It’s a sick thing to call a hobby, I guess it’s really more of a pastime that I can’t stop doing even when I’m surfing the Web not for work (online advertising). And that’s to be on the look out for PSA’s, or public service ads, or any other type of advertising anomaly.

For the uninitiated, a PSA is something that is served typically when an adserver has nothing else to show - usually it is a mistake since the person who is called on to serve the ad impression has typically paid for that ad and having to show a PSA means they are wasting money since PSAs are, by definition, free and unpaid.

I saw this on IMDB (owned by Amazon) - it looks like not only are they showing a PSA in this ad spot, but it’s showing the wrong size ad in this spot. Double mistake - and looks like the network serving it is Turn due to the image call being from http://img.turn.com/img/server/ads/ps/300×250.jpg (click to expand)

a.ka. crappy free wifi….

On a trip over the labor day weekend, stuck at the airport a little longer than expected and had the wonderful experience of using some free wi-fi. Now you may ask, how can free be bad. Unfortunately, sometimes a bad ad-supported “free” product is far worse for many users like me who would pay a few dollars for a non-adsupported paid version that:

1. Doesn’t break pages I’m trying to load, unable to deal with ajax, flash etc.
2. Slows down the page via two- or three-hop adserving that ends up in an unpaid PUBLIC-SERVICE AD
3. Have some kind of weird tracking/logging of URLs I’ve visiting

Also, I’ve seen lots of PSAs in my time (occupational hazard in looking at a lot of ads and websites for ads) but at least they could be rotating among different ones instead of the very same one. The service doesn’t let me upload a screenshot right now because it clashes with wordpress here. I blocked the ads but still have to redirect through their proxy to get online.

Ouch - looks like the service is called Freefi, and I can’t link to them either because their system (seems to be iframing the page) and breaks the wordpress links javascript as well. Joys! Hopefully these guys can at least get some paying ads up - don’t annoy people and not even profit yourself!