Board Thread:Game Discussion/@comment-73.217.37.21-20171101113021/@comment-31567784-20180202081141

In regards to the blank ads I think it is working as follows:

The game ad plug checked at FM if the player ID and AdID is still fine to get ads and got a go. Fine

It made the request to the ad server and it found an ad that is fit for the geo region and the targeting criterias. Fine

Now two options

1. The ad is hosted in the ad server and the trafficker made a mistake so all you get is the ad framework but no video. This can happen as well when the ad has a video rotation in the back and some videos have timed out or fullfilled the goals and the "mother" ad got no update.

2. The ad is a redirect to a 3rd party ad server. Here we don't know who is serving the framework and who is serving the video. Could be a mistake in trafficking or simple an issue of availibility on the video serving ad server. Also such a thing can happen when too many redirects are involved, in such a case it is a simple time out. Or they send the request to an ad exchange for bidding on it. May it simply got no bidder and the poor framework is no longer able to handle this.

Something that is always possible, as we use the internet, that on the way to the adserver or on the way back some IP packets got lost. There is "ZERO" guaranty that a packed is delivered and I know a number of WAN protocolls that have been designed to delete packets rather to transport them e.g. Frame Relay in the past was one of the first where congestion controll always ruled and "Fast Packes" could easily drop 99% of the traffic for beeing 100% functional. ;-)

Those are only a few of the "options" why an ad call can fail and we have not enough details avail to be sure why in this moment in time we got a "broken ad".

The good thing I have noticed is, FM does not count the broken ads against our frequency cap so we still can get the "normal" number of GC & R$ ads.