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The Media Buy Blacklist (14)

08-06-2011 03:03 PM #1 clickright ()
The Media Buy Blacklist

Ok so since it's always good to help each other out not to waste money, I figured I'd bring this up.

I'm sure y'all regularly surf the web from any GEO without a popup blocker enabled. As a result, from US geo I often see sites like chinaontv.com, directorslive.com, and even usbuildingdigest.com

Now I always kind of brushed it off thinking they were temporarily comscore boosting or other wise boosting stats in order to sell off their site to some poor bastard.

I always told myself to watch out for these sites and not advertiser (CPM based at least) on them.

Enter SiteScout which I know you are all familiar with and I came to the realization;

NOTE: facetheme.com is NOT one of the sites, it was just "caught in the middle"

Sure enough I see 2 of the sites I mentioned before. Needless to say they have an absurd amount of impressions (that's actually for Canada I believe I had that filter up).
Look at USBuildingDigest and how pathetic the site is, the only thing they update is some 'daily briefing' video with "industry news"

Either way, I can't imagine the CTR% on those type of sites being any good.

So, my point is, how about a maintained-list of sites to avoid and the network's they are spotted with? I'm sure these sites run with other networks too but I'll start with;

Sites to AVOID bidding on:

SITESCOUT:
chinaontv.com
directorslive.com
usbuildingdigest.com

I'll update the thread with any input y'all have

08-07-2011 06:42 PM #2 greentrack (Member)

Awesome idea! I will post as I come a cross.

08-08-2011 01:54 AM #3 harry1970 (Member)

lol, I git shitty CTR and blew through $50 in about 3 minutes on those sites.

08-09-2011 04:59 AM #4 clickright ()

I came across a few other 300x250 'unknown' placements with horrible CTR's but I haven't seen them first hand on popunder/popups (yet) so I won't add those to the list. They might just be terrible placements like low CTR% from bottom 728x90 placements but usually the latter are at least half the cost

01-25-2013 03:44 PM #5 turbo948 (Member)

Bump for some updated blacklist sites

01-25-2013 05:24 PM #6 machoman77 (Member)

mototestdrive.com, wasted $3k. All bot traffic.

01-25-2013 05:48 PM #7 soundengine (Member)

Yes but what about the bundled domains? Were there any good ones in there besides the root domain?
One of the annoying things about site scout is with many of the listed sites you can't see the bundled domains until you send traffic.
I've found some hidden gems bundled with some real crap root domains by sending a bit of traffic and then whitelisting/blacklisting the bundled domains.

01-25-2013 06:20 PM #8 stackman (Administrator)

This needs to exist for actual media buy companies.

Throw reduxmedia on the list (if they still exist)

01-25-2013 06:33 PM #9 leeches (Member)

I always check the Alexa (for a rough idea) of a site to see if it can get the traffic SC says it can. There are quite a few which are 100% not legit. I used to run a design site with a social media friend. A common tactic with Buy Sell Ads (a few years ago anyway) was to take the ad container code for a specific site and place it on other higher traffic sites which would drive up the impression numbers big time. I would imagine some of these sites have access to some high traffic garbage that is being used to get their impression numbers up but you aren't getting what you think you are. That's my theory anyway.

02-28-2013 04:23 AM #10 reedrothchild (Member)

CTR SITE
8.67 rantsports.com
6.16 gofugyourself.com
11.58 bookoo.com
8.28 careerbuilder.com
7.85 refdesk.com
10.04 starcasm.net
9.89 northjersey.com
11.35 myfoxla.com
8.27 telegraph.co.uk
6.97 suntimes.com
9.45 myfoxphilly.com
8.61 welolyou.com
2.79 premium-news-1.com
6.29 itcloseup.com
5.87 premium-site-8.com
5.7 my-magazine.me
4.39 free-power-point-templates.com
37.68 qoos.com
1.44 ziprealty.com
33.33 puff.com
1.58 rantsports.com
1.18 healthguru.com
1.68 sofunnylol.com
1.36 gag.bz
18.23 newfacets.tv
81.08 rtrk.com
18.54 puff.com
3.99 ivillage.co.uk
1.99 blend.com
5.19 shockya.com
1.86 dailynews.com
1.77 blend.com
1.94 homesandland.com
11.27 metroradio.com.hk
1.07 casalenews132644.com
55 qire123.net
44 evoxforums.com
37.08 pbskids.org
1.66 lolxpix.com
30.14 headlinefinance.hk
26.09 parentsite.net
9.83 spaceofcelebs.com
4.75 lolcounter.com
3.07 gogomix.com

03-30-2013 01:14 AM #11 reedrothchild (Member)

05-08-2013 08:36 PM #12 john_smith (Member)

A good rule of thumb i have is that if a site doesnt have alright SEO rankings, and their articles/whatever dont have any comments on them, I don't advertise on the site. I almost always do a manual 'sniff test'.

The amount of impression/click fraud out there is ginormous.

05-09-2013 12:14 AM #13 deondup (Member)

A good ad network will be on top of this. The problem is that often the remnant traffic ends up on RTB's.

There needs to be an RTB cleanup SOON.

05-10-2013 11:56 PM #14 cataclysm1987 (Member)

Here's a few adult sites for you guys:

-HomeSexAV.com
-YOBT.com
-TubeSexHot.com
-Pornoxo.com
-xgfsporn.com
-shooshtime.com
-tubesexhot.com
-2dirtyclips.com
-donkparty.com

Things to look for:
-Excessive, scammy looking ads
-Artificially inflated rankings or no rankings at all
-Nothing but dupe content
-Bad layouts

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