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Comment by detaro | Hacker News Reader

Surprised it took this long. These things are incredibly jarring and low-quality, and actively try to redirect users away from the publishers sites into a rabbithole of even more links.

If they supposedly pay so well, I wonder where the money for that comes from. Just high ad-density?

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Ultimately the money comes from a mark further down the line. For example some poor sucker desperate to fix their health problem spends hundreds on a flakey high margin product, be it physical or digital.

Sure there are legit ads too but I'd guess the greyhat stuff will give higher EPC.

Google ads takes the long term view and doesn't tolerate shit like that. They are very strict and would rather not take that money and destroy their brand. Result? People still use Google to search for stuff.

"Google ads takes the long term view and doesn't tolerate shit like that. They are very strict and would rather not take that money and destroy their brand. Result? People still use Google to search for stuff."

Are you sure? I've seen loads and loads of some of the trashiest ads through Google's ad network.

And at least Google iAds give you the tiny little logo in the corner for you to click so you can report the ad that tries very hard to look like a download button :(

Only they never seem to quite get it:

Google: here is x dating site,

Me: click, mark as irrelevant.

Google: here is y dating site

Me: irrelevant

Google: z dating site?

Me: nope

Google: lets try an ad for x dating site again then

Me: actually, you got my mail, all my searches for the last 10 years and still you cannot find anything more relevant for a happily married sw engineer?

Unless happily married SW engineers with your search history whom mark dating sites as irrelevant are great for dating site conversions.

You can change the google settings to specifically give you ads about topics you like

https://www.google.com/settings/ads

Ah, the "Choose your Vaselin flavor" option.

Been there, done that.

Somehow Google think dating sites fall under auto repair, gardening, computer hardware or software or a few other categories I am actually interested in.

Or more likely IMO: they don't care.

I bet they're using you to try and find differentiating factors between the different dating sites. You've already told them that you're willing to provide useful information about dating sites -- now they're just extracting as much info as possible.

They're extracting right till the moment they aren't - ever again.

I think they just have a weak pool of ads to serve. I routinely mark Twitter ads as of no interest to me, and still get virtually nothing I would ever have interest in.

The problem with that button is that whenever the ad slips past through an adblocker people like myself will click it regardless of what the ad is showing and report it.

People definitely still use Google to search for stuff!

The ad content is designed to look as though it is part of the source website, so claims made appear to be those of the originating site. Outbrain seems to be the web's answer to native content marketing.

Unfortunately NYT, Huffpo, Wapo don't realize by putting these on their legitimate articles they're allowing these third parties to siphon away some of their credibility.

This - they're bought programmatically. The buyer submits metadata (headline, URL, image, etc) to a bidding exchange and they're formatted to look like they're part of the relevant site on the fly.

>If they supposedly pay so well, I wonder where the money for that comes from. Just high ad-density?

Probably because ad-networks pay per click, and if you have something SO clickbaity like these ads there's a lot of ad clicks. For example if google ads and Outbrain both pay $7 per thousand clicks (I have never used either so this is just a random number) and google ads bring in 1000 clicks while outbrain brings in 3000, you're making 3 times as much money.

Some ad networks pay per click, some pay per thousand impressions. The numbers I've seen tend to be several dollars per thousand impressions, or a significant fraction of a dollar to several dollars per click.

Random blog post I just found talking about rates: https://www.hochmanconsultants.com/cost-of-ppc-advertising/

From someone I know who advertised on Outbrain, he said the CTR was way higher on Outbrain than it was on AdWords...so while we may all sit here and talk about how crappy those ads are for general use, they do in fact drive traffic.

That doesn't surprise me at all. Hell, I've clicked on them before and I could tell exactly what they were. I'd imagine that the average user probably clicks on them significantly more than they click on any other type of ad.

It is mostly just an arbitrage, the site advertising their click bait content just needs to get more money from the numerous ads on their page than they spent on the outbrain click.

Doesn't surprise me at all. Every time I've clicked on one it's been because I've been under the impression it's another story on the Independent or whoever. Of course those clicks generated 100% bounce rate.

That's because they aren't immediately recognizable as ads. More deception, in this case leading to a site with a lot more deception.

Ad networks need to die, and about 70% of news organizations also need to die. Then I think we'll be in a good market balance to where journalism can actually be profitable again.

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