Hey Everybody, hope your Black Friday is doing well
All year I have been noticing large spikes of what is essentially click arbitrage / referral spam in my direct traffic source in my shop stats
Just in the last 30 days, a new source has come up [REMOVED] I would post the link, but it appears this website is a malicious virus that attacks the browser, when someone clicks on one of their ads, and it is the leading source for my store's "direct traffic". Supposedly this practice is called "malvertising" and malware is embedded directly into the ad.
Just search "paid.outbrain.com spam" to see all the 1,000's of reddit/blog/etc posts mentioning that this is a traffic referral spam website that finds a way to insert malicious code into your browser. DO NOT GO TO THE DOMAIN
Outbrain and Taboola are some of the largest ad/traffic platforms that are responsible for shady ads for "weight loss/dieting/etc"
Does anyone have any insight into why Etsy is allowing such malicious domains to show up as traffic sources on our storefronts? This year in particular when my paid advertising and on sight conversions have drastically fallen, I now have 6 direct traffic sources, that all have reports that they are essentially click fraud companies.
