Hacker News Reader

Comment by toss1 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if there is a way to poison the system. E.g., flood it with accounts that look very attractive to bidders so they pay a lot for adverts that never pay anything.

I'm fine with context-based adverts based on and next to the content I'm reading, and have actually found some good products & services that way. But the tracking is not ok in any form (and from what I've read, basically doesn't work and is also defrauding the advertisers), so anything to destroy that model would be a net benefit to society.

View on HN

The only real solution is an ad blocker. I worked at an ad tech company. We all ran ad blockers. The hypocrisy is through the roof.

This is the best solution because it severely negatively affects the ecosystem.

Publishers make less, so they crank up the ad density for the remaining users. That increases user resentment and suppresses the per-ad cost, enabling much crappier ads to run on the website. That also increases user resentment and suppresses the per-ad cost, and the glorious cycle continues.

Wouldn't something like AdNauseam be better? Even if the anti-abuse mechanisms successfully detect it, it would still consume resources, which seems better than simply blocking the ads? Plus if your IP/browser fingerprint gets blacklisted you may end up in a situation where you get banned from further ads and may not even need as much blocking/etc as advertisers preemptively block you?

Run it if you want. But if you run AdNauseam, people are still getting paid. The publisher, the ad network, the ad agency.

The advertiser is getting screwed, but the other parties will work really hard to explain it away to them. "You're getting great engagement with the creative -- you clearly just need to improve the landing page experience."

For me, my balance is that I'll run an ad blocker and whitelist sites that (a) create original content and (b) don't abuse me as a viewer.

While I love the idea, I decided against AdNauseam because I was worried about Google AI labeling my account and/or IP as perpetrator of click fraud and banning my (or others') personal or work accounts in retaliation. It's not something I ever want to deal with or have to explain to someone else.

> The only real solution is an ad blocker. I worked at an ad tech company. We all ran ad blockers. The hypocrisy is through the roof.

I used to run a website that made money off of ads, and specifically ran an adblocker to avoid being banned by Google for mistakenly clicking on my own ads. Worked so well that I just left it on everywhere else.

Yup, already doing that (FFox, NoScript, it's a bit of a pain to maintain on a new install, but seems pretty effective).

I was thinking of something like the Blue Frog anti-spam system that automated complaints to get people taken off the system. I know they generated so much heat that they became retaliation & DDOS targets and shut down, but it seems something along the lines of automating complaints & defensive actions might have a role...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com