Wow, ok ... I do not for one minute point a finger at Adam, Donna or any of the staff at Neopets. I am sure that they are not amused or pleased by any of this either. Yes, the "powers that be" probably made this decision for that awful (please take it away!) huge topbanner thing. It was a bad decision for many reasons, not the least of which are people either quittting or drastically cutting back the time they spend on the site because the ads are just plain annoying, they (like me and some others here) have physical limitations/problems/disabilities and things blinking and jumping around just set us off ... and there's the fact that no matter what's been done, they DO slow the site down ... Not everyone has high speed internet or a new, fast computer. We with older, slower computers and/or on dial up are already at a disadvantage.
Now, the tracking cookies that have been found in the "sponsor" ads. From my understanding by asking around, this is basically what I've found out (and please correct if I'm wrong or off base - I'm not a "techie" type of person). Whenever you go to a site with a banner ad there's usually one of 2 ways the sponsor pays the site for that ad - either by clicking the ad (think g-petz - they were not allowed on Neo because Google click thru ads had been put up to help pay for server upgrades - once the ads were removed that site was allowed - that's what I heard anyway).
The other way a site gets paid for these banner ads is by a third party tracking cookie. Like, all you have to do is simply go to a page that has a banner ad, no clicking needed; the network that's selling the ads/paying the site reads all those tracking cookies and that's how they know how many people are seeing them/sending the information/how much to pay the site. These networks also seem to go by geographic area re: what types of ads are circulated ... apparently they're not age appropriate ads, though they should be able to generate ads for a specific target audience. At least it seems to me.
I think? this may be the type of network that was chosen and I only think this because I never clicked on any of the outside banner ads - I have no idea if clicking on them would take you off the site. If that was the case, then there definitely should not be a need for those annoying adware cookies. It also defeats and kind of negates TNT's own T&C about no outside clickable links. And there's just no good reason for having clickable outside links on a site where there's children leading to who knows what.
IMHO, they should really just have the sidebar as it is with the re-arrangement of the links, have the small shockwave ad on the sidebar (as it was) and get rid of that big topbanner completely. There's really no need to have ads for the site on the site, especially in 2 places. There were sponsor ads in the small spot, why not just keep them there. Unobtrusive, much faster loading, easier to ignore if you wanted to and in general much less of a headache. Plus then our lookup banners could go where they belong!
BTW, I started seeing only Neopets ads yesterday ... and the shop of offers was taken down apparently. So, it kind of looks like everything's been pulled that is off-site or outside advertising. Go Adam!
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He did say he'd pull all the banner ads if they were found to be inserting pop-ups... but since there is no outside advertisement already, couldn't they just chuck the top banner completely.
NYC
