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AdNauseam Banned from the Google Web Store

adnauseam.io

161–170 of 344 posts

Re: AdNauseam Banned from the Google Web Store

#161
post #116
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea is to mess with advertisers' metrics. If people using ad blockers are peaceful protesters, AdNauseam is trying to riot.

That's like harming the Pope to get back at God. AdNauseum doesn't hurt advertising networks, it hurts publishers. When they get banned for click fraud, the network keeps the money.

and when networks have no publishers left, what do happen to them ?

Re: AdNauseam Banned from the Google Web Store

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not that I'm really surprised by Google's action, but "fraud" is a pretty strong word for what's happening, and pretty disingenuous IMO. No one's pretending to be anyone they're not.

On their FAQ page AdNauseum reproduce the following definition of click fraud to argue they're not engaging in it: The practice of ... clicking on an advertisement hosted on a website with the intention of ... draining revenue from the advertiser Elsewhere on the same page they've even gone to the extent of explaining how they calculate the average revenue they think each simulated click drains from the entities they…

The difference is that in the classical definition, the revenue is drained from the advertiser to the click fraudster. That's an obvious and prohibited motive for traditional fraud.

In AdNauseum's implementation, the revenue is drained from the advertisers to all of the sites where those ads are hosted and where AdNauseum's users browse. Neither AdNauseum nor the users browsing the sites benefit from that revenue. Instead, the advertiser's marketing budget is slightly less effective.

This changes the behavior from an intent to profit to an intent to harm. I'm certain that they could prove in court that they do not intend to profit from this activity. But I don't know whether or not the court would classify the outcome of the activity as "resistance" or "harm".

Re: AdNauseam Banned from the Google Web Store

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But this isn't a case of two different markets...Google makes no money off of Chrome. They make money off of advertising. The bottom line of Chrome is that it is just there to view advertising. The better they can make it, the more it will be used, and the more advertising will be viewed (hopefully Google's)

Microsoft wasn't making any money off of IE in 2001's US vs. Microsoft.

It was defaulting to Yahoo who was paying them. Also their browser was mandatory, not optional. You don't need to use Chrome.

I switched to FireFox long ago.

Re: AdNauseam Banned from the Google Web Store

#164
post #161
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's like harming the Pope to get back at God. AdNauseum doesn't hurt advertising networks, it hurts publishers. When they get banned for click fraud, the network keeps the money.

and when networks have no publishers left, what do happen to them ?

> no publishers left

They become the publisher. In the grand scheme, this is a misguided effort that will further monopolize publishing.

Re: AdNauseam Banned from the Google Web Store

#165
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can the Adsense distinguish whether it is AdNauseum clicking or the human clicking?

They probably can't, since it's an extension and thus uses the user's browser, IP, cookies etc (Adsense does use mouse tracking and other techniques that will likely flag these clicks as suspect, requiring additional analysis). Therein lies the problem. It appears to them as if someone is going and clicking on every ad, or is using an automated headless browser to click on ads. That can easily get you banned. Google…

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Re: AdNauseam Banned from the Google Web Store

#166
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you trying to relate clicking ads to smashing up merchandise?

Both actions are done with the stated intent of costing the target money. Sure, it only involves accessing URLs the public is actively encouraged to visit (in a manner intended to bring the system down) but so do many DDoS attacks...

A lot of things costing a company money are perfectly reasonable and we rightly complain if a company sabotages them. Things like leaving negative reviews/ratings, receiving refunds for defective products or shopping around to compare prices ultimately hurt someone's bottom line, so I think we can expect better from an analogy here.

Re: AdNauseam Banned from the Google Web Store

#167
As many have pointed out, Google could handle this in their end and avoided pissing off a small but well defined group of users/developers. My guess is that they decided it wasn't worthwhile because they have some privileged ideas about the direction web marketing will be taking in years to come. As user behavior tracking and analysis techniques become more refined, ads won't be needed as much as they are now. Instead, ads will be placed in high impact areas/sites, and the intel to decide who sees what ads will be acquired even from sites with no ads. Better UX, deeper knowledge of users, simpler monetization strategies for publishers. Sure, it will be even more invasive of privacy, but it won't _feel_ that way to most users. This will require heavier use of NLP and ML, two things Google devotes a whole lot of time and money for.

Re: AdNauseam Banned from the Google Web Store

#168
post #77

It's pretty simple: this has to be wreaking havoc with Adsense - depleting ad budgets, artificially inflating CTRs, and giving website owners revenue they didn't earn. This extension also exposes website owners to unfair Adsense bans for generating high numbers of invalid clicks, which can cost them two months of revenue that is almost always withheld when Google bans a site. So by using this you could be costing som…

How can the Adsense distinguish whether it is AdNauseum clicking or the human clicking?

The extension clicks every ad on a page. This is almost certainly extremely atypical and could be detected.

Re: AdNauseam Banned from the Google Web Store

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it is not. It is an industry term for robot initiated clicks for the purpose of profiting, that is the "FRAUD" part, just clicking random ads is not defrauding any party to the benefit of another, it just wastes resources.

Do you think it is fraud to order a pizza to be delivered to someone else's house, because you are a vegetarian and wish to destroy the business model of meat-based pizza? How about doing this to every pizza store you encounter that serves meat? You're not profiting..just wasting a business's resources by misrepresenting your identity and intentions.

Either that or tracking clicks is a terrible way of keeping track of ad effectiveness, and therefore cannot rise to the definition of fraud.

What if I had a billboard with a camera that used face recognition to determine how many people looked at that billboard. Is it fraud to put on a mask to prevent my face from being detected? Is it fraud to put a bunch of faces on a poster-board and parade it in front of the billboard to confuse it?

Websites only provide information that I then can choose to render/manipulate however I want, and what I do on my application on my end with that information is my business.

Re: AdNauseam Banned from the Google Web Store

#170
post #64

Installed AdNauseam on Firefox as soon as I heard. Never heard of this extension before, now I'll use it!

Yeah I just installed it as well and it's fun seeing all of the content that gets clicked on. Searching on Google shows at least 15 ads clicked/blocked. No wonder they hate this extension!

I heard about it before, but wasn't really motivated to check it out. Just installed it in Firefox and it seems to operate as you'd expect. This might be an opportunity for Firefox to regain some market share.
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