Clicksor Advertising Sucks

Don't sign up for Clicksor advertising. I'll show you why!

When you first sign up to Clicksor, they automatically accept any site you put in. They call this the "Trial" status. During this time your site should be reviewed and and either accepted or denied.

So it makes perfect sense that two and a half months later, my site is still in trial. Nevermind that my site had 21,566 advertisement views according to my Clicksor reports, they just never got around to approving it. I joined up September 23rd and they never even reviewed my site.

Seriously. The ads load so slow it's embarrassing. In fact, sometimes they don't even load at all, your site just hangs while the banner is loading, and you are forced to refresh the entire page just to load the content in Firefox. This is because Clicksor does not generate code in an iframe, you have to load it directly on your page. Don't believe me, just google "Clicksor ads slow down site" and tell me what you see. The banners are not even CPM, you are getting paid around $.03 per click on barely targeted ads, which slow your site to a crawl. The pop up CPM rate is terrible too, you will get only about $.50 CPM for 1000 pop ups.

I had about $10.24 in my account. Every once in awhile, I would take off Clicksor ads just because I got frustrated with the slowness. When I had signed up, I signed up to these rules. They had your basic, nothing illegal, don't modify code, and don't click your own ads TOS. However, the rules were recently changed to this, without a warning email of new policy or an update on the publisher login pages. Want to know how I found out about these new rules?

Around the start of November, I was trying to get code for this website. When I did so, I got an error that said, "Your site/account is not allowed to get code." I assumed it was just a temporary error in the site and emailed my account manager. Yeah, they have great customer support. Once I sent the email, he sent me two suspension notices and a reply to my question, with his version of the updated rules. No warnings. Just two new rules that he could use to screw me.

• Participating sites must have 5,000 page views per day.
• Participating sites cannot be proxy sites or contain link(s) to such service.

Nowhere in the original rules does it say those two rules. They updated, did not even make an attempt to make it known the rules revised were in the place, and then suspended my site and took back all remaining balance that I was supposed to be paid. Part of my hits were coming from the open proxy I had running, which was recently made against the rules. Clicksor will claim that proxies have always been against the rules. That brings me back to my first point, that Clicksor does not check your site when you first sign up. They will not review it until you've made a decent amount of money, then tell you that your site is unacceptable. In fact, I have the feeling that if I never sent that email to my account manager, I would have never been suspended in the first place, they had no clue what was on my site. Even though I had over 21,566 ad views for them, they never checked my site and approved or disapproved it.

I've received comments users that visited my site while Clickor was running about Mcafee virus scan having problems. Here are two screenshots from forums complaining about it.

How would you like to have to explain to a visitor why your site made their virus scanner go crazy? As soon as I saw two users post that, I sent an email to my fantastic account manager at Clicksor. I informed him that I would not run the ads again until the malicious programs in them were completely gone from my advertising.

He told me that I should screenshot it next time it happens or describe the ad. First off, when something makes my virus scanner go off, I tend to close that window, so I can't describe it and neither can the people who had it happen to them. I wouldn't screenshot it either, I'm more concerned about finding out what just happened to my computer, let alone what ad caused this to happen. Besides that, nobody will see the virus again, because I just said, I'm not going to run the ads anymore until the problem is fixed. I did not feel like exposing myself and users to malicious code for a couple bucks. Although I can help by aiding Clicksor in finding the ads that cause problems, wouldn't a better policy be to actually review the ads before they run, so someone can't even run ads with malicious code in the first place?

There are hundreds of advertising companies, and I can't recommend one exactly, but don't make the same mistake I did and sign up for Clicksor advertising. You'll only lose visitors with slow loading pages and the occasional user who just had their virus scanner go off while visiting your site.