Every traffic network out there has both good and bad publishers in their portfolio. Publishers are guys/companies who run sites or apps, that they sell ad spots on. That’s how we, the affiliates, can buy traffic from them. The problem is, not every publisher is a honest person, some are flat out assholes who code BOTs and sell them to us, scamming us for money and wasting our time.
Unfortunately, we cannot count on the traffic networks to solve the problem completely, because even in case of BOT traffic, they still make their commission. That’s why many networks turn a blind eye to this problem …
On top of that, some cheaters are pretty good coders, so detecting advanced BOTs is not so easy. So even the honest networks have a problem catching all the crap. One way or another, pretty much any traffic source at least offers the option to pause/block specific placements that are not performing for us and/or use Blacklists or Whitelists. A placement can be a site, app or a specific ad spot, depending on the network and traffic type.
But there can be many reasons for blocking a placement, not just BOT traffic … just as there are many reasons for targeting particular placements only. In this article, I will explain what White and Black lists are, why and how to use them, whether one is better than the other and why that is the case…