I've noticed many shady ads (gambling, porn games, etc) appearing on 4chan in the bottom ad banner. I haven't paid much attention to them until I learnt that 4chan doesn't allow gambling ads:

We will not accept ads for the following products or services:

Gambling

[...]

 

That's when I started looking deeper into these ads and noticed that they don't send you to the danbo redirect url but instead use the s.magsrv.com domain.

 

After further investigation, I discovered the following:

 

  1. There is a script tag on the 4chan page that loads a script pt.js from cdn.pubfuture-ad.com
  2. pt.js then loads ad-provider.js from a.magsrv.com
  3. ad-provider.js loads all the shady ad media from s3t3d2y8.afcdn.net

 

The pubfuture-ad.com domain seems to be affiliated with the pubfuture ad network. I couldn't really find what ad service magsrv.com belongs to, but it is mentioned on some of the exoclick documentation pages therefore I would assume that it's part of exoclick.

 

Another weird thing is that these ads only load on a mobile screen and only in the bottom ad banner space. I never see them on a desktop browser but they appear very frequently when I'm on mobile. I managed to make them load on desktop firefox by shrinking the page until 4chan turned into it's mobile layout. If the site is kept in desktop layout then pt.js doesn't seem to load anything.

 

Also, these ads cycle between different images and change without me reloading the page.

 

So in conclusion, 4chan seems to use ad networks other than danbo which load shady ads for mobile users. I found this to be very suspicious. If anyone has any information or an explanation regarding this phenomenon, I would be interested to hear about it.

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[–] Anonymous 2d1777c5 1 point

idk I use adblocker

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