Yea that happens, although if NONE of them are loading, I'd be more suspecting a network outage somewhere.

Google can't manually keep track of every ad, and sometimes advertisers do dumb things. I periodically get some 300x250 rich media on my sites that's just *blank* - can't even get a link off it - and I've complained repeatedly to AdSense but they say there's nothing THEY can do to detect it.

One time one of my clients' competitors took their entire site down "for maintenance" for a week (I suspect it was actually hacked) and forgot to turn off their ads. So all week they paid to send people to their "Down for Maintenance" page.

It's an imperfect system.

netmeg: I'd be more suspecting a network outage somewhere

True, one of many possibilities but yes. Seems like happening a lot: a group of my sites were out due to an outage on company A, some servers on another company (B) were out too on diff dates, my sites there were not affected. I've been seeing outage threads on diff places (non related hosting companies).

Hmmm ... ok, I'm having the same problems again tonight and it's not serving landing pages on a tablet pc nor going through to the AdLinks first page... G has a BIG problem with delivering, I am having absolutely no problem accessing anywhere else including WebmasterWorld.

No excuses for The Gorg, they can't do it, period.

Well maybe they're broken. They stopped performing for me so I stopped running em last year. Haven't looked at them since.

Google is just a broker's broker right? They serve ads from thousands of smaller networks (any which you can turn off in your account). So, I would assume that if a page doesn't load when you click on an ad, it's the fault of the advertiser, not the broker network, nor Google's? Unless, you are blaming them for not detecting such situations, and I don't know how easy that is for them to do, or who is responsible for doing that (G or the ad network). Or perhaps the fault lies in the middleman broker's system? Do they redirect to the advertiser directly? Or do they maintain landing pages for each ad that then redirect?

Link units work differently. You click on one, and then you get a page full of ads (with thumbnails) almost like a search result. Or at least, that's what happened when I last used them. You can click on on a link unit without penalizing your account (but you can't do the "second click" on an actual ad) I think what HP is saying is that the second page with all the ads wasn't coming up.

The reason I stopped using ad links is because 1) they earn a lot less than they used to but mostly 2) they changed the way they render on anything other than a white background, and that doesn't work for the sites where I used them. I went round and round with support over this, till they finally admitted that it was a problem but that it wasn't a priority for them to fix it. At that point I figured the writing was on the wall for link units.

Thanks, I missed the "AdLinks" reference in my haste.