AAB - Abusive Advertisers Blacklist

Aug 19, 2017
written by Romeo Ju

UPDATE: Aug, 27 2017 While the "non-clickable" Adwords bug is not impacting publishers materially anymore, the abblock promoter campaigns are still a big issue and we highly recommend at least deactivting these ad blocking promoter campaigns in your 3rd-party (non-Sulvo) seller accounts.

Dear Publishers,

For the last three years, we have been collecting and maintaining our Abusive Advertisers Blacklist (AAB) that consist of fake advertisers and regular advertisers that "take more from publishers than what they contribute to the open internet." We used this list with all major buyer platforms to block unwanted advertiser domains that caused unnecessary revenue losses. By using AAB we were able to increase performance for our publisher partners, and today we would like to share this resource with the general public so you can also use it in your 3rd-party publisher accounts (such as in adsense).

While it started out with just some simple low-paying advertisers, in 2017 this turned into a slightly bigger problem. In some cases we found "advertisers" that were either exploiting a bug in Adwords to create unclickable impressions that don't pay or barely pay publishers or by setting up campaigns for spreading ad blockers that end up massively reducing publisher revenue over the long-term.

If all rules were perfectly maintained and correctly enforced, then AAB-listed buyers would not be able to participate in your auctions in the first place.

To continue improving earnings performance for our publisher partners, we have been adding more and more Abusive Advertisers to AAB. Today we have decided to release AAB to the general public due to the recent turbulence caused by the Adwords CPC bug.

Currently, AAB includes our internally detected and the publicly known offenders in ad tech across the major DSPs and Exchanges. We felt the need to release AAB to the general public not only because we have seen first-hand the difference that it can do to publisher earnings but also because of the time-sensitivity around the currently ongoing Adwords CPC bug. We believe these advertisers should be blacklisted in every publisher's system as soon as possible because they are unethical players in the market that "take more from publishers than what they contribute to the open internet." These "buyers" shouldn't be welcome by DSPs and Adwords in any shape or form, but for now, the only tool in publishers hands is the good old domain blacklist. If all rules were perfectly maintained and correctly enforced, then AAB-listed buyers would not be able to participate in your auctions in the first place.

Today, with the first public release of AAB, we would also like to open up the conversation and invite publishers from all over the world to share their recommendations and contribute their suspected abusive advertiser domains to this community maintained blacklist. We are dedicating an internal team and resources to review all proposals and continuously update AAB while maintaining the high standard so that it doesn't end up being used wrongfully by one single party with interest in disabling legitimate advertisers. Since new ad blockers and new offenders seem to be appearing overtime, I'd encourage you to subscribe to the updates of this Abusive Advertiser Blacklist so you can take action in your 3rd party publisher accounts as soon as new offensive advertisers appear on the market. You can sign up by adding your email at the bottom of this page in the "hellobar" widget. If you are part of the Sulvo publisher community already then you will automatically receive notifications about new offenders as the community is updating the blacklist. If you are a Sulvo publisher with no 3rd party ads, then these blacklists are automatically added and kept updated for your ads, however, if you use some backups or 3rd party ad units then you should also set up AAB to protect yourself in those 3rd party platforms.

We believe that the publisher community is more efficient and can discover issues faster than any single ad tech policy team with an inevitably limited headcount would ever be able to achieve - including the Adwords policy team. Nothing proves this better than the two most recent examples:
1. SPAM advertisers are getting some free impressions by setting up unclickable ads in Adwords (Aug 2017, CPC crisis)
2. Google buyer policies still allowing adblocker products - such as adremover(dot)org, adshield(dot)me and blockemall(dot)com - to be advertised through Adwords or Doubleclick Bid Manager up to this day.

We had numerous discussions with the Google Buyer Policy team about why these advertisers are still allowed to set up campaigns for ad blocking software that reduces millions of other publishers' earnings and threatens the open internet's livelihood. So far they said that campaigns encouraging the installation of ad blockers are allowed in their buyer systems and do not cross the boundaries of their buyer policies. Sulvo has very different views about this particularly publisher-hostile approach, and we encourage you to act on this issue as well just like we did with implementing AAB.

Since both of the above mentioned issues are still contributing to publisher losses up to this day, we decided to put our efforts behind this cause.

We believe that the publisher community is more efficient and can discover issues faster than any single ad tech policy team with an inevitably limited headcount would ever be able to achieve.

While the CPC bug is definitely a problem, we think that at some point it will be resolved at the buyer level, hopefully, sooner than later. At least publishers now have a quick and easy fix by blocking these Abusive Advertisers. The allowance of ad blocker campaigns is a much more concerning problem, however, because even if you as a publisher decide to block those ads, it can still affect your site if another publisher does not block those campaigns. No single website should be able to affect the earnings of the rest of the publishing community, and that's why Sulvo is heavily arguing against the allowance of ad blocker campaigns spreading through display banners across the web.

Most publishers are not aware of these issues yet, so I'd like to invite you to share this resource with your friends and to tell them about it on your blog and social media. By helping them to block the abusive advertisers that take more from publishers than what they contribute to the open internet, together, we can create a better ecosystem that does not put content creators' and publishers' interests at the bottom its priorities anymore.


Resources & Action Items:

• Turn on Notifications to stay in the know about new AAB domains when discovered by the community. You can sign up at the bottom of this page by adding your email in the Hellobar.

• With the use of the community-maintained Abusive Advertisers Blacklist block these domains in your seller accounts (such as adsense) and let us know about similar domains when you discover something suspicious. If interested, you can check out these visual example creatives which represent a subset of what AAB currently can help you in blocking out.

• Share this resource with your fellow bloggers or other publishers across social media or on your blog: