Ad companies you should be careful about

1. INTRODUCTION

After 14+ years working in the sector, I’ll give you three general pieces of advice to avoid end up working with a bad ad company:

Make sure is a certified Google Partner (being also an IAB member could give them an extra of reliability on good advertising practices). ✅
No Safe Frame = run away 🚩.
Common sense. If they’re offering you something too good to be true (“we only need to work with one ad block”, “we don’t need a special location for it”, etc.), it won’t probably be genuine. Brands pay ad companies to be seen and bought, not to waste money to be placed in blinded spots within your website.

Said this (it will be enough to avoid most of these bad actors), I’ll give you a list of ad companies I’ve suffered myself in my main website:

2. AD COMPANIES YOU SHOULD BE CAREFUL ABOUT

Mobusi/Sunmedia/Fibonad (they used to be the same people): the experience with them was insane (in the worse sense of the meaning). They used all kind of bad practices with me: straight link redirections, displaying non-agreed ads in different places, sell skin ads in IPs of countries I couldn’t check without a VPN, etc. All while I said from the very beginning -and kept clarifying every time I caught them- I was only interested in the outstream video ad (which by the way it was their original hook to get me in: “fixed €3CPM videos”). See? If I would’ve applied the pieces of advice I gave you to myself (I didn’t know any better at that time), I would’ve saved a lot of mental health, time, money and the overall welfare of my business itself.
TheMoneytizer: Another “big” guy offering crazy revenue but asking you to not use Safe Frame (🚩). They ended up displaying non-agreed aggressive ads in the middle of the content (in-text ads), lying saying they weren’t, but at that point I learned enough to verified/get-proof on the console that it was them and stopped working with them in the moment.
I also had problems with Rich Audience, but I didn’t work directly with them. In short, according to SemSeoyMas -my certified Google Partner at that point- Rich Audience asked them to place other ad formats on my website but they said no; and they did it anyway. I also found out travelling to other spanish-speaking countries that the skin ads they were displaying broke the site completely (instead of displaying around the content box, they were displaying full page = unreadable content –> direct impact in SEO and my brand).

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So in short: If you’re building a mid/long proyect, I recommend following the 3 tips I gave you cause there are probably hundreds of non-certified ad companies doing the same. Sometimes even the certified ones can get you in trouble if you let them display third-party scripts (from the non-certified ones) directly on your website/blog.