Does this sound like your story? You see pop-up advertisements from onclickads.net while browsing web sites that mostly don’t advertise in pop-ups. The pop-ups manage to circumvent the built-in pop-up blockers in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari or Opera. Perhaps the onclickads.net pop-ups appear when clicking search results from a Google search? Or does the pop-ups show up even when you’re not browsing?

Here’s a screengrab of the onclickads.net pop-up ad when it showed up on my computer, in a new tab, while clicking a link on a web that should not open up a new tab:

After a while, I was redirected to banners.unibet.com.

If this sounds like what you are seeing on your computer, you probably have some adware installed on your computer that pops up the onclickads.net ads. Contacting the owner of the web site would be a waste of time. They are not responsible for the ads. I’ll try help you with the onclickads.net removal in this blog post. This is done by removing the unwanted adware from your machine.

Those that have been reading this blog already know this, but here we go: Recently I dedicated some of my lab machines and intentionally installed some adware programs on them. Since then I’ve been tracking the actions 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 auto-updates, or if it downloads and installs additional unwanted software on the computers. I first observed the onclickads.net pop-up on one of these lab computers.

onclickads.net resolves to the 78.140.191.110 address. onclickads.net was created on 2013-06-03. Here’s some of the WHOIS info:

Registrant Organization: Advertising Technologies Ltd.
Registrant Street: Quijano Chambers, P.O. Box 3159
Registrant City: Road Town
Registrant State/Province:
Registrant Postal Code: VG1110
Registrant Country: VG

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

The onclickads.net domain is attracting a ridiculous amount of traffic, just check out the Alexa traffic rank:

The problem with pop-ups such as this one is that it can be initiated by many variants of adware, not just the adware that’s installed on my machine. 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 onclickads.net pop-up ads you need to review 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 onclickads.net pop-ups is to examine the programs installed on the machine, by opening the “Uninstall programs” dialog. You can find this dialog from the Windows Control Panel. If you are using one of the more recent versions of Windows OS 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 dubious listed 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 onclickads.net pop-ups.

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

I think you will be able to find 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. It’s a tool built to manually find and remove unwanted software. When you’ve tracked down 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 crippled like many other removal tools out there. It won’t require you to pay a fee just when you are about to remove the unwanted files.

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

Here’s a video tutorial which shows FreeFixer in action removing adware that caused pop-up ads:

Did this blog post help you to remove the onclickads.net pop-up ads? Please let me know or how I can improve this blog post.

Thank you!