How Curiosity Media Solved Troubling Mobile Redirect Issues for SpanishDict.com
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“The cleanAD team is truly solving the unsolvable, and as such, we consider them one of our most valuable partners.”
→ Lauren Hefferon, Product Manager at Curiosity Media
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About Curiosity Media
Curiosity Media is the team behind the leading Spanish learning websites, SpanishDict and Fluencia, which collectively help more than 100 million people each year with reliable, accurate, easy-to-use resources for speaking Spanish.
SpanishDict.com is the world's top destination for Spanish language reference and learning materials for millions of students every year. The website’s most-loved features include millions of free, high quality dictionary translations, conjugations for every Spanish verb, and real-time comparisons of sophisticated translation engines.
As a publisher that serves the education market, including cases where the site may be used in classroom settings for students, surfacing only top quality ads is a high priority for the Curiosity Media team.
The team has always had great success containing “ad quality” by working directly with SSPs to implement strong category blocks and building unique rules for allowances of ads. For instance, they found that blocking certain types of ads at specific CPM ranges allowed them to effectively keep some categories of ads out of classrooms.
The team prides itself on maintaining a heavy degree of control over ad quality, and a strong understanding of how to build creative rules that allow the perfect mix of ads for their users.
However, one specific problem still plagued them: malvertising.
Lauren Hefferon, Product Manager at Curiosity Media
SpanishDict.com is a top 100 website in the US, so it commands a very large footprint.
As a relatively small organization, Curiosity Media’s AdOps team was running some hefty websites on very limited engineering resources.
The team had access to two engineers, but was only able to utilize them for AdOps requests about half the time. This meant that they had to be laser focused, and very picky, about what those engineers spent their time on.
“Repeat users who fell victim to attacks would submit complaints, but what really concerned us was the 10, 100 or 1,000 other users who were potentially experiencing attacks and simply choosing not to return to our site.”
Lauren Hefferon, Product Manager at Curiosity Media
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Testing a Solution
The Curiosity Media team was confident that they needed a third party solution that specialized in malvertising prevention to help solve the problem. They chose to run a free trial of cleanAD to verify that it met their requirements.
The team was specifically concerned with ensuring that both ad reporting and ad serving continued unaltered and uninterrupted from the current state. The Curiosity team was most attracted to cleanAD because of two primary features that helped to ensure this very thing:
- No Reduction in Ad Revenue: Because cleanAD allows creative to render, but stops the malicious action from executing, malvertisers still have to pay for impressions (leaving ad dollars intact) but users aren’t affected by malicious code.
- No Maintenance: The simplicity of the cleanAD integration, and the fact that it blocks malicious ads more effectively than other solutions, with no manual intervention required, was especially important for the bandwidth-constrained engineering team.
“Preserving ad dollars and ad reporting was our number one priority. cleanAD was able to prove during the free trial that we would never have to sacrifice revenue when choosing to block malicious ads.”
Lauren Hefferon, Product Manager at Curiosity Media
Living the Good Life
Since implementing cleanAD on mobile web, the Curiosity Media team has been able to pretty much forget about malvertising and malicious redirects in that channel. The problem has completely stopped.
Rather than simply providing software, the team at clean.io works regularly with the AdOps team at Curiosity Media to provide regular monthly reporting along with important insights to help them improve operations.
In addition, SpanishDict.com has seen measurable improvements in a few key areas:
- User satisfaction has increased
- The volume of ad complaints has dropped precipitously
- User engagement metrics have increased
“The best part about cleanAD is that it has worked almost seamlessly since the day it was set up.”
- Lauren Hefferon, Product Manager at Curiosity Media
“cleanAD is truly a maintenance-free solution. We added the script on our pages and that’s the end of the story. It has performed exactly as advertised.”
Lauren Hefferon, Product Manager at Curiosity Media
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