Those of you partnered with a company starting with a G and ending in oogle may have noticed that your AdSense image banners are being dominated by ads from a specific advertiser. Nope… I’m not talking about the obvious gold sellers. The ads I’m referring to are for a game called Evony.
After weeks upon weeks of seeing these tasteless ads at the top of my sidebar, I went and conducted a little research. Apparently this Evony game is an unscrupulous ploy by Chinese Gold Farmers to obtain your personal information. The “free” game content that they’re offering is supposedly stolen, and it’s also quite cheesy from what I hear. The sole intention of this marketing campaign is to draw people in with their borderline pornographic advertising, so that they can acquire your info and later spam you with gold seller BS.
The initial ads weren’t so bad 😈 , but the new one with the cgi stripper was getting old fast. 😉 After some research I discovered that this hideous ad campaign was not only plaguing many sites across the web, but can also be very difficult to eradicate. It’s assumed that there are around twenty URLs that the advertiser uses, and since the ads are flash-based, it is impossible to tell the destination address.
With a little snooping about I was able to obtain a list of the URLs in question. So, if any of you are interested in removing these ads from your AdSense enabled sites, copy and paste my list below into your ad filter. I’ve also included a few of my blocked gold seller ads, so feel free to paste those in as well.