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Comment by anonymous5133 | Hacker News Reader

If google moves forward with this we should all start randomly clicking on ads until advertisers start to realize that they're basically throwing their money away on advertising that doesn't work :) Let's hit 'em where it hurts.

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Yes, let's beat Google by giving them more money by increasing the overall advertising hit rate in an organic, nearly untraceable fashion. Wait, what was the logic of that again?

It pits advertisers with deep pockets against Google's deep pockets, without the need to have deep pockets yourself.

From my experience, many advertisers do so little QA, they'll hardly notice that their conversion rate dips a little. And if they do, they'll look for problems elsewhere: Google is never wrong.

Someone just posted this to HN: AdNauseam[0]. It appears to describe what you say.

[0] https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam

There are people who click on random ads professionally, and Google has been fighting them for a long time. Whatever equilibrium has been reached is probably stable. The best thing to do is block ads and to do our best to stay off the grid - the only thing that no statistician can work with is the absence of data.

They can absolutely work with the absence of data, because you are still doing other things around the web that generates data. They will see you doing other interactions but not ad requests, and they can figure things out from that.

That's why uBlock Origin also blocks trackers, third party embeds, and of course, ads.

It would be I interesting to make this into an extension.

That said it probably wouldn't change marketing budgets, just what people pay CPC/CPM etc to offset the percentage of users doing this.

The AdNauseam extension [1] does exactly that, and Google really didn't like it (banned it from the Chrome extension store [2]).

1. https://adnauseam.io/ 2. https://adnauseam.io/free-adnauseam.html

If advertisers haven't realized that yet, they aren't going to wake up now.

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