Sigh. Life apparent'y hard enough for cartoonists so some lovely individuals at facebinks.com decided to help make it worse. They're the ones who have been randomly sending out malicious pop-up ads that claim to be from the website you're on and which, when you click "close", come up with a second screen which has no close button. The result is that you, the user, probably just kill the browser itself. And then stay away from Nicky510. There is the infinitiesimal chance that you'll take them up on their spam offer and that's enough for them to go ahead and try and wreck an innocent cartoon site. Certainly my web traffic has been very, very down this last week and it seems likely this was the cause.
Yesterday I finally determined that one of these was polluting my airwaves and also determined where it was coming from. So I pulled all the ads from that ad server (Contextweb). The downside is that Contextweb doesn't know how these ads are coming in and isn't "the bad guy". The actual bad guy is someone getting through their filters. And the second downside is that Contextweb was my top source of ad revenue. The fact is that Nicky510's primary revenue is through the ads that decorate the site. I'd love it if I didn't have to run them since they slow the page load times and can be annoying to look at. But the sales of books and shirts and art is, in a word, abysmal. Nobody's buying. So the only revenue left is ads. Which will now take a major hit.
If you encountered this rotten popup and were forced to kill your browser, I apologize for the problem. And if you ever in the future run into some ad behavior of that sort, please email me and let me know. There shouldn't be any auto-play ads, pop-up ads, or otherwise irritating ads showing up on my websites. However, I don't visit my site continually and so if there's an intermittent problem it's likely I won't see it.
Thanks for reading!
I wondered why that happened! Thanks for letting us know, and I’ll still keep visiting. Great cartoons!
Thanks, that’s truly a relief for me to hear. What I’m most upset about is possibility of losing readers because of this evil facebinks.com spam ad guy. So I’m very happy you’re understanding. And do, do, do let me know directly if you encounter any spammy stuff like that on my site in the future. Together we can make the world a safer place for comics!
I somehow managed to avoid the pop-ups, but they wouldn’t have stopped me visiting anyway. If they got in the way, I would have disabled javascript and re-loaded the page.
Thumbs up!
I read using an RSS reader, so the pop ups are avoided.
I typically like Project Wonderful. They never have invasive ads and I’ve actually found new webcomics through them so I enjoy their ads.
No doubt. But in terms of revenue they’re an order of magnitude below the more mainstream companies.
Ah, the jerks at work again. I hate these things, at least you try to filter them out. I had one site tell me they had to make money and my question, on how to adjust the advertisements to something I might actually want to see, was dumb. Needless to say, I stopped reading that site.