Ask HN: Do you click on ads as a donation? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do you click on ads as a donation?

5 pointsishener11 comments

Sometimes I find myself clicking on ads on a site or a blog as a way to show my appreciation.

Am I the only one? Is this a widespread phenomena so that I can attribute clicks on my own site to this?

No. Bearing in mind that a lot of very smart people invest a lot of time studying analytics and refining algorithms to detect spurious clicks, I don't imagine that such "well-intentioned" clicking is ever going to be more than a trivial portion of the sites' income.

At the point numbers of "donor" clicks start becoming non-trivial, the site owners start getting their publisher accounts banned, so I'm working on the assumption they probably don't want me to do it.

I've read before that this can actually be harmful for the person whom you're trying to help. The article was in reference to a pirated android app. The author noticed some crazy amounts of ad traffic from one of his apps. Evidently, the pirates were using this as a method of compensating for stealing the app. As it turns out, since the conversion rate was so low (a lot of clicks and no purchases) his ad revenue became basically zero dollars. So, they stole the app and made the only other revenue stream worthless.

I never click on adverts. I usually don't see them anyway as I always use Adblock Plus.

I do too sometimes. For similar reasons.

I realised I can look at it this way after I put AdWords on my website and I was warned by Google that I am now allowed to encourage visitors in any way to click on my ads.

Sometimes I do. Sometimes I am tempted to click on the especially annoying ads (e.g. tricks to a flat stomach), just to cost the advertiser money.

Why don't you create a poll?

I don't have enough karma... almost...

Yes. I do. When they give me what I've been looking for I would click on one banner.

I don't.

no, I don't.

Ido

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