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What on Earth is going on with the Internet at the moment??? I went onto Alexa this morning to make sure my contact details were up-to-date, and saw there a link to AdBrite. I figured that anything recommended so highly by Alexa must be a decent site, so I signed up.
Initially, I was looking to add an additional ad space below the existing Google ads on the left of the page, however AdBrite offers the possibility of including other ad providers (such as Google) and only displaying their own ads if they pay better. So I signed up for this option, as I’d prefer a single ad space to be honest, selected a whole bunch of technology related categories and keywords, and left all the other settings as default. Seems reasonable so far, doesn’t it?
To start with, I got a notice displayed telling me that it was assessing my content to find the most suitable ads for my site so I ignored it. A few hours later, I was telling my wife about it and she asked me to show her. You can imagine my horror to see a 120×600 pixel skyscraper ad displaying a whole host of very graphic porn images!!!
Stupidly, my first reaction was to go to AdBrite’s control panel and try and fix it - although setting “Family Friendly” made no difference (and I wasn’t prepared to wait to see if it eventually did!). My second thought (which SHOULD have been my first) was to quickly cut the code from my page! Of course, I then had to go back to Google and re-create the original ad which had been there in the first place….!
Still, you live and learn - I now understand very well what people mean by “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”! 
November 28th, 2007 at 10:54 pm
I had this happen to me through Amazon of all places. I was making changes to some of the code in my blog, refreshed the page and saw an entire list of sexual aid books in Amazon’s widget. Needless to say I changed my settings immediately.
November 29th, 2007 at 2:04 pm
From my almost 3 months testing AdBrites ads perform very poorly and the payout was nothing worth the time and hassle to waste precious blog and website space for them.
I dropped them almost half a year ago.
It took more to micro manage approvals than it was worth the time and income (and you have to manage a lot of request if you dont want to have the auto approve).
Semmy Stumpp
Without Fun There Is No Success!
http://www.semmy.name
December 6th, 2007 at 2:36 am
Thanks for the heads up. I’ve heard a lot of people recommend Adbrite and I was thinking about trying it on a community site I own. I’m sure my readership would have went to nothing if something like this would have happened on that site.
December 27th, 2007 at 9:33 am
That’s quite surprising!
I’ve been using AdBrite for 2 years and have never had such a problem.