I’ve been working on mybeerbuzz .com since 2008, and as any small website owner knows, you have to pay the bills. No matter how many free resources you use, there continue to be significant expenses; and while my goals for the site don’t include big profit, I do have to pay the bills just to keep the site alive and at least breaking even.
With that in mind, I have tested over two dozen advertisers on my site, and while I’m happy to say that some advertisers are legitimate, I’m sad to report that some are not very good.
Because of this recent experience, I though I’d better warn you about an advertiser that I recently encountered that is fishy at best with their dealings.
The advertiser is called Adipolo and they approached me a few months ago with all sorts of claims about how amazing their payout and advertisers were. It has been my practice to try out multiple advertisers to see how they compare to my current advertisers, so I agreed to a 2-week trial with Adipolo.
I should have known they weren’t very reliable right from the start when we spent three days troubleshooting the multiple errors in their ads.txt file. This was followed by over a week of troubleshooting with their ad JavaScript and <head> code.
With Dynamic ads, Video ads and ads that can be placed in a specific location, I chose to place the ad in a spot in my top right column just to try them out. What follows has to be one of the most frustrating advertising experience I’ve encountered in the 16-years of running this site.
To put it mildly, Adipolo has NO control over their advertising. On day one, despite where I placed their ad, the ad would not display where I placed it and instead their advertising was bombing in from the top, bottom and sides, covering up my content, covering up my other advertisers and covering all of my menus and navigation.
Again we spent a week with ME troubleshooting their code and trying to get it to work properly and not display in locations that Adipolo wasn’t paying for. At one point they actually asked me how to fix their code!
While their payout started as average (with ads spraying all over my page), once we had it all working properly, they payout tanked and went WAY down.
We traded dozens of email messages with dozens of excuses on their end for the terrible payout. Ultimately they blamed the traffic on my site so I dug deeper.
On a slow weekend day, I recorded 5009 impressions on my site using my CMS stats. I recorded 5102 impressions on my analytics package, one of my other advertisers recorded 4987 impressions, my second advertiser recorded 4889….and for that same day Adipolo recorded 158 impressions.
When I questioned these numbers, Adipolo said that despite what their very own advertiser dashboard was showing 158, they said I only had 108 impressions for that same day….so even their own numbers don’t agree.
You can read into this any whey you’d like, but in the end, Adipolo is underreporting my traffic in their favor. At best it is terrible code on their end, at worse, it’s theft.
I gave Adipolo every opportunity to correct the problem and continued working on my end to troubleshoot this mess they call advertising. After 35+ email messages to Aviv Sasson and Tamir Fayerstein at Adipolo, they continued to either not read or not understand my questions and delivered more and more excuses why their number was right, and everyone else was wrong.
If that’s not enough fun, Adipolo sets a high minimum payout, and in my month-long experience, I quickly realized it would take years to get to their minimal payout. In other words, they don’t give you credit for all of your traffic, they continue to drop the payout as you get closer to the minimum payout and they simply don’t seem to know what they’re doing.
After a frustrating experience and no answers to be found from Adipolo, I decided to bump them and move on. I put this out so that other web site managers can avoid the hassle of working with Adipolo.
In my experience: Adipolo doesn’t seem to have a grasp on their JavaScript code or how their ads will interact on your site, their technical crew seems lost, their advertising is difficult to control for placement, their minimum payout is too high, and their impression counts (and ultimately my payout) are flawed in their favor in a huge way.
Imagine driving 5090 impressions to your site and Adipolo only pays you for 108 and you’ll know why I list Adipolo as an advertiser to AVOID! zzubreebym
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