I hate having ads on Multiplication.com. I’m a parent of two girls and was a classroom teacher for over 25 years. The number one goal of the website is to help kids learn the times tables. I hate having ads on the site but each week millions of kids log onto the site and play the games. The bandwidth for the traffic costs me between $3000 and $5000 a month. The only way I have been able to keep the site operating is having some type of ad generated income.
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I have about every filter I can think of to keep the ads as kid friendly as possible. A few years ago, I hired a mom with two young children to spend 30-45 minutes each day making sure the ads are appropriate. Google won’t let me select ads, but will let me block ads from sites. I currently block over 120 sites and zillions of individual ads. (The Google Ads I subscribe to are supposed to be kid friendly!)
I have owned the site for 18 years and today was literally my worst nightmare! We had inappropriate ads show up on the site. We shut the entire site down as soon as we heard the first report of inappropriate ads. While the site was down, we blocked all of the ads and the entire Ad Network the served them. The ads came from a "kid friendly" ad network. (They purport themselves as a COPPA compliant ad network, which is the reason we used them. Never again!)
We have been working for over a year to develop a “teaching system” rather than a “practice the facts system.” We did a soft launch of the new features at the beginning of the year. It is what I’ve been dreaming of since I started the site. It actually teaches kids how to remember the times tables with over 100 animated instructional videos and has self-adjusting lessons that adjust to a child’s ability. AND… it is completely ad free. (Which allows the games and other activities to display full screen.) I’m hoping the new system will generate enough revenue so that I can drop ALL of the ads on the site.
We have put some new policies in place that will hopefully stop this from every happening again!