tl;dr: When you see a Pinion ad, post on the advertiser’s Facebook page and tell them how annoying the ads are, and that you will be boycotting their products/brands. Basically be a pain in the advertiser’s butt and they will stop using Pinion.

Whilst blocking Pinion is not technically difficult what is becoming increasingly annoying is the number of threads on SPUF, reddit, and pretty much every gaming forum started by players who wish to blacklist servers that run Pinion. The same repetitive discussions come up again and again.

There is only one solution to this - we need to undermine Pinion’s business model and destroy them as a company.

This is simpler than most would think.

Pinion makes money by selling your valuable time to advertisers. On their website they say to advertisers:

> Want to branch out from print and television?

> Want to reach males 18-35?

> Want to get incredible results?

Advertisers spend money on platforms such as Pinion because they expect the following outcomes:

1. Increased brand awareness
2. Increased engagement with their customers (that’s you!)
3. Increased sales (your money!) — this is obviously the end goal

So the easiest way to destroy Pinion is to cut off their source of advertising dollars.

1. Boycott brands that advertise using Pinion - they clearly don’t understand gamers, don’t buy their products
2. Tell these brands that you are boycotting them because of their annoying advertising

Write them emails, or better still, post on the advertisers’ Facebook pages so others can see you complaining and can Like your posts. Instead of posting complaints about Pinion to r/tf2, SPUF etc, post the advertisers’ Facebook pages so everyone can slam them. Encourage your friends to do the same.

Advertisers will stop using Pinion if you tell them how annoying it is because at the end of the day it is you, the gamer, that they care about. You are the one with the dollars that they want. They don’t care about Pinion.

Pinion.gg is a gaming advertising business that’s probably best known for inserting annoying HTML ads into your favourite game.

I came across them on the GamersUN TF2 servers.

GamersUN runs a mod that forces you to have HTML MOTDs enabled if you want to play on their servers.  If you disable HTML MOTDs the mod stops you from joining a team as well as generally being annoying by hijacking all your number keys. The reason they do this is because they run Pinion.gg’s video ads in the HTML MOTD.

You can block this easily by simply adding the following to your Hosts file:

In Windows, edit C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts (it’s just a text file so you can use Notepad but make sure you run Notepad as Administrator otherwise you won’t be able to save the file)

127.0.0.1    motd.pinion.gg

Note: Windows 8 users must exempt the Hosts file from Windows Defender; read this article for details.

On a Mac you can edit /etc/hosts adding the same entry above.

This is completely harmless as all it says is that if your PC tries to connect to motd.pinion.gg that the IP is 127.0.0.1 which is your PC’s local address.  So instead of loading ad HTML the connection will just fail.

I’ll keep this blog updated with new hosts as Pinion updates their service.