Spottt Goes to Doggie Heaven

Image via CrunchBase

This morning I read in the CMF forums that Spottt, a free Link Exchange from Adbrite was officially retired. After visiting the official Spottt.com site, I discovered that this was indeed true. The Spottt service is no longer offered.

I feel bad about this because Spottt was the first network exchange banner system in which I became involved. It was introduced in beta in September 2007, and was officially launched in February 2008. Initially, the folks at
  were were extremely involved, but the enthusiasm waned a few months later.

While it never achieved the success of Entrecard, Adgitize, or CMFAds, I always left its widget on my blogs because I loved the cute little mascot.

If you had been displaying a Spottt widget on you site, you will notice only a void where the widget once appeared. Spottt is gone, and you should remove its code to avoid any access violation when attempting to reach the superceded url.

Bye-bye Spottt, we'll miss ya.

JL...........

The AdBrite Gotcha - Full Page Ads

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to place a new AdBrite ad on this blog. Since I am familiar with Adbrite, I am careful not to display their "Full Page Ads" on any of my pages because they:

• Are Annoying,
• Turn visitors away from your site,
• Tarnish your reputation.
  
• Are Against the Entrecard, Adgitize, CMFads Terms of Service, and
  
• Are Poor Revenue Generators.

To me, there's nothing worse than being brought to some undesirable page when you click on a members widget and having to press the "Skip this ad" button to get to the site you wanted.

So, you can imagine my horrified surprise when I was writing last week's post to discover that this site was indeed displaying the AdBrite Full Page Ads!

At first, I thought the blog was hacked, but then I realized:

Ah ha! It's the AdBrite Trickery Gotcha!

So frantically, I went to my AdBrite account and saw that the Display Full Page Ads box was checked to ON, even though I had set it to OFF. I then went through each of my ads and made sure this option was off on all of them.

What surprised me was that no one had notified me that these ads were displaying. When I thought back to all the other sites that have displayed these as well, I realized that many (if not all) of those authors were probably unaware that AdBrite secretly set their Display Full Page options to ON as well.

So if you display AdBrite ads on your Blog or Site, you may want to spend a few moments to review your AdBrite settings for every Ad you display. Perhaps you too will find that you are unintentionally displaying these ads and turning away welcomed visitors. To Check your settings:

• Log into your AdBrite account
• Click the For Publishers Tab
• Select the Manage ad zones link

 Then for each  Site / Name ad,

• Press the More Arrow
• Select Ad Zone Preferences
• Make Sure the "Show full page ads?" box is UNCHECKED
  
• Press Save Changes

Hope this helps you too from continuing to be an unwilling victim of these undesirable pollutants!

JL.............