Does this sound familiar? You see pop-up ads from affclicker.com while browsing at websites that in general don’t advertise in pop-up windows. The pop-ups manage to find a way round the built-in pop-up blockers in Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer or Safari. Perhaps the affclicker.com pop-ups show up when clicking search results from Google? Or does the pop-ups appear even when you’re not browsing?

Here is how the affclicker.com ad looked like on my machine:

Does this sound like your story, you probably have some adware installed on your computer that pops up the affclicker.com ads. There’s no use contacting the owners of the web site you were browsing. The ads are not coming from them. I’ll do my best to help you remove the affclicker.com pop-up in this blog post.

Those that have been spending some time on this blog already know this, but for new visitors: Some time ago I dedicated a few of my lab computers and deliberately installed a few adware programs on them. Since then I’ve been tracking the behaviour on these computers to see what kinds of advertisements that are displayed. I’m also looking on other interesting things such as if the adware updates itself, or if it downloads and installs additional unwanted software on the systems. I first noticed the affclicker.com pop-up on one of these lab systems.

affclicker.com was registered on 2014-10-26. www.affclicker.com resolves to 54.219.142.13.

So, how do you remove the affclicker.com pop-up ads? On the machine where I got the affclicker.com ads I had TinyWallet, BrowserWarden and BlockAndSurf installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the affclicker.com pop-ups and all the other ads I was getting in Mozilla Firefox.

It seems as affclicker.com is getting quite a lot of traffic, based on Alexa’s traffic rank:

The problem with this type of pop-up is that it can be initiated by many variants of adware. This makes it impossible to say exactly what you need to remove to stop the pop-ups.

So, what can be done to solve the problem? To remove the affclicker.com pop-up ads you need to check your machine for adware or other types of unwanted software and uninstall it. Here’s my suggested removal procedure:

The first thing I would do to remove the affclicker.com pop-ups is to examine the programs installed on the machine, by opening the “Uninstall programs” dialog. You can open this dialog from the Windows Control Panel. If you are using one of the more recent versions of Windows you can just type in “uninstall” in the Control Panel’s search field to find that dialog:

Click on the “Uninstall a program” link and the Uninstall programs dialog will open up:

Do you see something strange-looking in there or something that you don’t remember installing? Tip: Sort on the “Installed On” column to see if something was installed about the same time as you started getting the affclicker.com pop-ups.

Then you can examine you browser add-ons. Adware often appear under the add-ons dialog in Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer or Safari. Is there anything that looks suspicious? Anything that you don’t remember installing?

I think most users will be able to track down and remove the adware with the steps outlined above, but in case that did not work you can try the FreeFixer removal tool to identify and remove the adware. FreeFixer is a freeware tool that I’ve developed since 2006. Freefixer is a tool designed to manually find and uninstall unwanted software. When you’ve identified the unwanted files you can simply tick a checkbox and click on the Fix button to remove the unwanted file.

FreeFixer’s removal feature is not locked down like many other removal tools out there. It won’t require you to purchase the program just when you are about to remove the unwanted files.

And if you’re having problems determining if a file is safe or adware in FreeFixer’s scan result, click on the More Info link for the file. That will open up a web page which contains additional information about the file. On that web page, check out the VirusTotal report which can be quite useful:

Did you find any adware on your machine? Did that stop the affclicker.com ads? Please post the name of the adware you uninstalled from your machine in the comment below.

Thank you!