Jeez the pop up is ridiculous on mobile. Can't really browse NT on my phone.
I would encourage anyone who encounters a technical issue to use the site feedback or bug reporting forums. Reporting it here is like yelling out the window of a moving car.
We are aware of this issue and it's currently being discussed here:
https://niketalk.com/threads/spam-pop-ups-agaib.692040/#post-36463169
So everyone understands the situation, we had partnered with Complex to serve relevant ads on the site, but we were impacted by this issue and were forced to leave:
Content Creators Who Partnered With Complex Took To Social Media To Announce They Haven’t Been Paid For Months By Complex
sitesupply.co
Consequently, we've been testing out alternative providers this week, and unfortunately that's resulted in some glitches like those mentioned above.
Forced redirects are absolutely not something you should have to deal with while browsing NT. This isn't an approved ad type. Rather, it's something called "malvertising" - a type of bad faith advertising that takes advantage of browser security exploits to force redirects or other unauthorized actions.
Ideally, these should be screened out by online ad providers, but most online advertising is now sold through automated auctions. (Look up “header bidding” and “programmatic advertising” if you’re curious.) Since these ad networks are largely automated, sometimes bad ads slip through the cracks.
We’ve run into these issues in the past, and usually the ad network response is to blame “user error,” claim you’ve all got a virus, and do nothing. I refuse to accept that it’s just some random coincidence that a bunch of people who visit the site every day suddenly ran into the same issue within 24 hours of switching to a new ad partner, so we’ve been very persistent in advocating for a solution and our current provider has just deployed a requested mitigation system to that end.
Hopefully this will address the issue, but if not please let us know via the Bug Reports forum.
I don’t pay but if I had to I would. Meth has held it down for too long (even tho he banned me from Kanye threads)
I recommend people becoming an account supporter, hit the gear icon in the upper right and then Account Upgrades. It’s $25/year. We’re talking $2 per month. You see zero ads.
The only time I’ve ever seen ads while being a supporter, it was an isolated two-day thing only, and I messaged Meth about it and he added weeks onto my membership for no cost. Haven’t seen ads since.
I’m on here as much as Twitter. Again it’s a $25 one-time fee over a year, you don’t see any ads
robpzee612
I truly appreciate the sentiment, but I want to make it clear that we do not believe in upselling a “premium” service. It was important to us to make that available as an option, but we also want the ad-supported version of NikeTalk to be the best experience possible. That’s the version the entire staff uses, too.
The fact is, we can’t deliver a good experience without the resources required to reinvest in the site itself and pay for high quality services. That involves a lot of tradeoffs. If we run a footer ad that’s 90 pixels tall instead of 50 pixels, those units perform three times better. Yet we still don’t run them for mobile users. A floating video player monetizes exponentially better than traditional static units - as would interstitial ads that take up the whole screen between page views. When you consider all the premium ad formats/sizes we don’t run in favor of smaller, dismissible, and less intrusive units, we leave a lot of money on the table to ensure that we can all load hundreds or even thousands of pages on NikeTalk daily without forfeiting our sanity.
An ad-free subscription isn’t something that can support a site like ours at scale. If we put the entire site behind a paywall, we wouldn’t get to enjoy the same breadth of engagement we do now from members around the world. The take-up rate for the supporter subscription, even at the current $25 annual cost, is very low.
We don’t offer supporter subscriptions to keep the site online. In fact, none of the money we’ve collected from supporter subscriptions has even gone to the site expenses. Instead, we’ve been donating that money to various charities, like Doctors Without Borders. We offer supporter subscriptions to give those who dislike the ads an ethical option besides essentially stealing the service via ad blockers. We use ad revenues pay the bills.
It means a lot that some of you value our community enough to spend your hard-earned money on it, but ad-supported visits are no less important. If there’s a problem with the ads, we WANT to hear about it - and the best way to do that is to share screen captures and other details in the Bug Reports section.
