My ultimatum letter to Clicksor about their virus/malware ads! Will they listen?

Eurofile007 Active Member

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#1

I'm fed up with Clicksor's malware/virus ads that keep redirecting my website users to other sites by force against their will! Clicksor refuses to fix this problem permanently, but instead expects me to report the these neverending hacking ads to them everyday, in essence asking me to work for them for free with no pay or credit!!!!!!!! This problem continues to repel my website visitors and compromise my site traffic! It can't continue!

So I'm going to send them this ultimatum letter below. What do you think? Will it work? Will they listen to reason and allow us to cash out our remaining balance, since they cannot fix this serious problem, and thus the fault and failure is on their end?!

Dear Anita,
Please forward this letter to the CEO or ower of Clicksor.

Dear Owner of Clicksor,

I am a publisher with you. For the past few months, my website users have complained that your ads have been infecting their computer and redirecting them to other sites against their will. It has happened to me too, so I know firsthand about this. Many computers have a shield or wall that alerts the user that their computer is about to be hacked by a harmful script, and at that point, many have to close their browsers. This is a very serious problem and threat to website users.

Each time this happens, when I report it to your customer service, they ask me for the IP of the user this happened to, and the URL of the site they were redirected to by force. Each time I provide that, they are able to trace the hacking ad and suspend it. However, the next day the same problem happens again, and again and again, etc. I've been through this about five or six times already with your support staff. Yet the problem persists. It is neverending. And it is highly unreasonable for you to expect publishers to continue to allow such malware ads on their site, while your staff never implement a permanent solution.

Your staff has no permanent fix to this horrific problem in your ads, but instead expect me to report the IP and URL of the hacking ads EVERYDAY! That is highly unfair and unreasonable, don't you agree? I am not a paid staff of your company, so what they are asking me to do is essentially WORK FOR YOU for free!!!!!!! Essentially, I would have to spend time and energy everyday to help you track down virus ads, while NOT getting paid for it nor getting any kind of credit whatsoever!

How would YOU feel in such a position? Think about it.

Plus, it's a fruitless endeavor. Tracking down each malware ad from clicksor would be like trying to kill every ant that's going under the fridge toward the rotten egg. It's neverending! Better to just remove the rotten egg, but you don't do that! Instead you ask me to keep stopping the ants, which are neverending! Do you see how futile that is? How long will you let this continue? It's obviously going to ruin your company, but you do nothing about it?! Why?! It's suicidal to your company to let this continue. Don't you care?

The logical solution to this is for you to hire or contract programmers to write a script that does not allow hacking scripts to get through your ads. So why don't you do that? Or just find out why Adsense and Abrite do not have this problem, and emulate whatever they are doing to not have hacking scripts in their ads.

Simple as that. So what's the problem?

Realistically, this cannot continue. I cannot have my website users constantly complain about your ads hijacking their computer over and over again while you have no permanent solution to it other than to ask me to spend lots of time everyday helping you track them down, without any compensation for my time.

Surely you can see that that would be highly unreasonable and unfair, right?

My website traffic is seriously compromised because of this serious problem on your end that isn't getting fixed.

Therefore, I ask that you consider the situation, and if you cannot fix this serious problem permanently, please allow me to cash out my remaining balance on my account, even though I haven't reached the payout amount, due to these circumstances that are no fault of my own, but due to the failure on your end to fix the viruses and malware in your ads. Therefore you give me no choice but to stop using your ads and it would not be fair or right for me to lose my remaining balance through no fault of my own. I'm sure you can understand that that is the only fair and logical solution.

In short, you cannot stop the viruses and malware in your ads, and publishers cannot keep displaying them and angering their users and repelling visitors from their sites. So the only fair solution is to allow them to stop using your ads and cash out their remaining balance, since you will not fix this serious problem, but instead expect us to help you stop "every ant under the fridge" in a neverending fruitless endeavor.

I hope that you will find a permanent fix to this problem immediately, or else do what's only fair.

I await your response.

Thanks,
Winston Wu
HappierAbroad.com
Click to expand...

Eurofile007, Oct 11, 2009 IP

Thibaut Well-Known Member

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#2

I totally agree with you. I am using Clicksor as well and the computer of my wife has been infected by a trojan downloaded from a Clicksor ad displayed on one of our blogs ! This caused a lot of mess here and off course a huge wasted time for me

I let know imagine as well the impact of this incident to our visitors.

There are other ad companies we are using who asked us to remove Clicksor or else we would be banned from their network. Guess what I did ?

Regards
Thibaut

Thibaut, Oct 11, 2009 IP

fabriciogr Active Member

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#3

Hey man. I'm going through the same exact issue with paypoup/clicksor network. I've reported it to Anita a few times and always provide IP, URL and exact time I got a trojan via their network.

Could anyone here suggest another network. It would be sad to stop using these guys specially since they have good rates and make up about 50% of my earnings for this site.

fabriciogr, Oct 11, 2009 IP

Eurofile007 Active Member

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#4

I know. The thing is, they are the only alternative to adsense in that they use contextual ads. Besides adsense and clicksor I can't think of any others that use contextual PPC advertising.

Yahoo Publisher Network does, but they do not accept most sites.

I can't understand why Clicksor doesn't get it. It's like they know their ship is about to sink cause of this, yet they do nothing about it, period. Very odd. It's like they welcome suicide.

Eurofile007, Oct 11, 2009 IP

Eurofile007 Active Member

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#5

BTW, maybe you guys can send Clicksor the same ultimatum letter that I sent them (feel free to use mine if you like and just change your name). If enough of us send them such a letter getting serious about this problem, maybe they'll listen to reason finally?

Eurofile007, Oct 11, 2009 IP

basketballboy Member

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#6

Clicksor is awful. Low pay, and bad ads. They've said they fixed the problem too many times... Such a terrible network.

basketballboy, Oct 11, 2009 IP

JakeWasHere Peon

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#7

Good for you for writing the letter, let's see if it does anything.

JakeWasHere, Oct 11, 2009 IP

sgalex Peon

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#8

I don't think they will fix this issue. Their ad format and functioning is a little bit terrible.

sgalex, Oct 11, 2009 IP

dimitri123 Well-Known Member

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#9

I removed their popunders and guess what, the number of visitors almost doubled..

Their ads are horrible..

dimitri123, Oct 11, 2009 IP

Eurofile007 Active Member

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#10

Good news. I finally got a response from Clicksor regarding my long letter to them. Here it is:

Anita:

Hi Winston,

I have forwarded your email to our CEO. He has read the email and had a meeting with our IT Department in developing technology to look through the problem ads immediately. Due to the increase number of campaigns and partners, our IT Department has decided to develop an advance technology to screen the ads to keep it clean and safe to view.

We appreciate your opinion!

Thank you,
Click to expand...

I hope they really do something about it.

Dimitri, it's not just their popunders. I only use their banner and text link ads, and the hijacking ads still come through! It's really annoying and invasive.

Eurofile007, Oct 14, 2009 IP

Steupz Peon

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#11

This has been happening to my site too and has cost me a lot of traffic.
I use redux ads, but I am not yet certain it's their ads; but the complaints here are almost identical.

Steupz, Oct 31, 2009 IP

ponpulla Peon

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#12

they wont listen im betting they know about this,, but they choose to ignore it

ponpulla, Oct 31, 2009 IP

perfectblue Well-Known Member

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#13

I dont think they will listen .....
I had sent letters thrice till date.... yet no solution

perfectblue, Nov 3, 2009 IP

xNuKeRx Member

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#14

I removed their ad code yesterday. I gave them too many changes to get rid of their bad ads, but they keep coming.
Shame, because Clicksor could have been great advertisement network.

xNuKeRx, Nov 3, 2009 IP

bestbiznet Peon

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#15

fabriciogr said: ↑

Hey man. I'm going through the same exact issue with paypoup/clicksor network. I've reported it to Anita a few times and always provide IP, URL and exact time I got a trojan via their network.

Could anyone here suggest another network. It would be sad to stop using these guys specially since they have good rates and make up about 50% of my earnings for this site.
Click to expand...

I removed Clicksor ads long ago but still using paypopup, it works fine.

Try spot200.com , good ecpm rate for publisher.

bestbiznet, Nov 3, 2009 IP

pad Peon

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#16

Hi guys,
Beside the fact that I totally agree with you, only one small comment. As a person that sent few complaints letter in his life, I truly think that a smaller letter would have done the same affect.
I know that when you are sitting to write such a letter you are angry and want to write everything bad that happened to you but usually the person receiving this kind of letter will never read it fully if it is too long.

For example, how many people here actually read the letter posted fully and deeply? or just skip between the paragraphs because it was too long?
However, I do appreciate people doing something when they are bothered and not sitting quietly and suffer.
Keep up the good work!

pad, Nov 5, 2009 IP

Eurofile007 Active Member

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#17

Finally, I get some constructive updates from clicksor regarding the virus problem in their ads. Leslie from Clicksor wrote me:

Hi Winston,

My name is Leslie and I am assisting Anita and Julia in answering Publisher Inquiries as they are at AdTech New York right now.

We appreciate your feedback and we would want you to understand that we are willing to work towards the best of your interest. As soon as we received your letter, we forwarded it to the CEO and the IT department. We could have just issued the payout to you (with a $5 account disable deduction as this is the policy for amounts less than our minimum payout); but what we value is the business relationship with you and many other publishers so we think it is more important to resolve the problem. We have always been monitoring our active ad campaigns the best we could to ensure that they are clean, but bad ads could still find a way to leak out somehow. In response to your letter, our IT team had held a meeting and came up with a plan to build a more powerful system that can scan through active ad campaigns to better monitor the quality of ads â€“ This will include ads in our network, and ads in our Partner networks. Therefore, once this system is developed, it will greatly limit the possibility of bad ads. If you do not prefer to use our ads at this moment, you may feel free to 1) try our Partner network: AdOnion.com. AdOnion is a transparent network and you have the ability to select what ads you want to have on your website, and therefore you have total control over the quality of the ads; or 2) come back to Clicksor when the system is launched.

Please donâ€™t hesitate to let us know if you have any questions, concerns, or suggestions. We are very happy to hear from you.

Please note that Clicksor will be attending AdTech New York on November 4 and 5, 2009. If you are attendieng the show, please drop by our booth at # 1341 and talk to our representatives about the many possibilities with URL, Contextual Targeting, or any partnership opportunities.
Click to expand...

My reply to Leslie:

Hi Leslie,
Thanks for responding to me.

So what is the status of the implementation of this new system?

Have the virus ads been removed yet?

You are in the US right? Why can't you just have a "tester" in your office refresh pages with your ads on them to find the ads that redirect you to other sites? It should be easy right? The virus and redirecting ads usually only affect US users, not those in other countries. And the thing is, they happen ALL THE TIME, so why can't you just have a tester track them down using just an internet browser, instead of asking publishers for URL's and IP's? Why not?

So does AdOnion have the same ads? If so, would it have the same hijacking viruses that redirect users?

Thanks,
Winston
Click to expand...

Leslie's next reply:

Hello Winston,

Our IT team is still in the process of building the advanced system. After the system is developed, it will have to undergo multiple steps of testing to ensure that it works and therefore this process may take some time.

The virus ads that we have been able to track down have been removed. As you may already be aware, some ads come from advertisers that sign up for many different account to bypass our current problem detection system. Some ads come from our Partner networks, and it is a bit more difficult for us to directly monitor and locate problematic ads. Hence, we feel the need to set up the advanced system and we are already working on it.

We are located in Canada, not the US.

As our network uses the Contextual Technology, it is not possible to have a â€œtesterâ€ that can track down all the ads that are displayed as ads depend on the channel/category and keyword targeting of the campaigns and the Publisherâ€™s website. Also, like I mentioned, some ads come from our Partner networks and therefore we need to trace back with URLs and IP addresses. We have a detailed procedure of approving advertising campaigns before they are released, the problem arises when advertisers change contents on their ads after approval.

We have also suggested to our IT department that we use a US proxy to keep running the ads, but we do not know if it is going to be as effective as our new system because of the factors of targeting that I mentioned.

As for AdOnion, since it is a different network it is better that you contact Annie at AdOnion:

Hope this helps!
Click to expand...

My next reply to Leslie:

Hi Leslie,
Thanks for the reply.

As to the "tester", you can just have a tester in Canada or America browse publisher sites that user clicksor, in every channel category you have, using a computer that is protected by good anti-virus software that will flag alerts. That would eliminate most of the virus ads. Just browse the most highly trafficked sites in each channel category.

Then you can easily trace which ads are redirecting users against their will.

At least, using a tester would track down some of the virus ads.

Also, why don't you just contact Adsense and Adbrite and ask their IT dept how they manage to keep viruses out of their ads, and emulate whatever they do?

Thanks,
Winston
Click to expand...

Last edited: Nov 6, 2009

Eurofile007, Nov 6, 2009 IP

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My ultimatum letter to Clicksor about their virus/malware ads! Will they listen?

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My ultimatum letter to Clicksor about their virus/malware ads! Will they listen?

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