This all started because my hairstyle blog site was running reeeeeeallllyy slowly and there was an obvious decrease in adsense earnings.

After a bit of refreshing the site on various pages it became obvious that the culprit responsible for my epicly slow load times was Google Adsense, or rather some or their so called “Google certified ad networks.” Some of which failed completely giving dns and server time-out errors that pointed to “view.atdmt.com” as the offending source. Obviously this is a huge problem if it’s failing for me at least 1/4 of all page loads, what’s that doing to my ad revenue? Yeah, nothing good.

Additional sources of loading hangups were b.scorecardresearch.com, doubleverify.com and rfihub.com. Doing a Google search for atdmt.com, rfihub.com or scorecardresearch.com will return lots of questions and discussions about how to stop them and remove their trojans and spyware. Perhaps this should send up a red flag for Google to remove them from the network. Doubleverify.com seems useful enough but could use some speed improvements.

Unfortunately none of these ad and information gathering agencies are listed in the manually blockable networks on Adsense. But “comScore/ScorecardResearch” is listed here as a verified Brand-Lift/Ad Effectiveness Studies Vendor… so why can’t I block them? And more importantly why aren’t they already blocked by the “Do not allow advertisers to use their audience information to deliver more relevant ads to my site” and “Do not show ads based on user interest categories. Visitation information from my sites will not be used to help create interest categories” settings?

Also, doesn’t it seem like “view.atdmt.com”, aka atlassolutions.com, aka Microsoft advertising through Google’s Adsense network is a pretty blatant conflict of interest? I mean they have every incentive to create a bad ad experience for advertisers and publishers on Google’s network in favor of their own, all while harvesting as much info from the unfortunate end users that happen to land on these sites.

Before I ramble on too much I have a recommendation or two to make this really easy to sort out.

1. Separate out the ad networks that have shown ads on a publishers site(s) with the same Allow/Block functionality as the blocking options have now. Also, show ALL the ads that have been run by those ad networks with allow/block functions (preferably with individual ad stats impressions/clicks/cpm/etc.). This way we can instantly see who the under-preforming networks are and cut them out.
2. Allow blocking of all the statistic gathering companies that apparently come bundled with the third party ad network. (you should be serving my ads based on content only anyway…)
3. Run a continuous check on all ad networks and all the ads they are serving through your system. If any don’t provide ads in under .2-ish seconds that network should be suspended until their servers can catch up.
4. Please separate these options by website.

If anyone knows a better way to fix these issues PLEASE let me know.

p.s. Serving three ads for Rice Krispies on a site homepage all about hairstyles seems a bit excessive.. maybe you should look into that.

Thanks for helping me make money Google! ...Help me help you... yea.