Online advertisers beware of Clicksor

Online advertising is a big deal these days. It used to be spammy and untargeted, now things are very different. The launch of Google AdSense sparked a lot of change in the online advertising world and since then competition has increased and the way in which ads are served are a lot more complex and targeted to the audience of the website.

For online advertising on a blog of any website most people will instantly think of Google straight away. Well for starters you see their ads everywhere and they do more or less dominate the online world (well, not quite but almost). The only problem that I and many others have found with Google AdSense is that making any substantial amount of money is hard and the traffic coming into the site has to be extremely high in order to get a decent amount of click on the ads.

Because earning a good amount from Google AdSense is hard, the natural thing to do is seek alternatives to see if higher earning potentials can be achieved. This is what a client of our had done and found the online advertiser Clicksor. At first Clicksor seemed like a good alternative to AdSense, the ads were OK, and they offer contextual advertising (which not money companies cannot). So after a few weeks of using Clicksor our client went to check some info on Google Webmaster Tools and found themselves presented with a warning at the top of the page saying: Parts of this site may be distributing malware. This is something that no website owner wants to be faced with. It is a worrying message to be faced with, questions start coming to mind; how is this happening? has someone hacked the site? is it a Google error? – NO! none of these, it’s the Clicksor ads being served on the website!

Immediately my client got online and wrote a very stern email to Clicksor and did some digging around online to see if there was any way of preventing this. They found after some research that this was happening to a lot of website owners and it has been an issue for Clicksor for a long time. There are many forums online where people have been talking about this subject and have contacted Clicksor to be told that they are working on it and are trying to fix the problem that is causing ads to distribute malware – but this has been going on for years.

It sounds to me like Clicksor are dragging their feet and are still making money so don’t want to invest more money into sorting this problem if they really don’t have to. This is a dangerous game for them to play, if they annoy enough people no one will use them anymore. My advice is to steer clear of Clicksor ads, they aren’t worth the hassle!

Posted on 25th September 2010 by Stuart in Advertising