Playvideodirect Ads Removal Guide — Fix Push Notification

Playvideodirect push notifications appear out of the blue, distracting and annoying you. Nonetheless, that is slightly more than just notifications – their origins is clearly malignant, and they can bring other malware to your system. In this article, I will show you the guide how to remove Playvideodirect pop-ups and explain how to avoid them in the future.

Any interaction with Playvideodirect pop-ups will be ineffective at best. At worst, the web pages it can show you can introduce malware to your system. These pop-ups may also advertise fake online shopping sites which will take your money and payment info. The latter generally ends up with losing all the money you have on the exposed card.

It is better to prevent, than repair and repent!

Removing Playvideodirect manually may take hours and may damage your PC in the process. I recommend you to download GridinSoft Anti-Malware for threats removal. Allows to complete scan and cure your PC during the trial period.

DOWNLOAD NOW

Gridinsoft Anti-Malware 6-day trial available.
EULA | Privacy Policy | 10% Off Coupon

What are Playvideodirect pop-up notifications?

As the pop-up definition goes, these are short and small advertisements that attract your attention to a product they promote. But the difference between regular pop-up advertisements and Playvideodirect notifications is the malignant origins of the latter. Normal pop-ups are offered for you to enable with a legitimate purpose – notify you about the fresh posts, goods for sale and so on. It is a useful thing to help your site to keep visitor’s attention and help the interested users to have the best deal.

Brief summary of the Playvideodirect.com pop-up ads:

Playvideodirect pop-ups, on the other hand, have a deal with less legit sites. You will commonly see the proposition to turn them on following the redirection from another site. It’s OK to see redirects unless they throw you to such a dubious place. In this case, enabling push notifications is offered as the anti-bot filtering. In other cases, the sites can refuse to show you the content unless you turn on these pop-up advertisements. These theses should raise suspicion, as websites generally have a more convenient anti-bot mechanism. Witnessing this requirement is a reason to skip the site doubtlessly. In some cases, even when you click “Allow”, you will not see the web page – it has only a landing page with the offer to turn on the pop-ups.

Playvideodirect push notification.

How does this work?

The majority of browsers support enabling push notifications from sites. Websites, on the other hand, can send out notifications with the content they like. It can be a promotion of the product listed for sale on this particular site, or a promotion of the page of their partner. As a result, you may see the push notification from site X, but interacting with it will throw you to site Y – because a link to the latter was built in.

Cyber burglars bear on this ability in their approach to gain money through advertising. They trick victims into turning on pop-ups, and after that just spread hundreds of ads of anyone they contract with. As you can suppose, no legit organisations will have a deal with fraudsters. All the Playvideodirect popups you may see lead to other untrustworthy sites. At some point, the same user may be trapped by multiple pop-up spamming websites, and its web browser will turn into a complete mess.

The ads these rascals show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It usually provides a negligible commission for one view, but when you can send ads to a huge number of victims and show them hundreds of ads every day – that is a much more significant sum. Despite most of these banners giving no result at all, it can still give all the participants a lot of money.

Are Playvideodirect pop-up advertisements dangerous?

Yes, they are. Initially, they may look safe – just a blinking window that appears from time to time. However, the contents of this window differ drastically from what you used to see in pop-up ads. Playvideodirect.com website is ruled by fraudsters, who intendedly spread hundreds and thousands of malicious ads in pop-ups. They also never follow any common sense and can launch sporadic pop-up advertisements into a hurricane of ads. For weak systems, that may be enough to make the system slower. But that is not all problems these pop-ups carry.

As any other thing related to illegal advertising, Playvideodirect pop-ups lack legit deals to offer. Even though hackers make the ads looking similar to ones from well-known retailers, the web page these banners will throw you to are completely different. And these pages may offer you to turn on other pop-ups, install a “useful” program, or pay for a thing at a big discount and never receive it. Let’s leave aside the cases when pop-up advertisements promote phishing pages or straightforward malware. There’s no way these pages will bring you any good, thus interacting with them is a very bad idea. For the same reason, Playvideodirect pop-up notifications are not recommended to click on either, and the best solution is to disable them as soon as possible.

How to remove Playvideodirect pop-ups?

Fortunately, Playvideodirect pop-up advertisements removal is pretty easy. They reside in the browser and cannot hide themselves among system files. Nevertheless, as I stated before, some push notifications can introduce malicious programs to your computer. It is nearly impossible to show all of the cases, and manual malware removal is a poor idea. Thus, after disabling the pop-ups it is recommended to use anti-malware software. That is especially recommended in the case when you have never clicked “Allow” to pop-up advertisements, but they still appeared. This situation may be a sign of malware activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will be the best both recovery and malware removal purposes, because of its system recovery functionality and superb detection system.

First and foremost, you should reset your browser settings. You can do that in both manual and automatic manner. The former, obviously, takes more time to complete and can be somewhat complicated if you have never done that. Automated supposes the use of anti-malware programs that can reset all browser settings at once.

Reset your browsers with GridinSoft Anti-Malware

To reset your browser with GridinSoft Anti-Malware, open the Tools tab, and click the “Reset browser settings” button.

You can see the list of options for each browser. By default, they are set up in a manner that fits the majority of users. Press the “Reset” button (lower right corner). In a minute your browser will be as good as new.

The browser reset is recommended to perform through the antivirus tool by GridinSoft, because the latter is also able to reset the HOSTS file without any additional commands.

Reset your browsers manually

Manual method of browser reset

To reset Edge, do the following steps:

1. Open “Settings and more” tab in upper right corner, then find here “Settings” button. In the appeared menu, choose “Reset settings” option:

2. After picking the Reset Settings option, you will see the following menu, stating about the settings which will be reverted to original:

For Mozilla Firefox, do the next actions:

1. Open Menu tab (three strips in upper right corner) and click the “Help” button. In the appeared menu choose “troubleshooting information”:

2. In the next screen, find the “Refresh Firefox” option:

After choosing this option, you will see the next message:

If you use Google Chrome

1. Open Settings tab, find the “Advanced” button. In the extended tab choose the “Reset and clean up” button:

2. In the appeared list, click on the “Restore settings to their original defaults”:

3. Finally, you will see the window, where you can see all the settings which will be reset to default:

Opera can be reset in the next way

1. Open Settings menu by pressing the gear icon in the toolbar (left side of the browser window), then click “Advanced” option, and choose “Browser” button in the drop-down list. Scroll down, to the bottom of the settings menu. Find there “Restore settings to their original defaults” option:


2. After clicking the “Restore settings…” button, you will see the window, where all settings, which will be reset, are shown:

When the browsers are reset, you need to ensure that your browser will connect the right DNS while connecting to the site you need. Create a text file titled “hosts” on your pc’s desktop, then open it and fill it with the following lines²:

Find the hosts.txt file in C:/Windows/System32/drivers/etc directory. Rename this file to “hosts.old.txt” (to distinguish it from the new one), and then move the file you created on the desktop to this folder. Remove the hosts.old from this folder. Now you have your hosts file as good as new.

Scan your system for possible viruses

After removing the Playvideodirect push notifications, it’s time to see if these pop-ups brought any threat to your system. Launch GridinSoft Anti-Malware, and then click on Standard scan. It will be enough in most cases to find and remove malware. The scan will last 5-10 minutes; you are free to use your system during that process.

Once the scan is complete, you will see the detections or a notification about a clean system. Proceed with pressing the Clean Up button (or OK when nothing is detected).

How to Remove Playvideodirect Pop-ups?

Name: Playvideodirect

Description: Playvideodirect - a lot of users became a target for the pop-up advertisements. I have a lot of friends who literally bombed me with the questions like “how to remove Playvideodirect.com push notifications?” or “why do Playvideodirect.com pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Playvideodirect pop-ups, which may corrupt your browser’s correct performance, and create a lot of troubles while you are working.

Operating System: Windows

Application Category: Adware

Sending

User Review

3.4 (5 votes)

Comments Rating 0 (0 reviews)

1. More about this malware type on GridinSoft Encyclopedia.
2. Official Microsoft guide for hosts file reset.