I turned off most of my Chitika ads today. Their new premium ads were the cause of the browser hijacks. They never did more than a dollar a day for me on about 8,000 exposures, but I considered this to be a problem with the fact that I placed them below the fold, near the bottom of a long pages.
What they did was resell their ad space to doubleclick and other advertisers. Along the way they were not very careful about who they were selling to, because the ads resulted in the execution of javascript that produced popups and in some cases page redirection to other websites.
Popups suck and I never want them on my page. Browser redirects are unacceptable. I opted out big time. I am now going through and removing Chitika code from websites. I don’t need users calling me up about problems for a lousy dollar a day.
4 Comments
Hi Keith – Ryan Travis from Chitika here.
A couple things – the ads you were seeing were NOT our Premium ads (our Premium ads are text ads with images next to them, and they will only display to your US search engine traffic).
The ads that you were seeing were part of our CPM Graphic ads program, which you can opt-out of by going to your Account tab in your Chitika account (there is an opt-out at the bottom). However – you mention “pop-ups” and “browser redirects” – those ads are not from us (we do not allow either types of ads to enter our graphic CPM inventory).
Given all of this, I’d be more than happy to work with you in a 1-on-1 basis to help you optimize our Premium ads (NOT the CPM Graphic ads) on your site. Please feel free to hit me up at ryan[at]chitika [dot] com
It was chikita. The redirects were repeatable with pages that only had chikita code on it. They stopped about an hour after they began on Sunday morning.
I started with a blank page and added the scripts one by one and when I added Chikita they started and when I took off the others it remained.
Somebody sneaked something by the Chikita QA.
I am sorry about the premium code mention. I knew that, but I didn’t think before typing.
Hey Keith – that is really strange – it definitely shouldn’t be possible.
By any chance – do you happen to have the source URL of the ad in question? If so it would be very useful so we can track down how that happened.
I do not have the url of the ad that created the problem. My web page painted partially and then the javascript kicked in and went to a URL that was an IP address – no domain name. Neither the url of the javascript nor the url of the page are in my browser history.
One of my users went through the “questionaire” thinking that it was something that I had put up, but it was one ad after another with misleading buttons to promt for click-throughs. I was afraid that it was a site that would try to exploit security holes and closed my browser immediately.