Coull.com Youtube Hijacking
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This is bizarre. A couple of videos on my site are suddenly refusing to play when clicked; instead, they open full-screen on some site called network.coull.com.
Since I uploaded one of these videos myself from a flash file to YouTube, it’s not something the uploader is doing, and shouldn’t be something built into the video.
Videos affected are “The prancing pony of Penticistan” in http://raincoaster.com/2013/03/03/the-prancing-pony-of-penticistan/ whose YouTube URL is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oo3cGYdBJx8
As you can see, on the blog the black bars are wider than usual, although I thought that was just because of the widescreen format. However, it’s the same on these videos in http://raincoaster.com/2012/08/10/friday-work-through-the-pain-playlist/ .
The actual code for the last video is
http://network.coull.com/activatevideo?video_provider_id=2&pid=8165&website_id=11205&width=474&height=297&video_provider_url=http%3A//www.youtube.com/embed/1LJgQsS9F-8%3Fversion%3D3%26rel%3D1%26fs%3D1%26showsearch%3D0%26showinfo%3D1%26iv_load_policy%3D1%26wmode%3Dtransparent&mobile=true&referrer=http%3A%2F%2Fraincoaster.com%2F2012%2F08%2F10%2Ffriday-work-through-the-pain-playlist%2FWondering if this is something on my computer.
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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What’s odd is, when you hover over the video, no YouTube bar comes up. And yesterday, only ONE of the videos in the second post was having this problem: now they all are.
Wondering if perhaps this is some ad hijack feature from WordPress.com?
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This is weird and that’s for sure. I think you should tag this thread for a Staff investigation and response.
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Ok, very odd. I’m not seeing the described behavior (they play fine), but I do see a green share icon hoving over the video which does go to coull.com.
Meanwhile, I’m not seeing any of that at http://macmanx.com/category/video/ (for example).
I’m wondering if this is maybe a new Youtube ad gone wrong. Would you mind trying just the URL embed (basically, just drop the shortcode elements)?
I’m going to poke around at this myself (once I stop laughing hysterically at the pony video), but so far my only though is to switch the embed method.
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Behaves normal for me also – but when I mouse over the video I see the green funny share thing pops up on the top right corner of the video – shows a link to coull.com
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Ah, I take that back, it’s WordAds. I should just be a tiny green button on Youtube video embeds.
FWIW, they’re working properly in Chrome. In Firefox, I saw a slight delay where it’s just a black box that goes to the ad provider when clicked. After not too long of a wait, the video appeared.
The WordAds team is investigating.
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I just Edited that post to take a look at the code, and didn’t change anything before hitting Update. All appears normal on that end.
Nothing has changed for me on that post. I’m going to email Coull.com about it.
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Ah, it’s WordAds? Interesting. Because there already is an ad on that post, as you can see.
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Yeah, WordAds is trying ads in embeds now, so more money for you, yay! :)
The issue appears to be with the ad provider, so they’re going to work with them on this.
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Since I get all the Adsense revenue from the YouTube, this actually means LESS money for me.
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