More ads than normal
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Actually I take it back (a little), they have iterated to a lesser ad pattern, not a no ad pattern and I have just spotted one ad that is in the wrong place from a formatting perspective. See picture, the ad has come between the pre-formatted text block and it’s “caption”. I am not sure how you are supposed to know not to put it there, but that does speak to my earlier remark, that if you want more ads, you have to allow us to position them, or just put them at the end. You could never correctly position them for everyone if you’re just going to liberally sprinkle them in among text paragraphs at will.
The blog post in question is https://mqgem.wordpress.com/2023/03/14/activity-trace-viewer-enhanced/ but of course the ad is now not there. How do you chase these things down if they keep coming and going?
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@moraghughson that’s why screenshots are so helpful. :)
@notthenewsinbriefs would you mind sharing which theme you’re using on your site? I’m checking a theory. Thanks.
@supernovia thank you. ♥
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Thank you for that!
Up until a few moments ago, it seemed like every site owner who posted about the sudden increase in ads was using one of the Classic themes. But now someone who switched this past week from a long retired theme to Bitacora also posted about the increase in ads. Regardless, I’m keeping an eye on these threads.
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https://notthenewsinbriefs.wordpress.com/2021/09/13/festival-toilets-are-a-feminist-issue/ Hi @supernovia here is an example from a blog post of mine where the same ad appears three times in between paragraphs and disrupts the flow of the text. It’s different to the usual Google ads, you can’t get rid of it because there is no X to click. I have never seen ads like this on my site before until they started to appear yesterday.
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Look at the ridiculous amount of adds on my blog, even on its homepage. It made my content unreadable this week. I feel like WordPress has betrayed our trust, as it our post, which we produce for free, that allow the platform to haver visitors and make money with ads. A mutually beneficial relationship requires mutual respect.
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https://notthenewsinbriefs.wordpress.com/2021/08/02/laurel-hubbard-and-the-olympics-trans-inclusion-policy/ Hi @supernovia In this post there are SEVEN identical ads in between paragraphs, sometimes splitting up quotes from their introductions so the sense is lost:
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Thank you for creating this post. When I saw all the ads on my site increase all of a sudden, I actually thought my device had contracted malware. That’s how intense it is. One massive ad at the top under the banner. Several ads in my sidebar that I honestly would call intrusive. Sometimes all for the exact same thing. When they were less intrusive, I was happy to let them be. But the way it has become, I think my readers would do better with an ad-blocker.
Let me see if I can’t show you some screenshots. It’s actually hilarious in a way. Unwieldly image dimensions because I’m editing this on a phone. And for hilarious effect.
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Same problem on the French forums, people ask why there are so many ads on the free blogs now ! This was not the case before …
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When I created my personal blog in 2013 wordpress.com said there would be just a few discreet ads at the bottom of the page . And related to the activity of the site …
Apparently things have changed … ! -
What’s funny to me, is that advertising does not have to be loud and obnoxious. Subtlety can go a long way. Can you imagine you’re walking down a street, seeing the sights, and some guy wearing a sandwich billboard jumps in front of you, shoves eight of the same flyers in your hands and a couple of your facial orifices and screams his slogans in your ears? That’s what the current level of advertising is like. There’s no way you would listen to or acknowledge what Mr. Sandwich Board has to offer you, because you’re pissed he just assaulted your senses.
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Thanks so much @moraghughson for starting this thread. It’s been driving me insane the way the couple of free websites I look after for community groups have suddenly became sprayed with weird ads, that also repeat through the text. In the case below this very strange one has popped up between photos overnight – I mean, look at it!? I’ve enjoyed using WordPress, but if this keeps up, not for much longer. Many thanks to those investigating to see what might be done.
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Just to be clear, there is an ad underneath the banner, an ad in the sidebar and three ads (two the same) through the text. It seems some of these ads are somehow linked to FB’s algorithim as they’re appearing on my page there too.
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To add to what @renkuleader said, specifically about an ad appearing in between two pictures — that’s pretty insidious. It almost comes across as masquerading the ad as a part of our content, and trying to boost the advertisement click-through rate by tricking our readers into doing so.
And like many of the users here have said, we’re not against having ads on free sites; we know that’s how the bills are paid. But it can be done in a classier way, like making it clear it is an ad, making it easy to close or report if needed (some are missing the X to close them, or the X is way too small that a smartphone user will accidentally tap the ad instead of the X), and having the ads in a designated spot, not shoving everything else out of the way.
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In short :
If our free sites are no longer visited (because of too many ads), everyone will lose !
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And this is what I see today on an Art website I follow ( https://art222.art.blog/ ) . Is it interesting ? I don’t think so :
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Thanks everyone for the feedback here, especially screenshots that show breaking issues.
A few points:
- If the ads are breaking the site, we definitely want to know about it and get that feedback to the ads team. A link to the site and the ad screenshot with markup is most helpful.
- They are trying to get free sites to be more self-sustaining, hence the increase. And that’s tough when so many people are using ad-blockers. Kind of a catch-22. Thanks for your patience while they iterate here.
- If your site gets a lot of traffic (tens of thousands of views per month) and you suspect ad revenue could more than cover the cost of an upgrade, it may make sense to use WordAds.
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@notthenewsinbriefs thank you for the screenshot! I think they’re probably okay with the same ad showing up more than once “scattered through blog posts” if that’s what the advertiser wants. My thought process while looking one of these the other day was like this:
beginning of blog post: “remember that thing you were gonna buy for your dog?”
middle: “don’t forget, doggo would love this thing”
end: “now you can go order it!”
Make sense? So I think that could be the advertisers doing what’s best for them in that case. If it’s breaking the site though, please do get screenshots of that and we’ll have a look!
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