Commercial Ads

[Jacpher]

Internet commercial ads or sponsored links as they call them, are taking over many of the my favorite sites. Obviously, there's money to be generated, service to be made available and line needs to be drawn. Not too long ago, a popular Islamic website devoted for Islamic literature had few commercial links of bible study sessions and other uninteresting ads.

 

Are these ads sort of random and appear out of no where or do webmasters actually have no control over the content of the advertisement?

[Geel_jire]

^ you could user Adware removers or blockers that would significantly reduce you're even seeing them.

 

an extreme measure if you are a windows xp user (I still haven't figured how to make this work in Vista) is to edit the host file on your system to redirect any requests to known Ad banners and sites to your local machine.

 

how this works is... whenever you go to any url, before the request is sent to your ISP it is first checked in your host file if there is an entry matching it is resolved locally on your computer and not sent out to your service provider only when the entry is not present in your host file does the request get sent out the DNS server you have configured.

 

usually the only entry in your host file is

 

127.0.0.1 localhost

 

so any request to 127.0.0.1 does not get sent out but ignored you could edit this file to show

[Adwaresite] localhost

 

so that any request to a known adware site gets ignored instead of being sent out....... you can download from the net , pre-edited host file that has a list of 1000's of adware sites that it will block and update once a month.

 

Warning do not tamper with your host file unless you save a backup first....... or it could ugly

[Geel_jire]

NY times does an Analysis of Internet based AD's and the kind of information they collect on users who visit the hosting pages for their ad and how they are targeted

 

 

Source: NY times