Ding Dong, The Ad Network Is Dead

As we're coming up on the fourth anniversary of the site we have some very, very big plans in the formulation stages. But before we get to any of that, I wanted to make sure we took care of an old issue that had been bugging us for a while: our ads. 

Ads are a necessary evil in this business. Since you aren't paying anything to access this site we need to get income from somewhere, and ads displayed to you are one way we can do that. We use a combination of an automated ad network and larger scale takeovers that we sell ourselves to studios or other brands. The problems we were having were with the automated ads. 

Sometimes - and it was rare, but not rare enough to be ignored - those ads that were being automatically served to us would break the rules of what we requested. We don't want to run ads with automatic sound, and yet sometimes they slipped through. What was worse, though, was that we were running ads that included automatic redirects, especially on mobile devices, which would hijack our readers away to the app store. That sucks. 

We tried really hard to get this fixed with the ad network we had in place, but the problem kept popping up. It's by no means a problem specific to them - the world of online ads is shady, and they had clients buying ads who were smuggling in illicit code the network couldn't see - but it's a problem we're dedicated to avoiding. So we've dropped our old network and have moved on to a new one. 

Here's hoping that this network is free(er) or the problems you, as readers, dealt with previously. Ads are a necessary evil, but they shouldn't be so intrusive as to ruin your browsing experience. Thanks for your patience, and as always if you find a problem with our current ad network, use the "Report A Problem" link at the bottom of every page. Your complaint will go to the right people. 

UPDATE: We're still in the midst of changing things over, so you may still be getting a browser redirect. This should be out of the system shortly. I guess this serves as a good example of why we're leaving!