Did you just get a pop-up or new tab from youradexchange.com and ponder where it came from? Did the youradexchange.com ad appear to have been initiated from a web site that under normal circumstances don’t use aggressive advertising such as pop-up windows? Or did the youradexchange.com pop-up or new tab show up while you clicked a link on one of the big search engines, such as Google, Bing or Yahoo?

Here is how the youradexchange.com new tab looked like on my system:

If this description sounds like your machine, you almost certainly have some adware installed on your computer that pops up the youradexchange.com ads. Contacting the owner of the website you were browsing would be a waste of time. They are not responsible for the ads. I’ll try help you with the youradexchange.com removal in this blog post.

For those that are new to the blog: Not long ago I dedicated some of my lab systems and wilfully installed some adware programs on them. Since then I have 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 installs additional unwanted software on the machines. I first spotted the youradexchange.com pop-up on one of these lab machines.

youradexchange.com was created on 2012-11-09. youradexchange.com resolves to the 72.52.179.212 IP address.

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

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

Rank 92 clearly shows that youradexchange.com serves lots of traffic.

The problem with pop-ups like the one described in this blog post is that it can be launched by many variants of adware, not just the adware on my machine. This makes it impossible to say exactly what you need to remove to stop the pop-ups.

Anyway, here’s my suggestion for the youradexchange.com ads removal:

The first thing I would do to remove the youradexchange.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 Operating System 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 suspicious 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 youradexchange.com pop-ups.

The next thing to check would be your browser’s add-ons. Adware often appear under the add-ons dialog in Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer or Safari. Is there anything that looks suspicious? Something that you don’t remember installing?

I think most users 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 started develop many years ago. It’s a tool built to manually track down and uninstall 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 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 difficulties figuring out if a file is safe or unsafe 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 more details about the file. On that web page, check out the VirusTotal report which can be quite useful:

Here you can see FreeFixer in action removing the adware that caused pop-up ads:

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

Thank you!