Hacker News Reader

Comment by siegecraft | Hacker News Reader

Were there really enough people using this to cause such an impact?

If someone creates a plugin with the stated goal of screwing up your clients' analytics to discourage them from paying you, do you really wait for it to work before you remove it from your platform?

I don't know, but I certainly wouldn't want to be a favorite site of even one AdNauseum user. Adsense is very sensitive to stuff like this, especially in higher CPC niches.

Why not? On the short term, you get more income from ad revenue. Who knows what the effect on the long term is going to be.

You would be banned - very fast. You would never actually receive the money since Adsense pays out on a two month delay. They are very good at identifying this type of activity and the webmaster is the one that pays the price.

Well, if that’s true, within of months, half of websites will have to search for a new ad network, and we might get a chance at less intrusive ads.

... Or, more likely, they will switch to an ad network with more obnoxious, or dangerous ads. Google, Microsoft, and their ilk are a fair bit better as ad networks then some of the less scrupulous players.

Yes, the large networks occasionally serve dangerous ads. But by far and large, they have better standards then most of the fly-by-night ad networks.

Or, even more likely, they’ll actually switch to direct negotiations with the advertisers themselves, through more open and manual brokering platforms.

This model works for buying advertising space on ESPN, or in a print magazine, but not on the internet. Economies of scale, need for targeting, the inability to force unskippable 5-minute-long streams of ads on users...

There's a reason why everybody uses ad networks.

I’ve done all this myself before – even when running a small Let’s Play site with a few friends we negotiated with publishers directly for advertising, and managed to get quite good deals.

I’m not sure why you think this is so complicated or impossible.

I've been using it for a few months and more recently took to installing it on public computers and telling anyone who would listen to use it. Just put it on my Mom's computer a day ago. I alone had it on a dozen machines or so.

There is one more now. I completely forgot to install this until I saw this story this morning.

Yeah after hearing about all of this I'm now a new happy adnauseam user! :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com