Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Anti-RWT ads filter

As you might have noticed Runescape Reader's Digest blog is RWT ads free. Today I'd like to tell you how it was achieved and how you can do the same on your fan site or blog.

It all started when Joost (owner of Runetower) shared with me his "black" list of RWT sites. I poured it into my AdSense Competitive Ads Filter, changed all ads to graphical ones and voila - RWT ads were gone. Only two weeks later I spotted a new RWT ad and had to update the filter. And so it went, very little maintenance was required.

But there was still a need to update the filter periodically and the list grew over time. I again started to feel like fighting my own battle against RWT ads. I did not want to fight it alone! So I ended up creating a simple "collaborative" tool, where fan site owners could go, grab the latest filter and contribute their "black" lists. I shared it with Runetower and TruthScape and since then was making all filter updates in there.

To be honest, I am not sure if Joost and Qeltar are still using this tool. In any case, I do and it is still there, up and running and containing the latest "black" list of RWT sites. If you are interesting in receiving access to this tool, let me know (via email please, vaskor_runewise@yahoo.com), and I'll be happy to give you access to it as well.

P.S. Eventually, I'd love to see Jagex hosting this kind of list and collaborative tool. That way all fan sites could benefit from it. I did post a suggestion about it on RSOF (feel free to bump it, by the way :-))

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I recently heard a podcast with Matt Mullenweg (creator of WordPress) He said he was having a major problem with google ads having "Free Themes", "Free Plugins" etc, that had malicious code, Spam, commercial Theme sites (Matt is VERY much against premium themes)... ANYWAY, He got a hold of Google, and asked them if they could ban the word "WordPress" from Google Ads. As soon as that happened a *VAST* majority of the problem sites advertising on Google Ads vaporized.

I never really thought much of it, but maybe Jagex should do the same thing.

Vaskor said...

Topper, I believe Jagex did the same. It is not possible to create Google ads with Runescape being among key words. AdWords tells that it is a "Trademarked Term". I stumbled into it way back when I was using AdWords to promote Runewise (didn't last long :-)). As far as I understand RWT sites use keywords like RS, RS2 and Zezima in their ads.

man said...

wow that is quite an achievement

 
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