AdFly

» see adf.ly as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Almost nobody made real money from AdFly, and almost everybody online in the 2010s waited out its timer. You shortened a link through adf.ly and posted it wherever you liked. Anybody who clicked it landed first on a full-page advertisement with a counter in the corner, and after five seconds a Skip Ad button let them through. The advertiser paid AdFly, and AdFly passed half to whoever had made the link.

The first capture of the site in the Wayback Machine is from 6 May 2009. The tagline was "let your links take flight" and a banner promised five dollars free to anyone who signed up by Friday, May 8. By 2010 the pitch had numbers in it: more than four dollars per thousand visitors, a five dollar minimum payout, a 20 percent commission on referred users, and a line saying all advertising was strictly family-safe with no popups.

The company behind it was X19 Limited, which listed offices in London and Barcelona and called AdFly the world's largest paid URL shortener, with over 2 million users. The arithmetic only worked at volume. Four dollars per thousand means a link needed 1,250 clicks to reach the payout minimum, so AdFly settled wherever one person posted a download that thousands wanted: Minecraft mod threads, and the custom content blogs around The Sims.

~ the dossier ~

~ what rode in on the ads ~

An interstitial network that takes almost any advertiser is also a delivery system, and the family-safe line did not survive contact with that. In 2015 Malwarebytes documented a campaign in which AdFly's ad slot forwarded visitors to the HanJuan exploit kit, which used a Flash Player flaw to install a credential stealer without a click. On Minecraft Forum a long thread titled "ADF.LY, Malware, and You" asked mod authors to stop using it.

The ads that were not dangerous were very often fake download buttons, shown to an audience that had arrived looking for a download button. uBlock Origin carried filters written specifically for adf.ly. In June 2023 a user opened an issue asking for them to be removed, because the site "seems to be dead, as well as it's other subdomains".

~ the migrator ~

Linkvertise told publishers about the takeover in November 2022: balances and existing links could be converted in a few clicks. In March 2023 it posted a video titled "To all Adfly Users: Convert to Linkvertise now!". A page at migrate-adfly.linkvertise.com first appears in the archive on 16 May 2023. The last capture of AdFly's own homepage is from the afternoon of 17 May, still offering a five dollar minimum payout by PayPal or Payoneer, and by the morning of the 18th the address answered with a redirect.

Old adf.ly links did not die with it, which is rare for a shortener. They were routed through a Linkvertise page called the hard migrator and came out the other side as Linkvertise links, with Linkvertise's heavier wall in front of them. A Sims 4 modding blog warned its readers that June that the old bypass tricks had stopped working and that the new destination was sketchier than the old one. The publishers were asked whether they wanted to move. The people clicking the links were not asked anything.

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