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Eliminating Clicksor Ads

Oct 11
Posted by kevintracy in Advertising, Clicksor, Crime, Digital, Economy, Indiana, Internet, States

If you’ve visited the site in the last couple of weeks, you probably noticed some flash-based ads at the bottom of the screen.  They’d be banners that would appear for a few seconds and then offer a “Close” link at the top-right.  These ads would sometimes take the form of square and vertical banner ads, too.  Rarely, even a video would play.  These ads were from a company called Clicksor.  On the advice of a friend who was also experimenting with Clicksor, I added Clicksor to my Google Adsense ads.  Although it was slightly against my better judgement to display upwards of four ads on a page, I went along with it.

This morning, I decided to eliminate the Clicksor ads.  My fellow blogger and I began to research Clicksor a bit more the past few days and decided we didn’t like their business practices.  They hide information about their pay-out methods (and how they can evade paying web-publishers) and their method of screening advertisers deserves scrutiny, too.  We’ve had sporadic e-mails from readers claiming the Clicksor ads were offering pornography and some even triggered red-alerts from Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox over trojan-horses and other forms of malware.  I’ve also noticed advertisements for online gambling, an activity that is illegal in the State of Indiana.

Although my traffic has remained fairly steady, my friend believes his has dropped about 10% over the last month due to the pesky nature and content of Clicksor’s pop-over flash ads.

I sincerely apologize if this has caused any problems for my readers.  The malware warnings were incredibly rare, and likely were only triggered because the ad was hosted on a website known to contain dangerous elements.  Likewise, only one of my readers reported seeing a pornographic ad and I only saw an online gambling ad once on this site.  I also run a website that discusses political and social issues.  My counterpart’s blog focuses on celebrity gossip, so there were several more problems regarding the latter problems on his site.

For what it’s worth, Clicksor asks if you have adult content on your website AND whether or not you want adult content to be featured in ads that appear on your website.  I answered “No” to both questions.  This plus the simple fact that they aren’t screening advertisers for end-user safety led me to say their screening method deserves scrutiny.

In the meantime, i will continue to run Google ads; which have been proven safe; on this site and satellite websites in the KTracy.com network.

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Mike Huckabee Suggests “Economic Terrorism” Responsible for Continued Economic Pain

Oct 12
Posted by kevintracy in 2008 Elections, Crime, Digital, Economy, Global War on Terrorism, Huckabee, Internet, McCain, National Security, Politics, Presidential Race

Mike Huckabee is a pretty likable guy, but as you probably remember during the Republican Primary, I’ve never shied away from expressing my opinion when the former Arkansas Governor and my pick for President in 2008 was wrong about something. This weekend, Governor Huckabee has been making the rounds both on his show and across Fox News Channel suggesting that the continued failure of the US Economy is due to “Economic Terrorism” citing trends in the last moments of trading where large numbers of computer users begin suddenly selling their shares, causing the markets to close lower than they otherwise would have.

Just today, a friend of mine in the financial markets indicated that he’s been doing a careful analysis of the last 12 days, and there seems to be a manipulation of the marketplace – at the last half-hour of each day, there is an extraordinary rush of computerized trading going on. He believes that there may, in fact, be evidence of economic terrorism that is fueling a lot of what’s going on. Now it’s a fascinating idea, that if somebody could break down the world economy, it would have a greater impact that any bomb ever set off. It seems to be there is plausible argument for it.

What?! This is honestly the sort of wacky conspiracy theory I would have expected from Sean Hannity (a first class patriotic idiot) or Sarah Palin, not Mike Huckabee. I’d really like to blame this on the McCain campaign for using Huckabee to float a trial balloon, but Governor Huckabee hasn’t exactly been cozy with John McCain and I doubt they’d use him to float the trial balloon.

The more realistic explanation is that the average Joe Schmoe, who does his trading from online in his living room, has lost all faith in the market and is pulling out before he loses everything. The people have no faith in the economy and while it’s lovely to say the American Worker is the hardest working in the world, that doesn’t mean as much when they’re worried about finding or keeping a job. Additionally, as investment brokers deal with clients who want their money out, they are forced to sell those stocks to accommodate their customers.

What Huckabee has unintentionally done is call the American people terrorists for pulling out of the stock market and keeping their money under their mattress where it’s safe. I know he didn’t mean to do that and I know he doesn’t think that about the struggling American workers, but this is the kind of asinine idea that’s going to come back to bite him in the ass in three years if he runs for President again.

Now, what probably happened was that Huckabee was looking for a way to get involved in this general election. As we all know, the McCain campaign seems to believe that a huge terrorist attack would spell victory for John McCain on Election Day. Well, since the odds of a terrorist attack between now and Election Day are pretty small, why not invent a terrorist attack? One that would make John McCain the expert on the economy because it had to do with his “specialty issue” – national security.  BRILLIANT!

Obviously, this ridiculous idea isn’t sticking and nobody is buying into Huckabee’s notion that terrorists are intentionally throwing Trillions of dollars into our stock market with the intent of losing as much as it as possible. Huckabee better pray that nobody remembers this unfortunate and embarrassing event in a few years.

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