Hacker News Reader

Years ago our company was running an ad campaign on social media. Curious on the results I spent time looking into a randomly selected pool of the “users” that had been clicking on our ads. It quickly became clear that at least half (if not a lot more) of the clicks were from what appeared to be fake users or bots. We shut the whole ad spend there off immediately.

View on HN

I sometimes when an advertisement annoys me, I punish it clicking on it, clicking around on the website, maybe adding items to the cart or going through half of the click funnel, and then I close the tab and never come back.

It's great.

You could automate this with a script running at certain intervals.

Some will throw you a captcha sometimes, but not all and not always early enough.

I did not abuse this, I have observed this when developing a scraper.

Test headless before deploying was my most valuable take away.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com