Every newspaper in America has obvious scam ads on its homepage. The whole online ad market is diseased and needs to be uprooted.
Common sense fixes:
- Never allow dynamic ad content! Ads should be individually approved by publishers and not subject to change after approval.
- Ban user tracking and targeting. It's a red queen's race and no one benefits. Everyone is better off once it's illegal.
- Pay for ad time slots, not user impressions. Instead of selling by CPM, publishers should say "independent analyst X says we have traffic Y on an average Sunday. You can buy placement for next Sunday for $Z." This is how all offline ads are sold, and it's much healthier for everyone than CPM. It essentially kills the motivation for the Reddit fraud discussed here.
- Use anti-trust to prevent link aggregators from being advertisers. This is a bigger issue, but putting ads on the aggregators creates perverse incentives to promote bad content and not actually pay for it. Why would you pay to put an ad on publisher A which may or may not have traffic when you can put the ad on aggregator B which will definitely have traffic? The problem is this means A cannot pay writers and the whole system breaks down.
This is probably the worst thing you can do to online advertising. It's probably one of the only good things about the online ad industry. If you book time slots, only the biggest players will be able to compete for that slot. Essentially killing the entire selling point of online ads, which is giving a chance to smaller players a chance at the game. I don't want to, ever, see online ads transform into TV ads.
Targeting would be okay if it was done properly. In its current state, it's unethical and probably should be illegeal. Advertisers shouldn't know what I like, they should only know that a certain device with a certain ID likes X,Y topics.
You don’t necessarily need to implement bidding on a dedicated slot—-the TV comparison assumes you’re sending the same thing to each user. This isn’t TV though, you can display different ads to different people of you wanted.
How about a system where probability of seeing an ad is weighted by how much money an advertiser pays? Then you just normalize across bidders and choose on that curve. Then perhaps the time slots just serve as a bucket to allow advertisers to approximate their target audience, perhaps there are additional buckets for things like geolocation.
If you're bringing in those buckets, you are already in the slippery slope bringing you to the current system. Why not a bucket for people who visit the site often? A bucket for people using advanced site feature A, feature B? A bucket for people who subscribe to /r/teen?
I don't see any issue with a site using their own data to provide targeted advertisement on that one site. As long as data isn't being aggregated between sites and users aren't being tracked between sites, the privacy risk seems minimal.
Because the buckets are only time slots. If you can predict what time your highly focused market is to be online the most, good on you, but it doesn’t involve collecting any additional data.
The problem with any model where ad performance is based on how much cash you can throw down is that scams are much more profitable typically than legitimate services. A scam page can afford $5/click if it's scamming 1% of its clicks for $5000. Bidding on clicks is just a race to the bottom in terms of quality.
We should instead be using user metrics to evaluate and punish ads that lead to pages users regret navigating to.
In that case it's just in the hands of individual publishers, so results will vary. Plus publishers will make more money if they _don't_ do the right thing and police out the bad ads (at least in the short term).
Traditionally, publishers didn’t mind publishing ads for scams like sea monkeys or x-ray specs, but they found it embarrassing and put them in the back of the book in small print. The bizarre part of the internet is that the scams go on the homepages of sites.
I think you're conflating two points - the granularity of targeting and the auction method. Everything will get simpler if you reduce the number of targeting variables. The auction method seems less relevant to me, that's simply a financial matter.
If there's no user information/tracking, what are the chances that any of those ads will be served to a potential customer for the small business? The GP's bottom line is that nobody except large consumer brands should bother advertising.
I was like "ok, is that really true" so I went and checked, and by golly, you're right. And it's 50-50 the "scam ad" I got is a direct result of a doctor leaking my medical records.
The whole online ad industry should be regulated out of existence.
In any case, it's not them who are exploiting the information. The ad industry is like a fence for stolen goods.
It's not that my medical information is top secret; it's that I don't want to see ads about earwax. And I think Google execs should be forced to watch them until they repent and become monks or something.
Small publishing sites are all but dead. The internet used to be a lovely village where everyone was on about the same playing field and now it's a handful of skyscrapers surrounded by slums.
That's a lovely theory, but the money is in Youtube and its pretty obvious.
Nearly all the major tech reporting sites have died: TechReport, Hardware Canucks, Linux Journal, etc. etc. When you look at who can actually sustain a modern tech reporting site, its the Youtubers: Linus Tech Tips, Gamers Nexus, etc. etc.
Even then: when the tech reporting sites were around, they were mostly on Google Adsense. The others are on Facebook Ads.
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The sites that are making it possible for small-style discussion to thrive again are new "networks" like Patreon. A lesser evil for sure, but a "Skyscraper" nonetheless.
The problem is that opening up the market to "Aunt Mae" will also open up the market to malicious players.
The financial barrier of entry of TV & print advertising is a very effective filter against scams. I have yet to see scam ads for fake tech support or "win an iPhone by filling a survey" or some "free" trial which uses unreadable fine print to sign you up for something very expensive, but those are commonplace online.
I worked at a local TV station a while back, and I programmed the commercials. You would be surprised at how little those slots go for. Off prime time, a 15 or 30 second add spot might sell for a couple dollars. At night they’re only a few cents. It was a mid-sized metropolitan area, so I don’t think this would be so out of the ordinary.
To this day, I have no idea how any TV stations are financially solvent.
Well, higher prices not only allow for people to be paid decent money to review the ads manually but are also a bigger risk for any scam operation as not only is it more difficult to obtain & move that amount fraudulently (you're not going to be able to buy a TV ad with a stolen credit card) but they also have much more to lose should their entire operation be discovered (presumably, a TV network discovering a fraudulent attempt will report it to the relevant authorities and will not just give the money back).
NordVPN's ads have made it onto TV, and a lot of TV ads nowadays are for gambling. Nevertheless it certainly is easier to regulate advertising if it isn't dynamic.
The Super Bowl specticle is just that, a one-off event where the ads are more like short films and talked about for maybe a day before entirely forgotten.
> Advertisers shouldn't know what I like, they should only know that a certain device with a certain ID likes X,Y topics.
This is well-meaning but unfortunately it's also naive.
That kind of information, in aggregate, is trivial to de-anonymize at scale.
I'd like to see secondary markets for PID banned outright, personally. If you want that, go on the dark web and risk criminal sanctions. I'm sure there are some positive effects which would get thrown out with the enormous moral hazard, but I'd have to be convinced that it isn't worth it: as it stands, keeping personal user data should be a cost center for most businesses, something which exposes them to liability with no means to monetize other than providing whatever service they nominally exist for.
>I'd like to see secondary markets for PID banned outright, personally.
I totally agree with this, but I think it'd be terribly hard to implement in practice. How would you eliminate the rise of a single large body that partners with everyone during data consent forms? Sort of like a VISA for personal data. The result is the same, or arguably worse, but wouldn't be banned under your scheme.
Regulatory capture, which is the broad umbrella I'd put that under, is a problem with any attempt at regulation, I agree.
We can imagine a better regime, which could say "if you attempt to cheat or skirt around on this, we're going to hammer you harder than if you just break the rules", but how to actually get it is pretty murky. Easy to aim for that, and land in a situation where shadowy individuals wield great and capricious power.
If I allowed tracking, which I don't, the ad companies wouldn't know what to make of me. Middle age white guy devops nerd into manga, anime, fishing, ramen, lo-fi, and coding. Yet, I wear Wrangler jeans, boots, and drink wine. Even my wife thinks I'm an oddball. My kids think I'm cool until it's bed time on a school night and then howls of "Dad, what about Gundam! It's almost over. We promise!"
They offer that information as criteria the ad campaigns can select for. The criteria could be pieces of specific datum or analyzed conclusions (e.g. predicted sexual orientation, political affiliation). Those conclusions may be inaccurate but they are still more accurate then trying to make those conclusions in a tv/print campaign. So it's still effective.
There may well be a company selling big-ass belt buckles with anime themes that is trying to reach you. When designing their ad campaign they could say they want people with an interest in anime/manga AND interest in westerns, trucks, boots or jeans. They would have no way to do that with a traditional media campaign.
I think you've put too focus on the things that you think make you special. And an advertiser may not even care that much. They would be looking at what ads are you a good match for, which means the things that you've posted.
You could get targetting down to a very small number of people, and consequently make advertising very cheap.
Because of the degree to which paid advertising us about creating common knowledge that a product exists, ads of this sort are likely more useful to the advertiser anyways, at least in the long run. If you merely want to inform people that your product exists, there are usually cheaper forms of marketting.
You don't need to own a time slot completely. You could still split impressions based on a time slot, eg. you pay for 80% of the impression in a slot and I pay for 20%. You can still target "all sports fans form 10am to 2pm" or something as well.
This would still remove the incentive for fake clicks.
> they should only know that a certain device with a certain ID likes X,Y topics
They shouldn't know any ID, not even one that gets sent only to that one advertiser and is reset after 30 days.[0] Even that much data shouldn't be stored, because it's not needed unless you want to do shady tracking-related stuff (e.g. run statistics that determine who gets a special offer with a lower price).
The way it's ‘done properly’ right now is that advertisers can subscribe to a segment of consumers who recently looked at X-type products from stores A, B, or C, in region Y. Then they make bids on how much an ad impression is worth to them when a match shows up. Kind of like auto-bidding on eBay, except more meta. The problem with this is that there still needs to be some ad platform that tracks user IDs. The better ones have a reputation to uphold, so they'll make some effort to protect consumers … from finding out what's really being tracked and when there was a leak.
I like the idea of giving smaller players a chance, but:
You don't need any tracking for targeted ads.
A lot of the most relevant ads I see are on Youtube, where I have personalisation turned off. Composer explains music theory? Music store. Chef explains recipe? Cooking classes from lecture video site. Formula 1? Expensive car brand. And energy drinks. E-sports? Gaming peripherals. And different energy drinks. Half the time, no meaningful match could be made and I get something generic. Neighbouring Swamponia is beautiful in toad season. These douche-bros will give me totally legit financial advice for free. The insurance I already use has a great product for people twice my age. Founder of local thimble manufactory rambles incoherently for five minutes.
In aggregate, that's way more relevant to me than ”you recently bought that power bank you needed, so here's another power bank”. I skipped 9/10 ads after 5 seconds, but now I know which brand makes a 6-string bass that's affordable for a guitarist who'd just like to give it a go for a bit. And I did see offerings from smaller players. So I also learned that the local neo-nazi party is pretty good at folk dancing. Homeland, sweet auto-tuned homeland.
I don't blindly assume that Google aren't tracking anything I don't want them to store. But they show me a lot of targeted ads and there's never any indication that they know what I did last summer.
[0] Oh, and obviously even that kind of ID shouldn't identify an entire device. When your offspring borrows your tablet to play Candycraft, do you want them to see ads meant for you? Do they want to see those ads?
Meanwhile, newspaper/magazine publishers are like: Oh hi there! You're completely new here, so let's play the spyware opt-out game! Well done, no cookies for you; here's a pop-up about push notifications and here's another pop-up informing you that you're running out of free articles this month.
(Wait, what? You just said I'm completely new here.)
Click here to continue reading the article. We promised no cookies, so there's no reason to worry about why Firefox/Privacy Badger/Ghostery just blocked connections to 20 different service providers. It's not our fault; far too few people are willing to pay for high-quality journalism nowadays. Before you continue reading the article, would you like to know which Spice Girl Slim Shady wanted to impregnate? Number 5 will shock you! OK, OK, back to the article. Here's an embedded video. If you can't see it, it's definitely your browser acting up; surely we're not supposed to know about youtube-nocookie.com. Of course you can scroll to the previous paragraph to have another look, but did you know you can subscribe to our e-mail newsletter? Where were we … right, so now you should see this relevant picture, but it ain't gonna happen unless Facebook can join the conversation. Was it good for you, too? Don't forget to feign engagement, boost share-holder value and spam all your friends!
Alright, Black Mirror, I'll grant you that. But apart from How TV Ruined Your Life, Newswipe, Black Mirror, and Weekly Wipe … what has Charlie Brooker ever done for us?
Fair enough, Antiviral Wipe. But apart from How TV Ruined Your Life, Newswipe, Black Mirror, Black Mirror, Black Mirror, Black Mirror, Black Mirror …
> Never allow dynamic ad content! Ads should be individually approved by publishers and not subject to change after approval.
Partially agree. Publishers should definitely be able to blacklist advertisers. However, networks like Google get thousands of ads that run for only a handful of impressions. Asking publishers to manually approve every single ad that might run is onerous.
I would like to see approval required for anything executable: JavaScript, Flash, etc. Waking up to find that your website has become an attack vector through malicious banner ads is not okay.
> Ban user tracking and targeting.
Mostly disagree.
I click on a meme site. There's not a lot of relevant ads for that. I could get served ads for lolcats-themed merchandise that I don't want, or low-value broad-targeted ads that probably still aren't relevant to me. Nobody wins.
Or, based on my search history, I could get ads for computer parts that I'm actually interested in. I get ads that are relevant, the publisher gets more revenue, and the advertiser has a real chance at a sale. Everyone wins.
> It's a red queen's race and no one benefits.
That couldn't be less true.
Now, systems that try to track individual people (rather than blocks with similar demographic/behavioral traits) are a serious problem. We do need stricter controls to prevent this.
> Pay for ad time slots, not user impressions.
Here we go. You want to throw away the very thing that democratized digital advertising. You want a system where either you pay five figures to reserve a time block, or you don't get to play.
Hard disagree.
> Use anti-trust to prevent link aggregators from being advertisers.
I'm not sure how anti-trust ties into this. Are you alleging that, say, Fark has a monopoly status, and is abusing it to gain an unfair advantage in an adjacent market?
Now, I think you're on to a very real problem here--advertising dollars are being diverted away from the organizations that produce content--but severing the only real revenue source for most aggregators seems like an inappropriate response.
"However, networks like Google get thousands of ads that run for only a handful of impressions."
Yes, that is the promise of these networks - that there are exactly 8 people searching for this search string every day and I could show just those people this very targeted ad.
I wish this were the case, but unless something has changed in the last few years, it is not.
You see, google scores your ad on a "quality" metric and if your ad only rates a handful of clicks it will be disabled and can only be reenabled by paying a very onerous (20x, even 50x) premium. Even if the search terms are esoteric and not targeted by anyone other advertisers, google would rather show nothing than show your ad.
So I am afraid this dream of a niche product showing a highly targeted ad to a handful of searchers each day is actively thwarted by google.
Frankly it's no longer an issue for us - the venn diagram of "people smart enough to use rsync.net" and "people not using an adblocker" contains zero people.
Who is going to go around approving 100 minor ads for each timeslot, with no targeting? This sounds like a recipe for making no money. I think the GP is just nostalgic for TV ads.
Magazines and newspapers and television and radio and billboards and (usually) podcasts are all existence proof that someone will go around approving 100 minor ads.
Might be missing something, how is "every 100th impression" during a timeslot that on average contains 100 impressions different from just selling a single impression?
Just seems like a less transparent way of doing the same thing.
The same way that selling a timeslot that happens to be sized so that on average there will be one impression is not selling one impression. You aren't pretending to be able to accurately decide whether any given page load is an impression. You aren't even guaranteeing that there will be a page load, let alone an impression.
It seems like a way of directly eliminating fraud, by preventing people from having an avenue to lie about impressions, and a way of discencentivizing tracking, since impressions stop being the billing metric and therefore stops "needing" to be accurate. Hopefully this (as well as the other things suggested by OP to discentivize tracking) would result in less tracking and less hoarding of dangerous user data.
Agreed... Timeslots seem like slapping a technical restriction from a prior medium on the web for no particular reason. I'm not even sure what problem it's actually meant to solve?
> You want a system where either you pay five figures to reserve a time block, or you don't get to play.
This is not what I observed from Project Wonderful when they were still around. Ok I guess it wasn’t precisely timeslots, so much as “amount of time” (though one could choose to only bid during the time you want), but the prices I saw were fairly often low enough that people would briefly get the slot just for a gag.
Pretty sure there were even bidding wars between groups who were both doing jokes?
I'm no expert, but one observation I had is podcasts seem to follow this model. Most podcast ads I hear are read by the hosts themselves, though a small number splice in targeted advertiser-provided audio (eg a UK soccer podcast will play me local Canadian ads).
For the podcasts that follow the former model, they don't seem to rely on timeslots (i.e. payment just for ad being shown), though some may be involved. Instead, it seems they rely on coupon codes to measure conversions. I assume the podcast gets paid per coupon code redeemed. Barring show sponsors, in my experience ever single podcast ad read by a host will use a coupon code.
Spotify will be inserting targeted ads into their podcast streams, if they haven't started already. Something to keep in mind for anyone who was thinking of listening to podcasts on Spotify.
One product idea (that I'm freely giving away here because it's a little too evil for me) is to use neural style transfer to seamlessly and automatically inject corporate-themed jingles seamlessly into the middle of popular music tracks.
Say someone's listening to WAP on the free version of Spotify, Their ad tracking indicates that they've had recent searches for life insurance. The algorithm would then inject a Cardi B sounding rap lyric about how bomb Northwest Mutual's whole life product line is.
Yup! Dynamic Ad Insertion is gaining a bit of momentum nowadays. It's terrible if you're trying to keep note of a timestamp. An ad that was served to you one day that was 30sec can be served to you next weekend for 45sec, which would shift a lot of audio.
Not positive, but since they don't say for free users only I'm assuming it's everybody. Mainly for their own exclusive "podcasts" but available for other networks to use also. I get the impression these take the place of the traditional "host reads a sponsor message" time slot.
On my site we follow a couple of the practices you mention:
- No dynamic ad content (we do allow geo-ip targeting for continents and countries, but this is using a self-hosted maxmind list)
- Half-month or Monthly advertising time slots
In addition to those practices, we also do the following:
- Self-host our ads
- Sell our own ads and have direct relationship with the ad buyers
- No animated advertising (only static graphics)
- Advertising is tailored to the content on our website which is an indirect way of targeting users (if users enjoy our content, they will likely find value in the ads).
edit: One of the benefits of the time-slot method of selling advertising is that it doesn't encourage methods of maximizing impressions (clickbait, galleries, etc) and also there is no reason to try to game clicks as with CPC.
Do you have any thoughts on the financial impact of self-hosting vs using something like Google Ads? I'd assume you mostly made that choice for ethical reasons, right?
I noticed that my ad blocker doesn't block your ads, and like you mentioned, they don't interrupt the browsing experience. They're almost like those in a high-quality paper magazine!
We initially used Google Ads, but phased them out 6-7 years ago because the ads were lower quality than we wanted and missing a big chunk of the ad sale due to Google's fees.
If I remember correctly, we used Google and self-hosted for a while, but eventually it made financial sense to replace the Google Ad slots with self-hosted so we were able to capture the full ad sale.
Several years on, I am really happy with the decision and it is great to not be subject to the whims of an ad marketplace we have no control over.
When you say 'on my site' would it be correct to say that you are talking about the one in your 'about' section? If so I was motivated to take a look as a way of expressing support for your design choices.
However, you are using a Google-Analytics script????
I have looked into alternatives before, but not either of those actually.
Plausible looks more promising of the two and I will check it out (PostHog could also be, but I didn't really understand the features as it related to a normal WordPress website).
It would be interesting to know how other Plausible users have found their traffic numbers compare vs Google Analytics. Likely that some users would be counted that weren't before, while perhaps bot filtering works differently.
I almost managed to remove all 3rd parties too (apart from the tawk.to chat widget, until I implement a custom contact form).
If you are looking to replace Google Analytics with a self-hosted solution (to fully eliminate 3rd parties) you can check out the analytics platform I'm building: https://www.usertrack.net
I actually did try UserTrack a couple of months ago using the self-hosting option and it was easy to get going, though was missing a few metrics we use in addition to event tracking.
Could you tell me what was the most important metric missing from userTrack for you? I keep adding new features (eg. just recently added the ability to filter all sessions from a specific user), so knowing which ones are the most common requested is really helpful!
I commented on it because I spotted the Google Ajax calls which sort of lead me to believe that you might have also been using Google for the Geo-Location stuff. When combined with the GA stuff it made me do a 'hang on a minute, something doesn't match up'. Thanks for taking the time to clarify.
> Every newspaper in America has obvious scam ads on its homepage.
It's genuinely baffling, given largely bad-faith "fake news" accusations, that news organizations are willing to light their credibility on fire like this. It feeds the nonsense, and justifiably so.
Turn off an ad blocker for a day after years of running one and you will routinely get solicitations for fake tech support lines, fake crypto ransom demands, and so on even if you are only browsing mainstream sites. This even goes for both iOS and Android phones. Digital display ads are major vectors of crime and the websites and the ad networks that serve them should be held liable for the damages that they cause to victims by facilitating the crimes. They are basically driving the cars for the burglars and helping them literally target victims like the elderly. Then they just say 'oops lol we're not liable.' It's a joke. The government should go after them like it dismantled the Japanese empire in the 1940s. Take everything they have and put the executives in prison for decades.
Given the hyper targeted efficiency of the modern ad networks, are you sure the fake crypto and tech support ads are going to everyone and not just to you?
My concern would be the opposite. What if scams are only targeted towards those that are likely to fall for it like the elderly, flying under the radar of anyone who has the skills to recognize it as a scam and report it?
I'm constantly amazed at the frequency with which articles posted to Hacker News have a bar of clickbait ads immediately following the body of the article.
Those rabbit-hole articles where they split eight facts across 12 pages and in some cases never mention the fact they were advertising in the original link. All so they can put six more ads per click in front of you.
Ye. These "You can't guess how 'random actor' looks now" and then a picture of some drug addict and not the actor. The actor in the ad is nowhere to be seen if you click the ad. I actually got fooled to click because I couldn't believe that the actor got like that and it looked like an article on the "honorable" newssite ...
For the clickbait content ads on Taboola and Outbrain, the strategy is ad arbitrage. The landing page is probably broken up into a slide show with many pages. The goal is to get the user to go through 30 pages (misclicking a few ads along the way) and monetize as more revenue than the cost of their visit. There are other monetization strategies for other types of ads on Taboola and Outbrain.
The arbitrage isn’t illegal but it’s also not not a scam. If you’re running ads against the shite articles and you knew all the traffic to the ad was just people from a different site who don’t even really see your ads, you wouldn’t be very happy to pay for it.
It's not that baffling. Good investigative journalism costs money and now everyone wants news free.
Also it doesn't matter what the NYtimes puts on its site - Sean hannity calls it librul and they all just fall in line anyway, why even bother catering to that crowd?
Seems like a lot of banning. Why not just prosecute the ad network for conspiracy to commit wire fraud whenever a fraud case is tried that involved online advertising?
It’s one thing for a platform to not be responsible for free content, but entirely another to take money from a fraudulent enterprise and enable their fraud.
Edit: to be clear the reasonableness legal concept would be in play here in the US. Plenty of frauds could slip by a reasonable advertising network review. Some clearly would not.
Extremely unpopular opinion but sometimes I like being targeted. Just last week I was looking for a ceiling lamp but couldn't really find anything I wanted. I finally found one that I liked by seeing it in an ad that was obviously targeted.
It was nice to not having to actively go through the hundreds of pages of lamps and instead get presented a few different ones in each ad group now and then, as a break in my usual feed. The drip exposure also made me contemplate each one in isolation instead of being overwhelmed.
What I don't like is that I keep getting ads for lamps now after I've already bought it.
Are you surfing the web without ad-blocker? For real? But I trust you are sincere. One of my friends sincerely said that he likes ads in movies so he can get up and do stuff during the movies. He felt stuck without ads (Pre-streaming of-course).
To remove dynamic ad content ignores the value that can be unlocked through targeting to more specific individuals. It must be considered, especially for small businesses who may not be able to afford larger timeslots, as are being proposed here. I think it is important to remember that a huge part of this more personalized marketing approach is that it allows small companies (not the P&Gs of the world) to engage in the ad market far more productively, with niche products. To ignore these advantages does the benefits of the current dynamic market a great disservice.
It seems like the main point you take issue with isn't dynamic ad content, but the next point:
>Ban user tracking and targeting.
You do bring up a good point though. Reducing dynamic ad content and user targeting reduces advertising "supply." Instead of showing 10 ads at once, you show 1 ad per timeslot.
Small businesses wouldn't have the in-house capacity to search for lower-cost ad options directly. They'd have to use brokers, eg some SaaS ad marketplace, or automated tooling to just submit to price-appropriate options. This does increase burden on small businesses. But most of all it increases burden on the companies that show ads. Now they have to hire (a team?) of people to manually review something that used to be automated.
I don't disagree with OPs point. Manual curation would lead to higher quality of ads, and probably benefit society as a whole. Just a lot of barriers.
As a counterpoint, most podcasts use this manual curation model with the hosts themsevles reading out the ads.
>most podcasts use this manual curation model with the hosts themselves reading out the ads.
And I am far, far more likely to explore a product endorsed by a favorite podcast than I am to click into a random link on the very same podcast's main site.
> To remove dynamic ad content ignores the value that can be unlocked through targeting to more specific individuals
Is that value worth it when it opens the floodgates for scams (manual review is impossible since the amount of ads is now near-infinite instead of being limited to a single ad per ad spot per period of time), misinformation (you can target your ad to only the people most likely to fall for it, while remaining completely invisible to those who might identify it as incorrect/malicious), malware or privacy violations (ad targeting involves collecting large amounts of personal data which can then leak or be misused)?
Careful, targeting is not the same as dynamic. You could very well have 10 ads approved, and choose which one to display based on the time of day, location etc
> Pay for ad time slots, not user impressions. Instead of selling by CPM, publishers should say "independent analyst X says we have traffic Y on an average Sunday. You can buy placement for next Sunday for $Z."
On top of the other objections, surely this would just move the fraud to another place, by incentivising people to create fraudulent traffic so as to drive up the perceived value of the time slot?
> Ban user tracking and targeting. It's a red queen's race and no one benefits. Everyone is better off once it's illegal.
Tracking and targetting has clear benfits for me as a consumer. I see adverts for things that actually interest me. If anyting I'd like it to be more precise.
There's a lot of reasons they're not done that way on the internet, for starters it's reverting back to requiring people in the loop for ad sales which is expensive on both sides of the equation. Add to that that the 'personalized' ads are, if the targeting is functioning properly, worth more to the buyer [0] than simple placement ads and you can see why automatic targeted ads dominate the space, human approved/sold, non-personalized ads are both worth less on a per impression basis and more expensive for the buyer and seller to use.
[0] For example a make-up company really doesn't really care about putting an ad in front of me a man who doesn't wear make-up.
“Influencers” are a new category of ad where you pay people to use your makeup or whatever on Instagram or YouTube. It’s hugely popular with consumers and modestly profitable for “influencers”, and it all works with zero targeting.
It's relatively small in terms of advertising dollars and a pretty different kind of advertising that relies a lot on the parasocial relationship they have with their audience. Random websites have much looser relationships with their audience.
Random websites have loose relationships with readers now because the big algorithmic aggregators have driven small sites out of existence. Back before Reddit and Facebook, small sites were common and you were expected to return regularly to see what’s new.
If the ads are billed per period of time and not per-click or per-view then "fraud" doesn't matter; all that matters is the overall ROI; if the advertiser gets more business than what it cost them to run the ad they will consider it a worthwhile investment, otherwise they will stop advertising there forcing the publisher to adjust their prices and eventually those prices will reflect the true value (as in how much ROI it brings) of the ad spot regardless of any "fraud".
It's not that fraud doesn't matter, it just moves to the publisher because they're the ones that have to track the eyeballs now in order to advertisers to know how good their ad space is.
It doesn’t matter because your traffic is measured by Comscore or Nielsen or some other third party and can’t be faked. (I don’t consider being in a survey group “tracking” in the relevant sense.)
"- Pay for ad time slots, not user impressions. Instead of selling by CPM, publishers should say "independent analyst X says we have traffic Y on an average Sunday. You can buy placement for next Sunday for $Z." "
This would end fraud. This would end mis-clicks. This would benefit the purchaser of ads AND would make the ad market more efficient. So, asking for "world peace" might be a easier route to go.
It’s a red queen’s race because ad buyers have a fixed budget. You can’t get them to spend more; just spend at different places. If tracking is available they’ll buy it, but it won’t increase the total buy.
My thought on this has always been ad networks need to flip the script. Detect how much users like the content/services they are being sent to via ads (things like whether they come back on their own, upvotes, etc., can be used to detect this). Then dramatically reward the ads people found useful to click and dramatically punish (they have to pay more) the spammy ads everyone regrets clicking on.
I was watching a screen share on someone else's computer who was looking at a news article and I was completely shocked at the experience. How do people live without adblock?
That and the new interface is awful. Even clicking into a thread you see like 5 comments and a ton of “suggestions” for similar threads. Not to mention all the wasted real-estate and whatever that “picture in picture” style of opening links is..
on tablets pretty much everything directs you to the app and most people trust this is the best result which with regards to youtube can result in an incredible influx of ads
As the guy that helped build the first ad platform on reddit, no, I don't think the provider should choose.
When we built the first reddit ad system, none of us liked ads, and we knew that a lot of users didn't either. We knew that we had to make useful ads if we wanted people not to block us. We knew we had to make them unobtrusive and even enjoyable.
We knew that we had to build an ad product people enjoyed if we wanted them to be effective and not get blocked.
And we knew some people would block them anyway, and that was fine. Heck, we even added an option to turn them off if you paid us, so that people had options.
I used to not run adblock as a way of supporting sites I liked, but then all the ads got so bad I just couldn't do it anymore. Now I just find other ways to pay for the sites I love.
It doesn't work the way you think it does. Ads are paid for my the click. Some people never click on ads. The kinds of people who are likely to consider running an ad blocker are the same type who never click on ads regardless if they have ads or not.
The ideal situation is never advertising ad blockers, never bragging about them, never making a big deal about them, and keeping some mild barrier of entry. This way the average person who has less of a concern about ads will not run an ad blocker, and meanwhile the one who never makes money for the company to begin with doesn't have to deal with it.
Ads are not just charged by click. Some campaigns pay by impression served and some pay by conversion. It depends on what the advertiser is trying to accomplish. Pepsi might pay per impression because their goal is brand awareness. Local Pizza joint might pay per click b/c they want to drive business off the web. AFKArena wants to pay by conversion because their ultimate goal is to get app installs.
Ads of all of these types generally compete for the same slot in an auction.
So yes, a user who has adblock is worth less than a user who doesn't have adblock but also doesn't click ads.
Technically, if the user with adblocker doesn't even count as an impression, and the campaign pays per conversion, then the overall click-through-rate of the ad goes up, which means higher RPMs!
In general yes, but not if they've agreed to display things in a certain way in order to receive a service, then accept the delivery of that service but don't follow through on their part of the agreement.
It's a fundamentally selfish viewpoint that you instead of the site you're using should decide how you consume what the site offers, a point of view that would be considered patently outrageous in many other contexts.
Many people here confuse such a thing being possible with such a thing being morally justifiable.
> It's a fundamentally selfish viewpoint that you instead of the site you're using should decide how you consume what the site offers
Properly pay wall it. The site does have control that it doesn't want to exercise. Why does it want to have control over your device to display what it wants.
Your content has left your property to land on mine. I can choose what kind of content I let in and not.
I don't have to store your ads and tracking cookies. Private platforms like reddit won't host all the content I send to them why should I be obliged to.
> It's a fundamentally selfish viewpoint that you instead of the site you're using should decide how you consume what the site offers, a point of view that would be considered patently outrageous in many other contexts.
I'd argue the opposite. It's fundamentally selfish for a site to assume that _it_ gets to decide, without my agreement or consent, how I must consume the content it has freely and unconditionally sent me. If a site wants to negotiate a fair payment in exchange for its content (whether that payment be currency or merely displaying ads on my screen) it is free to do so, but without a mutual agreement neither party is under any moral obligation to the other. I'm not obligated to view the site in any particular way, and they're not obligated to serve me the content.
Maybe? I don't really consider "by using this site you agree to such and such" to be consent, and I don't know of any sites that ban ad blockers in their ToS. But in a theoretical situation where a site made you explicitly agree not to block ads before allowing you to use the site, then yeah I think it would be reasonable for them to expect you to adhere to that agreement.
No offense, but to some of us whole promise of internet is to empower users.
I would be perfectly willing to let all the sites that can't survive without ads die.
Internet would be smaller but still enormously powerful tool.
And most of the problem people complain about web and internet today (fake news, social bubbles, , ...) came out of ad tech and its desire to optimize for engagement and tracking.
We cant put genie back into the bottle but I can use ad blockers to at least mitigate some small amount of damage.
It really can't surprise you that a common viewpoint on HN is that `Information wants to be free'. This is both in a descriptive sense and a normative sense.
The descriptive sense obviously can't be selfish but the normative one can. So the question is then as follows: are the activists who further this narrative, out of a normative belief, selfish?
I personally don't think so. I believe that people like Aaron Swartz are among the most selfless people to ever exist.
I think that's a fair point, the motivations may not be selfish, but that's the expression. Maybe a better characterization of the motivations would be "naive". Nothing is free.
Wow, this is a weird thread. Who is this guy and why is everyone so mad at him about making his living in ad tech..?
Him being in ads doesn't change the validity of the points he's making. Websites have to make money somehow. If you don't pay for a subscription, and don't allow the ads to run, why should you still feel entitled to consume their content?
To be super clear: I'm in the ad-blocker camp, but I don't think we can really pretend that it's somehow justified. Ads annoy the bejesus out of me, I'm not willing to pay for a million little one-off subscriptions, there's this lovely back door that gives me all the content with no ads, so, me being of low moral fiber, goes the adblocking route.
I have no problem with how he makes his living but when i wrote that he hadn't said a peep about it and it colors his arguments quite differently.
Now him making money from ads also doesn't give him the right to call someone a selfish asshole for not displaying them.
If a website wantsto block me for using an ad blocker that's fine by me, I leave the website no harm no foul.
But to act as if it's theft to view a page with adblocker on is just asinine, and he also did just that.
As others have said it's not just the ads, its the invasive tracking, resource hogging, auto playing videos et al. Ads have had their chance and pissed enough of us off that we said enough is enough.
We did not agree to be served an ad you jjst present it to us upon landing on your site. Ask away so we can deny but let's not for one second pretend any of us owe you our attention or our cpu just because we clicked some random link.
Yep and in all honesty it's their resource use (slowing down web pages), sometimes intrusiveness (e.g. modal popups), masquerading as news articles (those Taboola boxes), and cross-site user tracking/data sharing behavior that annoy me more than anything else.
If ads were just inline hyperlinked images I'd find them much less annoying, and would probably not bother blocking them if that is all they were.
That's especially beautiful after having seen your replies to this thread. See my other replies on here too if you'd like i know better than to argue with you about ads, it wont get anywhere as evidenced by this thread.
0. The vast majority of websites are running third-party ad networks, not first-party.
1. Even first-party ad networks often track and fingerprint users without consent, and may even share the data they have with other websites. This has personally happened to me, specifically in which eBay and Amazon serve their own first-party ads, but shared data about my searches, purchases, and clicks with other platforms. Even though it may have been a part of their ToS to do that, I consider that type of cross-business sharing of user data, without a clear opt-in/opt-out option presented to the user, to be a malicious term and effectively user bullying by monopolies in e-commerce.
For eBay and Amazon, I consider that consent to be a malicious term, especially for these websites which are near monopolies. Even though I hit "agree" to their attempt to collect data, I still will instruct my devices to not actually give certain data to them, and instruct my devices to not display ads that are targeted based on cross-business shared data.
And of course there are the million other sites you don't need to agree to any ToS to use.
I mostly agree with you on sites with no ToS or sites where you're not a registered user.
I think that the concept that a ToS is considered by you to be malicious, yet you agree with it anyway in order to receive services is where the problem lies. That seems intentionally deceptive to me. If you disagree with the ToS why still use the site?
> If you disagree with the ToS why still use the site?
Because I still need to buy stuff?
eBay is a monopoly in online auctions and secondhand goods from non-local locations. I don't have a choice. This isn't 1980 where you probably had a lot of options for auctions that didn't track your user data. Those auctions are largely gone.
Amazon is a near monopoly in e-commerce in that there are lots of things I buy that are more or less only available on Amazon, or perhaps Walmart which also a similarly malicious ToS.
Either way, I actually buy stuff from these websites. Probably upwards of $10K in purchases per year, at least. It makes zero sense for them to kick me off for thwarting their user tracking and data sharing attempts. It would be a lose-lose for them to do that.
There are a lot of things a ToS can reasonably require, for example, setting limits on how much you are allowed to use the service, and limits on how you may use data obtained in the course of using the service. I respect those. But when it comes to how my data is shared externally with other companies, I think it crosses the line for a ToS to require that of a user to use the service. In fact, I think there should be legislation requiring it to be a clear opt-in on part of the user, and I would go so far as to say that a default opt-in setting should be illegal.
And it is. If Amazon kicks me off I'll be shopping at Walmart tomorrow.
Also, note that a big part of this is also that the ToS was not bilaterally negotiated. They, as a near-monopoly, presented a ToS that they were not willing to negotiate with, and required agreeing to it to provide service.
In much of the contract world, both parties negotiate terms before signing -- for example, investor term sheets, contractor work, business partnerships. In situations like that where I have a voice, and have a fair share of negotiating space with an agreement before signing, I am normally very respectful of what I agreed to, but if I was not offered that opportunity, to hell with it, I will go by my idea of what I think is right, and they can kick me off if they want to and lose their $10K/year in revenue. Most of the time, they'd probably rather take the $10K than pick a fight over ad blockers.
The terms of service for a web page the user just visited? They haven't even seen anything to suggest that the ToS exists at that point -- they haven't consented to anything.
That's a hell of a qualifier you just slapped on there. I'll answer as soon as I can track down a website that's not running a third-party ad network, which I'm sure you're aware is but a teensy percentage of web sites that run ads.
On mobile, I've encountered ads which create redirects away from the site I was originally on, triggered by ads. This has happened on many large sites, not just small ones (think: CNN, Bloomberg, etc.). It used to happen a lot more, but I've still encountered it within the last six months or so. Using the mobile web is near impossible without running an adblocker, unless I'm willing to shell out a grand for the next generation phone to run the horrendous amounts of javascript for ads.
EDIT: Oh, I see you're massively limiting this scope to first party ad networks. I guess I have never really experienced issues with first party ad networks, as I practically never experience them. If they're truly first party ads, then they probably won't be blocked the ad blockers I run, because they'll be served by the same site I'm trying to access being first party and all.
I find it so weird idea that people really click on ads. I don't know if I've ever done so (intentionally). As such I would have expected more like 90% of clicks to be fraudulent.
Where I clicked while the page is still loading. But by the time my click is registered, an ad has loaded in the target location.
I suppose you could say loading ads asynchronously improves the user experience, but my skeptical experience is they intentionally load in high activity localities.
I can't run an ad blocker on the Instagram app, but I really don't mind much. I end up clicking on ads all the time there. They're usually super relevant.
I used to be like that, but for whatever reason a significant proportion of my adds these days are from smaller, local companies - a vineyard or clothing company for instance.
I click on these adds, and if I like what I see, I'll buy it. I feel a lot more comfortable supporting small businesses that someone has poured their heart and sole into. I want to see these companies thrive, and if targeted advertising is the way I'm alerted to them, then so be it!
that's super awesome to hear as a small business owner. My gf and I started http://buyfunnyaprons.com/ and running ads on IG and FB have been the only way to get exposure. FB's targeting is super advanced and allows smaller guys like us to compete with the corporates (since we can't buy traditional media like tv ads or billboards).
Even if I’m both intrigued by the product advertised and really want to support the site/app I’m on, I’d rather go google the product in an incognito window than give any money or information to adtech with that click.
Yup. I remember those sites that would say "please click on the ads and support us!"
There was also that one in the early 2000s that claimed to donate a cup of rice for every ad clicked, and maybe another one that planted seeds or something. I think I clicked on those a bunch for a while. Doubt they ever did any good, and I should probably have just donated the $2 I probably "earned" for those charities with my clicks.
I once used a hosting provider whose business model was to give you "credits" every time you clicked on an ad. Enough credits got you a month of hosting. So of course I wrote up a little HTML page with some javascript that had a dozen iframes to load each click into a different frame, then refresh the ads list. Host told me to knock it off a couple days later :(
He did end up hiring me for a tiny bit of website work after that, paid like $200. My first ever paid tech gig.
I run an ad blocker, but I’ve also occasionally clicked on ads. Usually it was some cool looking gadget or clothing item, not sure if I ever purchased through ad-initiated interaction, but it definitely made me aware of products.
I've intentionally clicked on plenty of ads before. I've never made a purchase right after doing so, but I have bought that item later on, because of the ad.
On mobile I could easily imagine 7/8 are miss-clicks. Do you have clickrate for desktop vs mobile? I mean they should be about the same for on purpose clicks.
Most of the ads in general, like in TVs or newspapers, are there to let you know about the product and the brand. You are not expected to buy immediately after seeing the ad. However, you will more likely prefer a brand or product you already know about when you buy something you are not familiar with.
I buy popular brands I see on ads often enough (especially if you consider food items). Granted, there was a reasonable chance I was going to buy the products anyway, but seeing the ad probably raised the chances. I think every time I thought about the product, there was a chance that I was going to pull the trigger on buying it, and seeing the ad prompted another thought about the product. Also, when I see ads, I often have a thought like "I see this ad more often than the competitor's ads. Are they doing better? Maybe it really is because their product is better than the competitor's".
Not very often, for me. I used to consciously avoid them.
Nowadays on search engines knowing that they're likely spending a dollar or two to reach me, I'll click to test the veracity of their targetting. If they're going to bid for people searching from X in country Y, they'll be needing an ROI and providing I'm genuinely interested in whatever X is, the ad is no problem.
I gotta say... this is an incredibly naive analysis.
To demonstrate Reddit Ads isn't doing click fraud protection, you should try to generate a fraudulent click yourself. Looking at what is getting through and finding that a lot of it as easily identifiable as fraudulent is NOT a valid signal.
It's incredibly likely that there are far more bots that are being blocked and that the bots that are getting through have invested a lot of effort in to fooling Reddit's fraud protection, but really don't care at all about fooling the landing page site (and of course, there are a lot more such sites, so it's a lot more expensive to design & operate a system that would fool all the other sites). Consequently, they're "easily identifiable" (though in truth the author is unfortunately use a very crude model for identifying fraud which will include a ton of false positives) by the landing page, but not by Reddit.
OK but doesn't OP demostrate that the same IP clicked 15 times in a short period of time and he was charged for all of them? How could that be complicated to handle?
Well, for starters, the IP they see might not be the same IP that Reddit sees. If you are a fraudster, obfuscating IPs is something worth investing in to get by the ad network, not the publisher. There's no need to invest in fooling the publisher (in fact, appearing fraudulent to the publisher can be an objective).
Secondly, 15 times in a short period of time from the same IP might just be the ad system targeting a particular group of people who all use the same NAT (which does indeed tend to happen). So it might not be fraud at all.
There is no way to obfuscate an IP address on a TCP connection. The TCP sequence numbers are random so if the fraudster spoofs their IP, they won't get the return traffic and will be unable to complete the handshake and even establish a connection.
As the original poster noted, 15 requests from a single IP in a short amount of time should be an anomaly. There's no real world scenario where 15 people behind one NAT show interest to a specific ad simultaneously.
> There is no way to obfuscate an IP address on a TCP connection.
I think you misunderstand how this works/is done.
> The TCP sequence numbers are random so if the fraudster spoofs their IP, they won't get the return traffic and will be unable to complete the handshake and even establish a connection.
A bunch of misperceptions here.
I'm posting this right now from an IP address that is different than the IP address that HN sees on their side. Likely you are as well. I'm not doing IP address spoofing like you are describing (though you can indeed do that, even with TCP... there are RFCs on it and everything, it's just totally unnecessary), because that isn't needed. A simple NAT, VPN, or proxy can obfuscate the IP you are using. Click fraud is really no different from SPAM in the way that perpetrators collect pools of IP addresses/computers and relay their activity through those addresses/computers to obfuscate its true origin.
The TCP connection used to click on the ad on reddit is not the same TCP connection used to visit the advertiser's landing page, so there is no need to mess with anything at the TCP level for a different IP address to be presented to the publisher.
> As the original poster noted, 15 requests from a single IP in a short amount of time should be an anomaly. There's no real world scenario where 15 people behind one NAT show interest to a specific ad simultaneously.
Would you consider it an anomaly for 15 people anywhere on the Internet to show interest in an ad over a short amount of time? If so, you probably should rate limit your campaigns accordingly, but if not then there's no reason why you should consider it an anomaly for 15 people to show interest in an ad over the same IP. Particularly since ad engines have behaviours that make it disproportionately likely that an ad will be shown to people at the same time if they are behind the same IP. I'm not saying it isn't an anomaly. It could well be, but it is far from definitively fraud. This kind of "anomaly" happens all the time for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with fraud.
A lot of companies have done this and do this kind of thing as a service.
That said, this report's objective isn't really to measure click fraud detection on those networks. It's to highlight that one doesn't have to be very sophisticated to commit ad fraud (which is absolutely true). It also has some really odd ideas (e.g. they contacted the Chrome team to let them know about the existence of the stealth plugin in, and were surprised that the Chrome team said that the browser was working as intended so there was no action for them to take on their part... they similarly drew a false equivalence between defending account creation vs. defending click fraud). They also seemed to think that sites should be blocking bots, which is of course not what you want to do, because that provides a feedback loop to the fraudsters so that they can figure out how to overcome the measures. You want to proceed as if it is working, even let it show up in the ad campaign data at least initially, and as much as possible make corrections in ways that make it difficult to determine which traffic has been identified as fraud.
I get the impression that Reddit's ad network is just immature.
We're finding that Reddit ads perform well and are cheap, suggesting that there isn't much competition for clicks.
More mature ad networks such as Google's and Facebook's are better at reducing spam clicks. Google bought a company focused on this about 10 years ago, I'm sure Facebook put similar effort in.
I'm sure this is something they'll work to improve over time as their ad network gains traction.
That depends on the scale though right? Reddit ads were for a long time very poor. They've become a lot more feasible for many companies in the last few years, as Reddit has also become a lot more mainstream.
Also we don't know if they are doing basic fraud mitigation. It's possible they are doing plenty of fraud mitigation, but that it's just not advanced enough.
Did you look at the link? The detection methods used, and the discussion of mitigation in the thread, make it clear that if they are doing any mitigation at all they are neglecting obvious red flags.
Every business is obliged to be ethical, vigilant against deception, and not blatantly lie, no matter what size they are. Even if you could make an argument like this, reddit was already pretty big ten years ago. That's why they started running ads.
I wish they would actually address this issue in the OP's link. None of the reddit ad reps have responded to this and it's quite a shame they haven't yet...
Do you mean spider.io? I believe the internal team at Google had egg on their face when they had to admit they hadn't built anything and had to instead buy this company. But yeah it's definitely a sign that a network is maturing -- both facing and stopping this problem
Edit: Fun fact, one often undiscussed use for click-fraud was money laundering schemes, where people would own shitty landing pages with ads, and pay bot-net operators to click ads on their pages to legitimize money as "ad revenue"
The issue though is the complete lack of transparency with the major online ad networks. We're relying on the fox to guard the hen house. They get paid whether the click is valid or not. I don't think we should reasonably expect the Google's and Facebook's of the ad world to spend money preventing fraud when that generates less profit overall. Until we start regulating the industry, no ad company is going to spend money to lose money, especially when there's no real repercussions to begin with.
> Until we start regulating the industry, no ad company is going to spend money to lose money
Google made 113 BILLION dollars from advertising last year. The majority of companies spending that are sophisticated enough to tell if they're getting value from their 0.1 trillion dollars.
Ditto even reddit advertisers -- attribution to reddit is table stakes for buying ads. The buyers are getting value or they quit spending on reddit.
edit: In fact, if you understand ads, fraud on reddit is a problem for reddit because it causes advertisers to transfer ad spend off of reddit.
Almost all bidding on FB is oCPM and Google is tCPM, which means that clicks don't really matter at all in terms of Google/FB's ability to monetize. Transparency shouldn't matter for people bidding for conversions. The only transparency you need is to know where the visitors are coming from.
If anything fraud (really misclicks for FB and Google search since there is no fraud incentive) is also bad for them as well as it provides false signal of intent to their algorithms.
>which means that clicks don't really matter at all in terms of Google/FB's ability to monetize
What? They get paid for the clicks, not the impressions. Serving ad impressions costs money, the clicks make money. I don't quite follow your line of reasoning here.
>Transparency shouldn't matter for people bidding for conversions
Why wouldn't it? How do we know the bidding process is fair and the clicks we're paying for are valid? We don't and that's the problem. We wouldn't tolerate this type of behavior from companies in other industries. We need to quit giving tech companies a free pass and start holding them accountable.
>If anything fraud (really misclicks for FB and Google search since there is no fraud incentive) is also bad for them as well as it provides false signal of intent to their algorithms.
It only has to be good enough to convince people to keep using it. There's no financial incentive to eliminate fraud completely, or even try, without regulation.
Google gets paid for clicks but most (or at least many) people bid on conversions, for those people it doesn't matter if google delivers 100 clicks at $2 per click, or 4 clicks at $50 per click as long as they get the same number of conversions, so to this extent the CPC doesn't matter. Similarly, I could care less if 50% of the clicks are fraudulent. As a buyer what I'm judging at the end of the day is if I got the value I wanted for the price I paid. Clicks don't map to value very well, conversion actions do.
Plus, it's not like if there was no click fraud that the auction becomes magically transparent, it's still as opaque as it was before, so really this is the only rational way to purchase ads (off of some basis other than "did the # of clicks meet my expectations?")
Disclosure: I used to work on the pipelines counting this stuff at Google.
> What? They get paid for the clicks, not the impressions. Serving ad impressions costs money, the clicks make money. I don't quite follow your line of reasoning here.
> Why wouldn't it? How do we know the bidding process is fair and the clicks we're paying for are valid? We don't and that's the problem. We wouldn't tolerate this type of behavior from companies in other industries. We need to quit giving tech companies a free pass and start holding them accountable.
For cost per click there's an economic argument that the auction is fair. Google has limited ad slots and leaves money on the table if it serves low bid or low quality ads instead of higher-bid or higher-quality ads, and if Google pretended low-quality ads were high quality the advertiser would see it as an insanely high cost per conversion. Click validity is also easy to measure; count how many clicks you're charged for and compare that with how many referrals with gclid from google.com show up in your logs (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/35813737/matching-google...).
Impression ads are trickier which is why there are fancy cross-device conversion/attribution metrics to correlate purchases with impressions, but ultimately that is the problem with pay-per-impression in general.
> It only has to be good enough to convince people to keep using it. There's no financial incentive to eliminate fraud completely, or even try, without regulation.
Here I mostly agree; I was pretty disappointed to find out Google was serving those stupid "Download Now"-button ads on various software distribution sites. I think that particular insanity has been fixed now, but "not against the rules" was the answer for most of the time I was there.
Trust is also a financial incentive and is the primary incentive to prevent outright fraud. Ad-blockers or moving to another ad network are the proper responses to indicate lowered trust.
Shouldn't ad buyers just assume that the high fraud rates are baked into the price? If Reddit gets rid of fraudulent clicks (whatever that means), then the ad price will probably go up.
Yep, reddit ads CPC is 2-5x cheaper than FB / Google. So assuming half of it is real fraud, the likely outcome of removing the fraud is just that CPC would double. Still better as misleading metrics are bad, but likely no real net change in cost per real return.
that's a terrible way to run a business...they should just own it or fix the problem and charge whatever is fair. Tricking the users will bite them in the ass
> I get the impression that Reddit's ad network is just immature.
I get more the impression that Reddit's advertiser community is just immature. ;-)
> We're finding that Reddit ads perform well and are cheap, suggesting that there isn't much competition for clicks.
Also reinforcing my perception.
> More mature ad networks such as Google's and Facebook's are better at reducing spam clicks. Google bought a company focused on this about 10 years ago, I'm sure Facebook put similar effort in.
I doubt either of us know that either of their ad networks does a better job. They certainly have invested more money in it, but they also run much bigger ad networks that are likely much more aggressively targeted for fraud (particularly because of their revenue models). So they may have more of the clicks that get through being fraud than Reddit.
> I'm sure this is something they'll work to improve over time as their ad network gains traction.
Yeah, but what I think is needed right now is a more mature perspective on click fraud. For starters, the underlying subtext that "click fraud" means that the ad network is profiting at the advertiser's expense fails to appreciate the context. If there was no fraud, the clicks would cost proportionately more (likely more than proportionately more), so the advertiser would save no money and Reddit would not lose any revenue.
More than that though, the poster doesn't seem to appreciate that what they are describing as obviously fraudulent is likely filled with a lot of false positives (I'd speculate that they are labeling at least a third of their real traffic as fraud using this heuristic). They also do not seem to understand that just because they are using a technique to detect fraud that Reddit isn't employing the same technique on their side; click fraudsters have a strong incentive to fool ad network detection mechanisms, but no incentive to fool the landing pages. They might follow redirects, load images, use unique IPs, etc. on the ad network, but they have no incentive to fool the operator of the site the ad is sending traffic to (in fact, sometimes their objective is to convince the advertiser that the ad network isn't providing quality traffic).
What I don't get here is - who is doing this? I'm not sure who has the motivation to falsify clicks on Reddit ads. For Google ads, somebody might want to falsify clicks on the ads displayed on their site because they get paid by the click, but who other than Reddit would want to do that here?
Let’s not first assume intent. There are tons of scrapers running on Reddit. Reddit ads are presented inline rather than iframed/complex load behavior like Google Ads. Also browser extensions, browser behaviors (which smartly preload pages, prefetching) all cannot differentiate a Reddit ad url vs a regular link.
Reddit makes it much easier for any web traffic to follow through to ads. The issue is that Reddit doesn’t have a mature ad network infrastructure team to care about filtering traffic to better standards.
Given that only 50% are jokingly fraudulent, I’d say they’ve already done an OK job and aren’t booking an order of magnitude more of the web’s typical random traffic.
If it's all scrapers, why would somebody build a scraper that bothers to click ads? And if you wanted to scrape Reddit, why not use their public API instead?
The nasty part about this is it creates a positive feedback loop where easily-manipulated people see that "consensus" normalized and begin reproducing it elsewhere.
Not sure about ads, but I do know with Facebook likes, people who sell likes have to like a lot of organic-looking random pages to avoid being banned. Something similar could be happening here. Either that, or it’s Ad Nauseam. Edit: someone else mentioned money laundering too.
I use AdNauseam[0] which blindly clicks ads in the background on any page you visit. It may be morally wrong, but so is the amount of tracking ads do and the amount of malware that ad networks like Google let through.
One reason I've seen detected elsewhere (wish I could remember the blog post tho): adding noise and farming "human signals" to get through later tests better.
E.g. if you have a bot to click on ads to make you money, you'll be less likely to be detected if they also click other ads / have other background advertising data. Similar to how spam review accounts will also leave reviews on entirely unrelated products, both to appear more real at a glance (not just one "5 star buy now" review), and to throw off detection of "this account is obviously paid by this account".
The most common causes of false ad clicks on the web isnt fraud but unintended maliciousness. Eg. there are extensions around that 'click' and load pages or click through posts to cache contents, etc. Plenty of people write web scripts that end up looking to webservers like humans interacting with ad content.
If I'm going to see ads, I'd prefer targeted ones personally. Show me something I might want - product discover is actually hard, if an ad can show me something that solves a need/want I have that's great for me and for the company.
I'm the literal opposite. If I have to see the ads, I don't want my data harvested, stored, and shared in an effort to serve them to me. Identify the target audience of the site you're buying ads from, and identify if that is a target audience that you can appeal to. Then buy ad time.
Like TV. That way my data is safe, and I'm still exposed to your ads that are relevant to people visiting 'x' site.
I'm an immigrant, and Facebook shows me a lot of targeted ads for local companies that sell snacks from my native country. The TV constantly shows me ads for cars despite the fact that I don't even have a drivers licence.
The first one is useful for me, but the niche of people who would buy it is so small that it wouldn't make sense to target it to everyone. I hate the second ones, but the majority of people love buying cars.
You don't need your data harvested. Youtube could serve Sandvik ads beside This Old Tony videos just based on the content being served without knowing anything about the viewer
The ad is targeted by showing you a relevant ad on a relevant site. Looking at a hiking site, they'll have boot ads, looking at vacuum cleaner reviews, there are obviously going to be vacuum cleaner ads. Advertisers collecting every single personal detail they can so they can show you the boots you already bought months ago on an unrelated topic just makes the world a worse place.
Have you ever had that experience though? For me targeted ads just show me things I've already bought. "Great google, yep, last month I was reading midi controller reviews, and I bought one last month. " Amazon does the same thing after I've bought something from them. Just bought a printer? Amazon's gonna email me shit about other printers I might like for a week, not accessories that go with the machine I purchased, just other printers. So not only am I not really comfortable with tracking, I don't think the experience justifies it.
I'm of the opposite view: If I'm going to see ads, I'd rather they be irrelevant. That way I at least have a little more assurance that my privacy was not violated in order to produce them. I don't care what the content of the ad is, because I will not buy a product from an ad, so a non-privacy-violating ad that I ignore is strictly better to me than a privacy-violating ad that I also ignore.
I think the average (non-technical) person would agree.
I know a lot of very non-technical people, some of who dislike facebook in general, talk about how good facebook is at showing them ads that actually get them to discover and buy new products.
The people I've heard this sentiment from don't feel like they were manipulated into buying something that ultimately didn't meet expectations. I commonly hear things like "I can't believe how good the Facebook ads are. I only see ads for really nice Blouses in colors and sizes that I like. I've bought nice things via Facebook ads".
Granted, it's usually followed up by "I can't believe Facebook is able to be that good at showing me the right ads" ... but people I've talked to seem to feel neutral about the creepiness of it, I'm guessing because the upside is they get to discover and buy cool new things that they otherwise wouldn't have known about.
(Personally I don't like ad targeting on the basis of companies abusing / selling / harvesting data about me... but for the average person I think seeing well targeted ads is positive UX compared with showing non-targeted ads)
My non technical friends and family do not like targets ads. Anytime they see specific ads for a store the just visited (online or brick-and-mortar) they think the microphones are on and being used. There’s a difference of an ad for a generic pet product you may like vs an ad for the exact product you viewed on another site. They do not understand how two completely different sites share their information. They do not like when they do a google search for an illness, view a webmd page, and then see ads for their illness on the phone apps.
During my time at Apple one of the big things they impressed on new hires is that there are things we can do with technology, that may even be beneficial to the user, but will be perceived as creepy. For instance, Starbucks could use facial recognition to greet you by your name at a location you’ve never been to. They could have already started your drink with a high probability it is what you order based on time and weather. But these things are “creepy” to much of the population and should be avoided. Ad networks do not care because their customer is not the end-user.
This sounded good to me on paper, so years ago I turned ad personalization back on for a while. At the time I was checking Pebble's site on a daily basis because they had short-term sales not announced anywhere.
AdSense then proceeded to push just that one "Pebble Smartwatch" ad on me, everywhere. Even a page with multiple ad blocks just had several of them -- sometimes all of them -- the same text ad for Pebble. It became more annoying than helpful because I was already going to buy one, it just tried to push me to buy it for a higher price.
I turned ad personalization off again and now any ads I get are mostly just related to the current page's content.
Targeting as it is currently done collects an insane amount of data which is an ever-growing liability which will inevitably blow up when that data leaks or becomes resold/misused.
I think there's a world of difference between saying that targeted advertising as it is done now is unacceptable, and saying that targeted advertising is fundamentally unacceptable.
The first one I'm actually sympathetic to. The second I vehemently disagree with.
To be fair, Cambridge Analytica was just betting on idiots willingly granting access to their Facebook accounts and the data they ended up gathering was these people's social graph and had nothing to do with ad targeting.
Why can't ads simply be targeted based on the content of the page or type of website?
Show ads related to programming on /r/programming, ads for cars on /r/cars, and ads for antidepressants on r/wallstreetbets
You would still see yacht ads on the site for Yachting Magazine. What you wouldn't see is hemorrhoid ads targeted to you because you searched for hemorrhoid cream three days ago on a different computer.
Many of the comments in this thread are talking past each other, by ignoring one side or the other of the cost/benefit balance. It's pointless to shout "But it has benefits, leave it the way it is!" and "But it has costs, eliminate the entire industry!" without engaging with the opposing value set.
I don't think that anyone would disagree with you that true product discovery - educating you about a thing you didn't know about that solves a problem you have - is a benefit of good advertising. Lots of advertising isn't about product discovery, for sure, it's about persuading you to buy a thing you don't want and reminding you about a product you already know about and building an image about the product, and many people want to get off the hedonistic, materialistic treadmill that such persuasion pulls towards, but let's ignore that for now and assume that targeted ads lead to a benefit to the consumer of improved product discovery.
However, I don't think this is a very big benefit, in the real world. I can count maybe 3 things that I've bought in the past year or so where product discovery was important to me, where I was genuinely surprised that the solution was that easy and available. Heck, one was such a big benefit, I'll share: I changed the faucet hardware in my bathroom vanity, but instead of laying on my back and trying to turn the nuts by hand or squeeze in a pair of channel-locks between the sink and the wall, this time I got a targeted ad in my Amazon search results for the faucet advertising a basin wrench, which I didn't know was a thing. That's genuine product discovery, it saved me a little discomfort and a little time, and cost $6. I like the basin wrench, but if targeted ads didn't exist and I could pay a third party to provide me with the same advice I get from targeted ads, I'd value the service at maybe $2/year.
Targeted ads, especially as they're currently implemented, do have a cost to you as a consumer. It's largely invisible to non-technical users, but they do have a significant cost to your privacy. They cost computing cycles and battery life. They cost control of your devices, of your software, and of the websites you browse. Personally, those are pretty significant costs to me. And worst of all, IMO, they have a huge cost in mental fatigue, clamoring for my attention, because for every targeted ad that matches the "has this problem/wants to solve it with this product" combination there are 10,000 that fail one or the other condition. I value these costs pretty high, I bought an SBC just to run PiHole, I pay for Netflix so my TV is ad-free, I buy songs on my phone and wear noise-cancelling headphones in the shop at work so I don't have to listen to the incessant f*ing radio ads. Ugh. And there's little chance I can do anything about the billboards on my commute, though those are contextually targeted to my area rather than invasively targeted. I've probably spent hundreds of dollars avoiding ads, if I could pay someone hundreds more to make the entire industry disappear from my perception I would do so in a heartbeat.
That said, it's not possible to put a number on either the cost or the benefit that's true for everyone. Personally, I feel that those advocating targeted ads generally underestimate how much data is being collected, overestimate the benefits of product discovery, and underestimate the benefits available from alternative, less consumer-costly mechanisms for targeting, like content/context-based targeting.
How many dollars per year do you think the benefits of product discovery, as provided by non-GPDR, non-CCPA, no-holds-barred targeted advertising is worth to you? What price would you put on its costs?
Warning to not install this extension if you use google ads in any capacity (work/blog/other), it will get your account banned from google very quick for clickfraud.
Similarly, if you work in a bank, I recommend not spontaneously shouting about the evils of capital while lighting the til on fire.
The entire point of the extension is to attack the incentive mechanism that makes ad networks work. This tends to mix poorly with trying to turn a profit from those same networks.
It's where you're effectively banned without being told about it. You can still use the service, but any action you take is isolated from the rest of the site. The term I think comes from reddit but the concept is by no means unique to them: your upvotes or downvotes wouldn't affect rankings and nobody would ever see your submissions or comments other than you. The idea is to let spammers or fraudsters waste their energies on accounts that have already been flagged, instead of notifying them that they've been banned so they switch to a clean account.
That is a stupid idea and will get your accounts and IP banned from Google and Cloudflare. Use it yourself if you want, do not encourage others to use it.
It is based off uBlock Origin. Just use uBlock Origin.
Because Google calculates clicks as results, people are encouraged to click the ads, meaning news sites earn more money if clicks increase, and the advertiser has to pay more money to Google if clicks increase.
Ad fraud is when you scheme to get clicks on your own site to defraud the ad network that would pay you for the space you sold them. It is not relevant here unless you're using the extension on your own site.
I'll challenge your claim that it's a stupid idea, if you really want to speak carefully about it together. Your prescription to not prescribe using it requires some justification.
The best way to use the tool is to have it click between rarely and sometimes. Anti-tracking tools may allow you to dial it up as well.
> The best way to use the tool is to have it click between rarely and sometimes
What you don't realize is most of the users are dumb and set it to maximum click through rate, because they think it is some form of achievement. Going against the advertising mafia, fooling Google, etc.
To load the ads you need to click on, it has to contact the adserver. If it contacts the adserver, what's the point of an adblocker?
Also, faking stuff (here, you are faking your interests by clicking random ads) for privacy reasons is good in only very few situations. The best way to remain private is to not give any info at all, instead of faking it. Faking stuff should be the secondary choice.
Hello. My name is [[h0p3]], and [[I aim|IA2DYJ]] to be a friend and an ally. I have looked through your history, and I can see it is my honor to meet you. Thank you for agreeing to speak with me. I admire your fervor and candor, nomad, and I can see that we have quite a bit in common (for example, I despise AMP with a passion, and you seem passionate about the topic too). I'm probably not as skilled with [[computers|Computing]] and prescription as you are, so go easy on me. Of course, I'm making it easier on myself by waiting too. Time has passed, and there are fewer people watching. The pressures are lower here now. Let us wrestle in dialectics openly and wisely together. We can also take our discussion off-site if you would be more comfortable.
> What you don't realize...
Hrm. Most people require more time and effort to figure out what I don't realize, including on this matter. I [[hope]] that we will one day know each [[other]] much better.
Your thesis is that using AdNauseam (presumably any use) is stupid and (because it?) will get one's accounts banned with Google and Cloudflare. You have not defended this claim (or these claims, if you meant them as disconnected propositions).
There are cases in which using AdNauseam is not stupid, and it is not inevitable that using it will get your accounts banned with these corporations. I'll agree (from practice) that its use can cause service problems for some people, but even that can be remedied (at least for now).
> most of the users are dumb and set it to maximum click through rate, because they think it is some form of achievement. Going against the advertising mafia, fooling Google, etc.
I don't see why I should think most current users behave in that fashion, but perhaps you have evidence you can show me (I've not looked). I'll agree that most prospective users are ignorant, though that doesn't mean they have to be: they have a choice. Surely you would agree: just because someone can use a tool in a stupid way doesn't mean any use of the tool is stupid. Encouraging people to understand and use their tools wisely seems reasonable. There is a path on which this tool can be used and developed wisely. Even if all it did was bring attention and experience to the problems in this sphere, it might be worth using in ways that we might otherwise deem "incorrect."
Should we discuss the merits of monkey-wrenching digital advertisement industries? Are you claiming this tool doesn't present a problem for Google's business model? Let me grant that this is an arms race, one that our adversaries are winning, and one that they will likely win. There is something to be achieved here though, and this tool does achieve something, however small. I will also agree there are much bigger fish to fry than this in the political problem of the continued centralization [[power]].
> To load the ads you need to click on, it has to contact the adserver. If it contacts the adserver, what's the point of an adblocker?
There are number of reasons one might use an adblocker, right?
Performance is one such reason. On my [[phone|monster-14]]'s 4G connection, my throughput is so slow that I can feel the difference between having ads and not. At home, I have a strong internet connection and a sufficiently fast [[computer|monster-16]] such that I often can't feel a sufficient difference. I use adblockers on both, but it sometimes serves an extra purpose on my phone.
We can consider [[privacy]] to be another reason, and an extremely complex one, no doubt.
I also consider the advertising industry to be immoral, but even if it weren't, I find ads (and an internet driven by ads) slow down my ability to find what is [[salient]]. Depending on what you mean, perhaps you and I will need to discuss the concept and practical concerns of "adfraud." Adblocking simplifies and improves the experience of acquiring knowledge and building relationships with [[others]] over digital mediums, and it enables us to take back some semblance of control of our [[political autonomy|Justice]].
An adblocker that still contacted the adserver (which will perhaps ultimately have to be done to bypass restrictions in this arms race) but eliminated the display of the content in my browser is still incredibly useful to me in a large number of contexts. Of course, our attention spans are at stake. Let us consider the spectacle together wisely.
> Also, faking stuff (here, you are faking your interests by clicking random ads) for privacy reasons is good in only very few situations. The best way to remain private is to not give any info at all, instead of faking it. Faking stuff should be the secondary choice.
I'll agree that adding polluting noise, in some cases, may disrupt their ability to model us to some [[dok]]. Attacking ad companies effectively enough may also provide some disincentives for them to attempt to model our private lives (though I think that is limited). It may be worth it even if it only raised the cost of online advertising. Among many methods, [[ML|Aispondence]] may eventually make this untenable, and the overwhelming effectiveness of fingerprinting is exceptionally problematic. Thus, I will also agree that this not the most important user-rights tool, not by a long shot! It still costs them something though. There are privacy trade-offs to be had here, and this is a low-hanging fruit method. Even in steganography, where part of privacy (or even anonymity) may require masquerading as a normal-looking user, we'd want to have some imitation clicks. My suggestion is that AdNauseam is barely even an alpha concept. There is still an arms race to consider here.
Continued use and development of AdNauseam doesn't have to be stupid.
> Hello. My name is [[h0p3]], and [[I aim|IA2DYJ]] to be a friend and an ally. I have looked through your history, and I can see it is my ...
I'm curious. Is it just your way of mocking me? Just wanted to know.
> You have not defended this claim
I do not have any proof of account banning, but I have been completely blocked by Google recaptcha when adnauseam is installed because I looked like a bot. I have been blocked twice.
> There are number of reasons one might use an adblocker, right?
Every reason (mobile data consumption, privacy, and page speed) can be achieved through uBlock origin. The only 'feature' adnauseam has over uBO is the automatic clicking.
> just because someone can use a tool in a stupid way doesn't mean any use of the tool is stupid
The problem is not that people can use this in a stupid way. People are using this in a stupid way. They set it to full click through rate and feel proud of standing up against the advertising mafia and are like 'Oh look at me, I'm faking my interests. I'm fooling Google and Facebook!!! So clever!'
> I'm curious. Is it just your way of mocking me? Just wanted to know.
No. I'm not mocking you. I am correcting you though (on a number of issues at this point). While I'm putting on a clinic here, I'm not trying to have fun at your expense. I'm quite serious. Your argument is not sound, and I'm trying to help you fix it (and your discourse), homie. Please pay attention.
If you really are curious and want to know: https://philosopher.life/ - I thought you might be inspired to think about my history given both how I thought about yours (and looking through your history, I see you've failed to learn from promoting your thesis more than once) and because you incorrectly presumed you knew what I didn't recognize (surely you will take the opportunity to gain perspective and context in coming to understand who you are speaking with). In any case, even this conversation will be finding its way into my wiki.
> I do not have any proof of account banning, but I have been completely blocked by Google recaptcha when adnauseam is installed because I looked like a bot. I have been blocked twice.
Okay, you'll agree you are retracting one of your original claims then, right? (Normally, it's polite to concede where you've lost in the argument. That's part of arguing in [[good]] [[faith]].)
> Every reason (mobile data consumption, privacy, and page speed) can be achieved through uBlock origin. The only 'feature' adnauseam has over uBO is the automatic clicking.
Obviously, I argued that the automatic clicking is a reason to use it in at least some cases. uBlock Origin does not cover every use case for dealing with ads.
You forgot to mention one of the primary reasons I gave: it prevents the display of ads. Now, look at the exact words you wrote in your argument: "If it contacts the adserver, what's the point of an adblocker?" So, are you agreeing that your counterpoint is nullified here, right? I demonstrated to you that there is still a reasonable point to using an adblocker that still contacts an adserver. That's at least two claims you've trotted out that turned out to be unjustified.
Don't you think a little humility on your part is in order here, my friend? Consider the possibility that you are wrong, please. We all make mistakes.
Also, since you continue to utter falsehoods as though they count as support for your thesis: that isn't the only additional feature that AdNauseam provides, but I'll agree it is far and away the primary one. Moreover, you have yet to demonstrate that the feature is conceptually and always stupid: the burden of proof is on you here. I've already given you the counterexample.
Lastly, don't get me wrong: I'm a huge fan of uBlock Origin. When in doubt, that is what I recommend. There are people to whom I recommend AdNauseam though. There's a time and a place for the tool.
> The problem is not that people can use this in a stupid way. People are using this in a stupid way. They set it to full click through rate and feel proud of standing up against the advertising mafia and are like 'Oh look at me, I'm faking my interests. I'm fooling Google and Facebook!!! So clever!'
Hrm. Look at your logic again. Here's a substitution to show you why the argument doesn't have the validity you hope:
"The problem is not that people can use [a motorized vehicle] in a stupid way. People //are// using [motorized vehicles] in a stupid way." Note how my counterpoint clarifies how just because some people use a tool, be it a motorized vehicle or AdNauseam, in a way that is stupid doesn't mean that all uses of the tool are stupid. Using a motorized vehicle is not stupid in at least some cases, and the same is true of AdNauseam. Your thesis is overcommitted (try stating it differently).
Perhaps you might try to argue about how the average use of the tool is harmful, but you've not given that argument either. I'm prepared to take you to task there too, of course.
Note that you're ignoring multiple arguments I've made here. C'mon dude, do your due diligence, go ahead and walk through it line by line, charitably, please (just like I did for you). You might find your argument is substantially weaker when you actually try to address what I've said instead of sweeping it under the rug and repeating yourself.
Let us assume for the sake of argument that using "full click through rate" is stupid (and, problematically, you've not established even that, and I've already given you a reason that it isn't necessarily stupid). There is at least one person who doesn't use the "full click through rate" for the sake of costing advertisers money, and this counts as a non-stupid and non-trivially valuable function that uBlock Origin does not provide (note that this wasn't the only reason I gave for the value of false clickthroughs). Thus, even if I granted that "full click through rate" use was stupid (and I obviously didn't), your thesis does not stand. There is a counterexample.
You continue to offer an ad hominem attack on a strawmanned user, as though they represent all possible users and uses of this tool. Preference falsification is a weak aspect of the tool, and you're ignoring the strength of it. Have the integrity to look at the other reasons I've shown you, please. You might still want to argue that the reasons I've given you are stupid, but you've conveniently ignored addressing them instead. So far, at best, your argument is really against some users of the tool rather than the tool itself.
Note, also, how using the tool stupidly (or even just ignorantly) to some degree does not imply it's stupid to use the tool. You need to provide a reason for us to think the former implies the latter, and you haven't. It feels like you've had more trouble with the tool than most people (maybe you should take other people's anecdotal evidence into account if you expect them to take yours into account).
You may find it useful to at least attempt to reason out loud about how AdNauseam may function as both a protester's tool and a proof-of-concept educational object.
This is awesome. I thought about exactly doing that at one point, since I block most ads, although I do it via /etc/hosts instead of AdBlock, so that makes it a little harder.
I also have custom CSS/JS rules to block those infuriating chat box popups on various websites and thought it might be fun to not only block them but also run a chat bot on them in the background for every chat box that pops up unsolicited. Waste their time and maybe they will learn very quickly that unsolicited chat popups are the most annoying UX ever.
(To be clear, I love chat UIs for customer support -- but not unsolicited "Can I help you?" sales chat boxes that pop up and cover part of the screen before you have even had a chance to understand the product.)
You see, the main reason I block ads isn't because I disagree with advertising. Advertising itself is fine.
I block ads because:
- They are often bloated with CPU-intensive JavaScript that makes my web experience less than smooth. I demand that scrolling and other UI actions be imperceptibly fast, and 90% of the time I find it's ads that are the culprit in making them perceptibly slow.
- They are often loaded with tracking and fingerprinting spyware. I blocked Facebook ads as soon as they started showing me stuff that I had searched for on eBay and Amazon. Like, WTF. Big nope. I was fine with the ads, but not that level of tracking and sharing user data across companies.
As such, I block ads in protest of the above. But if I establish a mechanism that clicks the ads in the background, they don't have to know whether it is me or a robot that clicked them -- as far as they are concerned my residence is a black box, and there are some intelligent beings inside this black box that click the ads, some of those intelligent beings are made of silicon and some are made of carbon, and they don't need to know the chemistry of what being caused the click. At some point in the far future of civilization and humanity, I expect biological chemistry to be abstracted out, and laws in place to not discriminate on the chemistry of a being, and economies will have to be rebuilt around that assumption. I'm just living that future now, and as far as the big companies are concerned, they can start thinking about new monetization models now that better align the collective incentives of my blacxbox with theirs.
Traditional ads don't influence my purchasing behavior much either. I'm not their typical consumer. So it wouldn't have made a difference. My purchasing decisions are based more on a combination of first principles and friend/coworker recommendations.
Now there's the issue of how ads might drive revenue, and that's how the internet is kept free. Sure. But I think there are other ways to drive that than the current iteration of ads. Social-media-ify it, gamify it, make it fun, and I'll actually want to interact with the ads. Make me have to play a game to get a $1 Starbucks discount, and I might play -- and go to Starbucks! You see, carbon-based lifeforms love coffee, and love games, so the possibility of a discount on that might actually make me want to play the game.
But none of this tracking-spyware-CPU-bloat-while-I'm-trying-to-do-something-else please. Plain <a href="foo"><img src="blah"></a>, no megabyte-sized images, and no cross-site sharing of user data? If they can agree to that, I'll stop blocking.
You are replying to someone who depends on ads for money. Hard to get someone to understand something when their paycheck depends on it and all that, he's all over the thread crying but not actually refuting any points of the comments he replies to (such as yours).
Do you also use other services and then impose your will on how payment will be made? Maybe grocery stores would be better if they worked on subscription. Do you also think it would be justifiable to run out the door with all the shit you want then mail a check later?
Nope. Those are physical goods. They hand me an avocado in return for $1.50. Actual ownership of that avocado is fully transferred at that cost.
How my system renders code, or renders a webpage, and which instructions it chooses to run or not run, are upto me, as the owner of the system. Nobody else has the right to control over my hardware. They can only make suggestions, but the final decision about which lines of code are allowed to run are mine. No transfer of ownership occurs.
Nobody is trying to control your hardware, you agreed to receiving ads as a part of the terms of service, and then willfully violated those terms.
To use a non-physical example, how is this any different than signing an agreement with a lawyer to give you legal advice, receiving said legal advice, and then refusing to pay?
> you agreed to receiving ads as a part of the terms of service
No, for 95% of the sites I read, I don't need to accept any terms of service. Hell, even the ones I do, often don't mention anything about ad blocking. I can't see anything directly prohibiting ad blocking here on the Facebook ToS, for example:
> how is this any different than signing an agreement with a lawyer
ToS and a contract with a lawyer are very different things. It is not generally a crime to violate a ToS, but rather, merely a breech of agreement, and they can refuse service in return. If I violate a ToS, they can block me from using the site, and that's about the most they can do, unless I intentionally harmed the company (e.g. hacked other user data or compromised their servers).
(In the particular case of Facebook, it would also probably not be in their interest to block me, because I post a lot of original content to the platform that causes other users to spend more time on Facebook, and my presence on the platform is highly likely a net positive for them cash-wise.)
Is your viewpoint on the morality of agreements that it is morally justifiable to break those which are not legally enforceable, but not morally justifiable to break those which are? Or to state it a different way, the law defines morality.
I think law and morality are two totally separate concepts.
I operate by morality, but my risk tolerance is bound by legality. For example, for any human rights issue X, will I speak out for X in a place that has free speech but not yet legalized X? Absolutely. Will I speak out for X in a place that I might get a $100 fine? Probably. Will I speak out for X in a place that I might get jailed or beheaded? Probably not.
In this case though I don't consider it immoral to violate certain ToS terms, especially when they track and sell user data and don't offer a clear opt-in/out option to that, and perhaps even doubly on the sites that I actively contribute useful content to the platform in good faith, and the legal risk is extremely low.
If you're goal is to get the pages, that you value enough to view, to move to some other way to get money from your use of their service (which I assume you think should be free), then there's no downside.
As others have said, any service doing fraud prevention might ban you. It doesn't seem to be happening yet, but that could change any time it got popular and they would be pretty justified doing it.
I know you're being obtuse, but the fraud is that someone is paying for you to look at those ads. You're under no obligation to actually do it, of course, and the site is under no obligation to let you use it, hence the ban.
Advertising manager here - The real problem is that not enough companies pay attention to the results they are getting from their ad campaigns. Most big companies just dump money into a lot of different campaigns without putting in place strict measurement procedures.
So this puts the ethical ad seller at a major disadvantage. Currently you have companies spending tens of millions of dollars on digital ads each quarter and only looking ad metrics like cost per click or cost per impression.
So they are judging the effectiveness of the ad campaign on metrics the ad seller provides. They are not putting in place effective checks and balances.
Why you ask? Because if the huge companies buying ads wanted to actually measure everything it would be extremely time consuming and expensive. It is a lot easier to pretend the problem doesn’t exist and just go with the flow.
So small companies with small budgets are actually a lot better at measuring results in most cases. Also online only businesses are a lot better at it. Measuring the offline impact of online ads is very hard.
But the bulk of ad dollars are spent by huge companies with huge bureaucracies. So game theory says you need to capture those dollars to win.
Source – I’ve been doing digital marketing for the last 12 years at a variety of companies.
What ads? I block them all, at home, at work, and do the same for friends and family. The only ads I see are the half second ads during my DVR playbook, and then skip. I pay for the Internet, for email, for the software I use. I'm not suffering through ads. One project I'm working on is sorting out how to get the Pi-hole to block YouTube ads 100%. I don't see them on my Linux latops because of Nano Adblock, but my kids see them on their iPads. For some reason no one (yet) seems to be able to sort out how to block ad content on YouTube 100%. There has to be a way.
Does it really matter if they are fraudulent? Most advertisers measure (and are willing to pay for) conversions, not clicks. So even if there are lots of fake clicks, the number of purchases wouldn't change.
If advertisers have to pay for more than their conversion rates justify they will stop advertising on reddit which forces reddit to solve the fake clicks problem.
Many ads are not clicked on by a real person, but a bot, or someone clicking ads as fast as possible because it is their job.
Many comments would be considered "fraudulent" in the same sense, in that they were not authored by a real person, but a bot, or someone writing comments as fast as possible because it is their job.
I'm pretty surprised the aws bot got through. I used to be responsible for detecting fraud for ads in the past and we had access to a blacklist that likely would include a lot of these ips. If we didn't do things like this, advertisers would actually stop working with us.
Does this actually matter? If you are doing online advertising, you should be able to attribute a particular visit to a specific ad campaign, so you can calculate your conversion rate. If Reddit has lots of bots, it just means your conversion rate for those ads will be lower, and you can adjust your spending accordingly. There are a lot of things that can significantly affect clicks other than fraudulent clicks (popups people click on by accident, small "close" buttons, mobile vs desktop, etc.), so I think evaluating your success based on just clicks is going to be pretty useless regardless.
The point the poster was making is that they were paying money for clicks that had no chance of generating any conversion - and that it's Reddit's responsibility to detect those and not charge for them. So they're not complaining about lower conversion rate, but lower bang for their buck.
I don't see how they can be sure based on their criteria that those are fraudulent clicks. They could be web crawlers, users with various ad blocking tech, and so on. Going straight to fraud is premature.
I’m getting the same ad on the reddit app over and over again for what feels like a year, and it’s so bad I would never even think of clicking on it.
Now that I write this, I notice that’s actually true for most ads I see because they would require a pihole and I haven’t gotten around to setting one up.
It really feels like the ad business is inherently flawed these days. Who clicks on ads? How many of those are going through with a purchase? There is just way too many and poorly created ads for any brand to stand out from all that garbage people get shoved in their face all day.
Average person in developed countries spend hours on online media daily. I see that as a worrying trend. 6-7 hours for Americans so that would be a huge chunk of your life.
I wonder if people don't have time to buy other things to spend their day on due to social media being so addictive.
This is less of a problem for pay-for-action type ads.
If you send X number of people to your site with Y conversions, it doesn't really matter that 'bots don't buy' - because the $Z spent on ads for Y conversions is the metric used.
It's much more of a problem for impressions or for ads without directly measured value.
It's one of the reasons Google makes so much money, the spend is generally optimized for the return, not for 'how many visitors are fake'.
>I've compared this method to Twitter (6% click fraud) and Google (-26% click fraud, received more legitimate clicks than I was charged), so Reddit is definitely doing something different.
The suggestion "Don't charge the same IP address more than once in a certain time period (e.g. 24 hours)" is clearly broken. For people at work in larger companies, there can be thousands of users that all appear to have the same IP address. You can only charge once per day for all of them?
As the reddit posting points out, there are plenty of other ways to determine that a click is fake (no css or images loaded, etc).
I may or may not have participated in click fraud in 1997 with DoubleClick by forging source IP headers and going through a proxy ... that I may or may not have been running. I can only imagine how much more sophisticated click fraud has become today. Even if you raise that bar, I suspect a vast % of clicks are probably fraud anyway.
Someone mentioned timeslots witch might not be a too bad idea. Then you would have to meassure traffic independently via eg. some panel or something. It is probably less easy to game. It would also kill spam sites since the panel would not stay on those very long.
Yea you'd surely be surprised. Our marketing department started using clickguard 6 months ago and we were simply shocked to discover how much of our budget was being wasted on Google ads.
Exactly.. I was just thinking about making an adblocker that loads the actual ads in a fake environment, it could really simulate the ad industry to look for other ways because it costs them too much money.
Agreed. Premium is fine. On another note, I dislike the coins and award system because it reminds me of gacha. They provide you free award to make you open the app every week or two and encourage you to buy and award more through various shady methods. Counters, notifications that don't exist, subs you are not subscribed to getting thrown in your feed, etc.
There’s one particular YouTube pre-roll ad I’ve seen maybe dozens of times. I literally cannot recall anything about the ad, other than I’m sick of seeing it. I’ve totally tuned it out at this point. But if they wanna waste their money advertising to me, be my guest
90% of the ads I click on are when I Google a brand name and the top ad result is their page. I try to scroll down and click on the top result to avoid them having to pay but I often forget or move too fast.
Yeah fat fingers aside I just don't get how internet advertising is effective and even marketable. It has no effect on me. I avoid it entirely, even without add blocking. I often wonder if this is a bubble that will pop.
Assuming this isn't Reddit, but just a bunch of users with AdNauseum installed, what do you expect them to do? Present a captcha before letting a user click through an ad?
Spitballing here, so excuse me if this is a horrendous idea:
The reason we have aggressive web advertising is because the web has no revenue model to pay website owners for their content costs. So I’ve wondered if the web would be better off with a Spotify-like model, where ISPs pay web hosts per page view (or how long time is spent on a page). If websites want to be eligible to receive these payments, they’d have to commit to having no ads, or at least very unobtrusive ads without any tracking. And line Spotify, consumers would continue to pay a flat rate, regardless of how many pages they visit (within their data cap)
I think the major web players are far too mature and entrenched to make such a major shift in the web’s revenue model. But if this had been implemented decades earlier, it might’ve had a shot at success.
Maybe nothing. If it's a valuable service, a small subscription or micro transaction. If Noone is willing to pay for it, even the site owner themselves, maybe it doesn't actually need to be around. I think alot of labor of love sites would remain.
>what do you expect them to do? Present a captcha before letting a user click through an ad?
Maybe not the kind where you need to solve puzzles explicitly, but a few months back I noticed they were running recaptcha enterprise on every page, presumably for anti-bot/fraud purposes. This would be consistent with the hn story a few months back which found that reddit was fingerprinting users through a company called "whiteops", also for anti-bot/fraud purposes.
Well don't buy clicks then, i mean it s not like they are expensive. My peeve is that Reddit would be great for some specific kind of ads (cryptocurrency) but sadly they dont allow them
> Facebook lookalike audiences. Upload customer list (with attributes you want in your targeted demographic) and have Facebook create a lookalike audience for it. Incredibly precise
What the fuck? Facebook allows people to do these things?
Not just Facebook. As an ex-Hubspot employee this was a feature people cared about (email list uploading/processing). HS would generally try to scan the list and make sure it wasn't a huge pile of spam recipients but I'm not sure how many others in the CRM space take that extra step.
I believe this is almost table stakes for an ad platform these days. Marketers expect ever-more precise targeting to get better CPCs/CPAs/ROAS. This is especially true as an ad platform becomes more popular and CPMs naturally rise due to increased competition in the auction. When a company like FB/GOOG innovates in the ad targeting/measurement space every company will follow suit because their customers (advertisers) are going to ask for it. I believe market forces will continue to drive innovation in ads targeting until someone steps in and draws a line in the sand (eg regulation via the governement).
Common sense fixes:
- Never allow dynamic ad content! Ads should be individually approved by publishers and not subject to change after approval.
- Ban user tracking and targeting. It's a red queen's race and no one benefits. Everyone is better off once it's illegal.
- Pay for ad time slots, not user impressions. Instead of selling by CPM, publishers should say "independent analyst X says we have traffic Y on an average Sunday. You can buy placement for next Sunday for $Z." This is how all offline ads are sold, and it's much healthier for everyone than CPM. It essentially kills the motivation for the Reddit fraud discussed here.
- Use anti-trust to prevent link aggregators from being advertisers. This is a bigger issue, but putting ads on the aggregators creates perverse incentives to promote bad content and not actually pay for it. Why would you pay to put an ad on publisher A which may or may not have traffic when you can put the ad on aggregator B which will definitely have traffic? The problem is this means A cannot pay writers and the whole system breaks down.