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Comment by 55555 | Hacker News Reader

Is your goal primarily to waste the budget of advertisers, many of whom are small businesses? Because you would be increasing the revenue and profit of ad networks.

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Yes, because then advertisers will reduce their ad spend.

Spend less by spending more?

Yes but not to the degree that the ad network will make less money in total. If you understand how advertisers optimize their campaigns and think it through you'll come to this conclusion. Performance-based marketers will reduce bids until they asymptote at the real value of the traffic. But other marketers with bad stats will just keep spending, and performance-based marketers launching new campaigns will need to run run-of-network until they've blacklisted the crappy placements. In the end, the ad network will make more money and advertisers will lose money.

This is just one of a billion issues with a simple implementation of this idea. Another issue is that merely clicking ads without adequately spoofing your fingerprint will just get you ignored by the smarter networks... I could go on and on but don't have time atm

This all sounds good to me. Punishing ad industry would be the best, but punishing dumb advertisers and punishing dumb ad networks also sound great.

Punishing the people who buy ads is a far more effective strategy that gets to the heart of the issue.

Also, just as effective.

ad spend (as percentage of gdp) has remained constant for more than 100 years

https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-BVIsd8mMLFM/Wk7XXTQvWEI/AAAAAAAAI...

I'm not sure I agree with OP, but you could at least skip clicking on the simple text ads that average joes use to try and get customers. Perhaps start with a list of approved ad "blocks" to click on.

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