will post back if I do see one again.

 

[Anne]

Glad to hear the really bad ones are gone . I'll look into the one you posted here rubysmama - thank you for your patience!

 

[rubysmama]

Thanks. And, BTW, it's at the top and bottom on this page, yet again.

 

[Anne]

Thanks. And, BTW, it's at the top and bottom on this page, yet again.

That in itself (showing up twice on the page) is not a problem. It's ad quality I'm concerned with. Not all ads will be on topic but we prefer to keep dating ads off the site as they tend to be distracting. We're trying to chase down this one.

 

[rubysmama]

You're right, they are distracting. And a bit offensive.

Just now, I had a meet Japanese women ad at the top. I got the link for the jpg, but it changed to the other ad before I could get the site link.
https://tpc.googlesyndication.com/simgad/17414723735610177004

Edit: And here's the link: Meet Japanese Women

I used to post on a vegetarian board, and they kept getting "meat-related" ads if someone posted something about meat. They had to tweak things to make them stop appearing.

Good luck catching the culprit ads.

 

[jcat]

These are showing up today:
Meet Japanese Women
Find your chinese woman
AnastasiaDate brings you a large membership of interesting women from abroad, all verified and determined to find love

 

[Norachan]

Interestingly enough, I'm in Japan and I'm getting ads to meet beautiful Arab women today.

 

[AbbysMom]

Anne

 

[Winchester]

I saw a "Meet your Asian love" ad at the top of the Lounge. And right now, on the bottom of this page (the site help dating thead), there's a "Be flattered by Flirty Singles" at dating.com.

I don't know many people on TCS who are really looking for something like this. I could be wrong. I find it weird.

When I just went in to edit my post, I saw the "This is Not a Typical Dating Site" ad. So that's three dating ads in as many minutes.

You know, I realize that you don't want us using ad blockers, but it's preferable to dealing with ads like this. Sorry.

 

[Anne]

I saw a "Meet your Asian love" ad at the top of the Lounge. And right now, on the bottom of this page (the site help dating thead), there's a "Be flattered by Flirty Singles" at dating.com.

I don't know many people on TCS who are really looking for something like this. I could be wrong. I find it weird.

When I just went in to edit my post, I saw the "This is Not a Typical Dating Site" ad. So that's three dating ads in as many minutes.

You know, I realize that you don't want us using ad blockers, but it's preferable to dealing with ads like this. Sorry.

Hi Pam

First thing to understand is that the ads you're seeing are not something I "choose" to show. Ads today are different for each user and depend on things like location, personal details (not known by TCS - known by Facebook and/or Google) and sites visited in your computer which could be leaving cookies in your computer.

We try hard to maintain a higher than average level of ads here by disqualifying some topics such as gambling, tobacco, adult products and dating. Usually that works but sometimes rogue ads sneak in when advertisers don't mark them correctly when submitting to the network. When that happens, we can try and hunt down the ads and manually block them.

We rely on users' reports here. The best thing to do to help us out is to hover with your mouse over an ad and capture the URL it's leading to - without clicking through. A screenshot once the URL shows up can help because it contains the name of the ad network.

We will try and hunt down the rogue ad anyway, even without the URL by using the domain name.

I can't stop anyone from using an ad blocker. I just hope people realize that small websites like TCS rely on advertising revenue. Without it there would be no TCS - it's that simple.

Facebook and Google are already able to apply far more sophisticated advertising methods because their members provide them with infinite amount of private information (without even realizing that they dig into your email accounts, private messages etc). We don't do that. And by "we" I don't mean just TCS. I mean all content websites that aren't Google or Facebook. Without the support of surfers content sites will crash. And that support just means not using an ad blocker. Even if once in a blue moon an ad for a dating service shows up.

I really hope most of our site visitors and members will prefer to whitelist TCS and continue to support us by viewing ads. And also help us by tracking down rogue ads so we can take them down.

 

[Winchester]

OMG! I'm not looking at dating ads! Believe me, I'm at work and man, I'd get fired so fast it would make your head spin, NOT that I'd be looking at them anyway. I swear!

I didn't realize that's how it worked. Not that I believed you were OK showing dating ads, that's not what I mean. But I thought that they were getting "sneaked in" by whatever company does the ads for you.

Thanks for clarifying. And now I'm trying to figure out how in the heck I'm seeing tons and tons of dating ads. Wow!

 

[Anne]

OMG! I'm not looking at dating ads! Believe me, I'm at work and man, I'd get fired so fast it would make your head spin, NOT that I'd be looking at them anyway. I swear!

I didn't realize that's how it worked. Not that I believed you were OK showing dating ads, that's not what I mean. But I thought that they were getting "sneaked in" by whatever company does the ads for you.

Thanks for clarifying. And now I'm trying to figure out how in the heck I'm seeing tons and tons of dating ads. Wow!

Oh, no worries. I didn't think you were (not that there's anything wrong with looking at dating sites, mind!) In this case, the thread you were browsing was about dating and that's like a magnet for dating ads.

Advertisers pay for these ads so they prefer to show them to people who they think may actually be clients. That's judged either by a person's browsing history (nothing to do with TCS) or the content on the page. The advertisers are managed by very large networks so a site like TCS doesn't have say in which ads are displayed. We can only set the preferences not to accept certain types of ads. We aim at keeping this site family friendly so we refuse ads for gambling, tobacco or anything of adult nature - no matter how much they're willing to pay (and some of those gambling ads are willing to pay a lot!). We also filter out pop-ups and any auto-play ads. Again, they're paying a lot but I prefer to keep the ads as non-intrusive as possible.

Here's the thing though, as far as I know, not all networks distinguish between dating ads and regular ads. There are real and legitimate dating services out there. Networks mark ads that are "adult" in nature but not necessarily dating. These ads are usually not shown here because they're not contextual with most of our topics. Some may sneak in and we can try and flag them but it doesn't always work.

I know it's annoying to get ads which are clearly not targeted properly. I get them too as a user (not only here but all over the web). What you can do when that happens is look for a little X at the top of the ad, click it and let the ad network know that you don't want to see ads of this type anymore. That should work with ads served by Google which is our main ad network. Don't click on the ad itself though, just the little X. It should bring up something like this -

Click on the "Stop seeing this ad" button and Google's AI is supposed to stop showing you ads like it over time.

It may be tempting to just use an ad blocker but when you do that, you're taking away the main (and sometimes only) source of revenue, usually for small publishers like TCS. If most users do that, sites like this one will no longer exist. As simple as that.

 

[rubysmama]

Anne It's been a while since I started this thread, and I am still getting those insulting dating site ads ALL THE TIME.

They're not just on this site, but it's also not every site I go to that has ads.

It's like the default ad is a dating site one. Then if I go to Amazon or some other site, it'll start putting ads of things I looked at. But these dating site ads still show up. And they're driving me insane!

I even tried doing the ad blockers for a bit, but they kept using up too much memory and crashing my computer. So I've had to turn them off.

Is there any way to make them stop, particularly on this site? I am here a fair amount. I've tried the "stop seeing this ad" but it doesn't do anything.

Here's the link to the one especially annoying me today:
AsiaCharm.com - Online dating site

And the link to the image: https://s0.2mdn.net/8231341/5-728x90.jpg

 

[Anne]

Yikes, I've been getting them too. They actually come from Google Adsense and I've had the same experience with not being able to stop them despite reporting them multiple times.
Let me try and block them from the ad admin's side. Hopefully our ads director will be able to do something about it soon.