“35-50% of clicks on Reddit Ads are fraudulent”
reddit.com
reddit.com
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.
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.
We should instead be using user metrics to evaluate and punish ads that lead to pages users regret navigating to.
> "Never allow dynamic ad content! Ads should be individually approved by publishers and not subject to change after approval."
What's so awful about TV ads? I'd be fine with seeing more "mainstream" ads if the tradeoff was no targeting/tracking.
Aunt Mae's cookie shop will never be able to compete with Pepsi for airtime
It still can’t compete with CPM
Getting 100 or 1000 impressions vs millions of impression is not really competing for air time.
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.
Surely there’s a better way.
No one has ever had a favorite internet banner ad.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
- location of ip address
- article/page the ad is placed on
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.
This would still remove the incentive for fake clicks.
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?
(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 …
That is in fact what advertisers know. It’s the aggregators that know who you are, not the advertisers.
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.
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.
No reason timeslots can't be sold in the minutes, seconds, or even miliseconds on high traffic sites. Five figures assumes a long timeslot.
You could even do "every 100th impression during the timeslot" or so on without doing anything that would offend the user you are replying to.
Just seems like a less transparent way of doing the same thing.
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.
Maybe they should find a better business model, then.
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?
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.
I think Stitcher does this as well.
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.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/8/21056336/spotify-streaming...
> Spotify Podcast Ads offer the intimacy and quality of traditional podcast ads with the precision and transparency of modern-day digital marketing
Yeah, that's what I like about online targeted advertising. The transparency.
- 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.
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!
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.
However, you are using a Google-Analytics script????
Nothing wrong with that Buuuuttt.... uhm, yeah.
That said, we do use the Anonymize IP setting and have all of the demographic / interest settings turned off for Google Analytics.
We basically whittled 3rd party stuff down to GA and a Google font, so while not 100% perfect, I am pretty happy with the strides we have made.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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)?
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?
We underestimate the value small businesses get from the current ad market. It’s partly because of this value that ad fraud is rampant.
Enabling small businesses to advertise to cheap also makes it cheap for fraudulent advertisers to commit ad fraud.
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.
[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.
How do you know if Facebook or pinterest is better ROI for your marketing budget?
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.
Can you elaborate on this?
I would rather live in this kind of internet.
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?
Its just terribly done by pretty much any metric.
They had ~2mbit fixed wireless (w00t), but when I installed Adblock and dialed up their CRT to 85hz from 60, they didn’t even notice anything changed.
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.
Every time it feels like a bait and switch.
It's just a bit too much. You need to have a rooted android.
I did it when they increased the ads to one ad every 2-3 posts.
This is the whole reason they do so much tracking and analysis, to suss out the idiots who'll just buy whatever is shoved in front of them.
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!
Don’t show ad-network ads.
In the very beginning - say, circa 1995 when I was building my first websites - I would click on almost every banner ad I saw.
I wanted to send a signal to advertisers, and to the market in general, that there really were people out there.
I was trying to do my part to care for, and feed, the infant industry I was taking part in.
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.
He did end up hiring me for a tiny bit of website work after that, paid like $200. My first ever paid tech gig.
Advertising delenda est.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not that they need to change, i like the simplicty of their ads
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"
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.
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.
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.
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).
We are considering driving some traffic into very basic sites. We dont really intent to monetize, so cheap trashy visitors are ok
Doing God's own work there, I see ...
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.
Ad buyers will pay half as much for double the traffic when half of the traffic is bots.
Every ad links to alb.reddit.com . Every post links to *.reddit.com .
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".
Like TV. That way my data is safe, and I'm still exposed to your ads that are relevant to people visiting 'x' site.
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.
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)
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.
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.
The first one I'm actually sympathetic to. The second I vehemently disagree with.
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?
Online advertising is a giant scam.
i don't know how many people actually install this extension, but it is specifically designed to clicks ads so you don't have to :)
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 is based off uBlock Origin. Just use uBlock Origin.
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.
So unless you have some proof to prove your point, I'm going to assume you're making this up
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.)
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.
Are there any downsides to using this?
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/decentraleyes...
Just look it up - it's basically a cloud-based pi-hole and it's wonderful.
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.
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.
I was advertising officially licensed Minecraft merch (cardboard steve heads, foam pickaxes) and it did extremely well in MC / Gaming subreddits.
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 not in advertising though so I have no idea.
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.
I wonder if people don't have time to buy other things to spend their day on due to social media being so addictive.
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'.
Though it's a problem.
>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.
https://old.reddit.com/r/adops/comments/ikskpp/3550_of_click...
I know it could be improved with better targeting, but by default it should not give you 100% fake clicks.
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 think mostly people just want the service but dont want to pay for it in any way.
I'd get in touch with my state AG's office as well as the FBI.
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.
What the fuck? Facebook allows people to do these things?