I appreciate AvSim needs to make money and adverts are a major source of your income. But I was surprised and disappointed to see a British political advert today. I can’t point you to it but the headline said “Boris, Trump wants your NHS”.

Clearly political, controversial and maybe funded by the Labour party - a left-wing party. And on the day we go to the polls to vote for our new MPs.

Do you have any control over what ads appear in AvSim?

LATER: a similar ad popped up after I posted this message. This is where it took me.

https://www.nhsforpv.co.uk/

Edited December 12, 20196 yr by Ray Proudfoot

Google ads are shown based on location, personal searches and preferences and the campaigns available for your location, im seeing a advertise of shoes behind your post, good looking ones BTW.

Edited December 12, 20196 yr by dmarques69

12 minutes ago, dmarques69 said:

Google ads are shown based on location, personal searches and preferences and the campaigns available for your location, im seeing a advertise of shoes behind your post, good looking ones BTW.

Bloody Google! 🤨 I’ve never searched for that topic. Is there a way of restricting the types of adverts? Shoes I don’t mind but I don’t want to see political ones irrespective of political allegiance.

And I’ve never seen a political one until today of all days.

Edited December 12, 20196 yr by Ray Proudfoot

1 minute ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

Bloody Google! 🤨 I’ve never searched for that topic. Is there a way of restricting the types of adverts? Shoes I don’t mind but I don’t want to see political ones irrespective of political allegiance.

And I’ve never seen a political one until today of all days.

It doenst have to be all of the conditions, i dont recall of searching shoes also in the last days...theres an x on the right corner of every google ad, if you click it, you have an option to stop seeing this ad.

Thanks Marques. I see there’s an option to report it so if it appears again I will certainly do that.

AvSim are innocent. They have no control over what appears in those placeholders.

Even if you x it out and report it, it will come back,  Google is very persistent.  Only real solution is to use an ad-blocker.

Thanks Charlie. I do on my Windows laptop but not on my iPad. Don’t mind most ads but that one is a real bone of contention.

Personally, I use add blocker. I have found on occasion that it disappears and I have to reinstall it again. I think that happens when there is a Firefox update. Anyway the torrent of advertisements that all of a sudden I am bombarded with send me scrambling to reinstall it. I though advertisement was bad on cable TV! I remember when the Friday night movie was 2 hours. Started at 7pm and ended just before 9. That left the channel with maybe 15 to 20 mins for commercials. Now the Movie runs from 7pm to 10pm. 3 hours for the same movies that used to take 2. I would say that you are forced to sit through over an hour of commercials for every 3 hours of programming and they expect you to pay for it.🤣

I got ride of cable years ago and do all my viewing for free online. I cannot imagine how anyone could surf the internet without ADBlocker Ultimate. I see virtually nothing!  😁

Edited December 12, 20196 yr by Avidean

49 minutes ago, Avidean said:

Personally, I use add blocker. I have found on occasion that it disappears and I have to reinstall it again. I think that happens when there is a Firefox update. Anyway the torrent of advertisements that all of a sudden I am bombarded with send me scrambling to reinstall it. I though advertisement was bad on cable TV! I remember when the Friday night movie was 2 hours. Started at 7pm and ended just before 9. That left the channel with maybe 15 to 20 mins for commercials. Now the Movie runs from 7pm to 10pm. 3 hours for the same movies that used to take 2. I would say that you are forced to sit through over an hour of commercials for every 3 hours of programming and they expect you to pay for it.🤣

I got ride of cable years ago and do all my viewing for free online. I cannot imagine how anyone could surf the internet without ADBlocker Ultimate. I see virtually nothing!  😁

Forget AdBlocker. It has been shall we say, 'bought out' in certain places as it fails to do what it purports to do. Instead try Privacy Badger or Ghostery.

Edited December 12, 20196 yr by vc10man

5 minutes ago, vc10man said:

Forget AdBlocker. It has been shall we say, 'bought out' in certain places as it fails to do what it purports to do. Instead try Privacy Badger or Ghostery.

Thanks, I'll check those out.

Hopefully the ads will end after tonight... 

 

I have a brick breaking game on my mobile phone (a bit like the old Breakout arcade game, but without the bat..). It uses ads to give a player the opportunity to gain more balls which is helpful to finish each level! So I'm used to the ads and you can decline them to lose the bonus, but I too was shocked to see ads by a certain left wing party whose favourite colour is red, all without my preference. It took me about 7 or 8 video skips to get google back to its senses and giving me ads for consumer goods and other games, yet the political ones still pop up now and again..

 

29 minutes ago, vc10man said:

I am so glad you raised this up, Ray.

Left-wing ant-Semitic Labour lies as usual. Never mind the lies that took this nation to war in Iraq over invented-weapons-of-mass-hysteria!!!

Hopefully a one-off Rick given the ad was for a march in the spring. Someone at Google probably paid to regenerate it today. Hopefully a positive result to today’s election and we should have the first indication at 22:00hrs.

2 hours ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

AvSim are innocent. They have no control over what appears in those placeholders.

That is not the case. AvSim has all kinds of control over the categories and types of ads that are show. They can allow interest based advertising, based on what the visitor may have searched for or looked at on other websites but, they can still restrict specific categories of advertising from being shown. The controls on their end are actually very granular, right down to blocking specific advertisers and even ads if they discover some that are a problem. Keeping in mind they need some revenue to cover costs, they still do have control. I have multiple websites that are partly monetized with advertising and have multiple categories blocked.

My biggest pet peeve, is that they are not using responsive ads on mobile with many of the ads extending beyond the viewport which in turn makes the main content move from side to side when scrolling down. This is just poor user experience and should be fixed.

53 minutes ago, turnandbank said:

That is not the case. AvSim has all kinds of control over the categories and types of ads that are show. They can allow interest based advertising, based on what the visitor may have searched for or looked at on other websites but, they can still restrict specific categories of advertising from being shown. 

My biggest pet peeve, is that they are not using responsive ads on mobile with many of the ads extending beyond the viewport which in turn makes the main content move from side to side when scrolling down. This is just poor user experience and should be fixed.

I’m not going to over the top for what is essentially a one-off. I visit AvSim every day and today was the first time I’ve seen a political advert. The link to today’s General Election is obvious but I point the finger at Google for allowing it. They have no morals whatsoever.

55 minutes ago, turnandbank said:

AvSim has all kinds of control over the categories and types of ads that are show.

Again, you are totally wrong.  You need to click on the arrow in each of the ads and do some research before you post.  AVSIM just throws a switch in the control panel like every website on the Internet.