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Ad Fraud on LinkedIn

samueljscott.com

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Re: Ad Fraud on LinkedIn

#261

Post by jazzyjackson »

rurp wrote: post #155
dylan604 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's face it Shell and Raytheon have much much larger ad buying budget than probably any/all of your actual interests combined. If Shell/Raytheon/types target the same audience as smaller vendors with smaller ad buys, then they will always lose the auction. If someone has a $500/month budget, they will lose to someone with a $5000 budget. This is why I think these "targeted" ad pushers are the actual fraud. Other me…

If this is the case then why does LI even have the "I find this ad annoying or not interesting". I thought the whole point of that option was to counteract a company that the user is explicitly not interested in from winning the ad auction. If the option doesn't work than that seems like an issue on the part of LI, either dishonesty (pretending it does something when it doesn't) or incompetence. Given the company we'…

Perhaps we can find a reason in the article "Why the world is full of buttons that don't work"[0]:

"They're sometimes called "placebo buttons" -- buttons that are mechanically sound and can be pushed, but provide no functionality. Like placebo pills, however, these buttons may still serve a purpose, according to Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychologist who pioneered a concept known as the "illusion of control." "They do have a psychological effect," she said in a phone interview. "Taking some action leads people to feel a sense of control over a situation, and that feels good, rather than just being a passive bystander."

[0] https://www.cnn.com/style/article/placebo-buttons-design/ind...

Re: Ad Fraud on LinkedIn

#262

Post by jazzyjackson »

rapnie wrote: post #78
chrisseaton wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Having selected "I find this ad annoying or not interesting" numerous times without any effect. What is this algorithm behind that thinking? Just because you're not interested in hearing it doesn't mean advertisers don't want to try to tell you anyway.

Or LI tells these advertisers "my my do I have this large interesting target group based on your criteria" which was a bit inflated. Who knows.

Would be hilarious is their marketing reports counted "hide this ad" as "interactions"

Re: Ad Fraud on LinkedIn

#263

Post by jazzyjackson »

jd115 wrote: post #107

The biggest mystery for me is why so many people believe so strongly in Facebook Ads. I have never gotten ANYTHING other than bot traffic from FB, or anything above 0% conversion, after repeatedly (mis-)spending thousands on FB ads. I must really be going all backwards about it, or something. (P.S. this is for content that otherwise gets a very healthy conversion rate from organic traffic)

All I get are ads for cheap consumer products off alibaba, some even having the audacity to claim they are made in USA, when I could do a reverse image search from their shopify page to the alibaba post.

I read all the happy comments wondering how many were bots. I comment about finding the product on alibaba and my comment is swiftly removed and the option to comment is no longer on the post. So much for freedom of speech, zuck.

Re: Ad Fraud on LinkedIn

#264

Post by RoadieRoller »

tgb wrote: post #217
HEHENE wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CapOne offers that for their credit cards, but it's so clunky and unintuitive that I still wind up using Privacy 90% of the time.

I have a Capital One card and wanted to use that feature. As far as I could tell, the only way to use it was to install their "assistant" browser extension and give it permission to view everything you do. Then if you were on a merchant site it could suggest you use a new card number for it. I considered toggling the assistant on and off just as needed but instead said nope. Was there another way to do it?

You can give selective access[0] to the extensions in Chrome. The restrictive access is that it will get access to the webpage only when you click the extension. Read under "Let extensions read and change site data"

[0] https://support.google.com/chrome_webstore/answer/2664769?p=...

Re: Ad Fraud on LinkedIn

#265

Post by sailfast »

fakedang wrote: post #242
sailfast wrote: post #176

My profile is on LinkedIn because I feel like I’ll miss opportunities if I’m not on there. I’d love to remove it and go somewhere that doesn’t do this. Are there any non-terrible, more purely motivated sites for an individual to post their background and what they’re looking for so folks can view them?

Personal websites?

Certainly, but it doesn’t have the same effect of having you searchable in a general database for recruiters. I don’t need to share network updates but I do want to be able to look for jobs and have someone be able to offer interesting opportunities.

Ideally these connections are all personal anyway and you get poached because somebody knows you, but it’s nice to stay tapped into that virtually as well.

Re: Ad Fraud on LinkedIn

#266

Post by behringer »

quineoa wrote: post #222
Scoundreller wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sometimes it's just priced in. Agreed. The real losers are the genuine content creators, as the adcash isn’t flowing to them. They can’t just average it out.

Yep. Got banned from Google ad mob because the ads I bought using other Google services gave me traffic that was deemed to be fraud. Of course there’s no way to contact and tell Google that Google gave me fraud traffic and got me banned from Google.

Don't worry. Some rando at Google is bound to see this message or the next one!

Re: Ad Fraud on LinkedIn

#267

Post by kimi »

josefrichter wrote: post #30

LinkedIn is the weirdest product ever. Everybody is there, nobody is using it for anything. Except shady recruiters.

I think Linkedin is quite useless as a social network - their business model selling your contacts to "digital strategists" who try to contact you. Most of the content is marketing spam, and nobody uses it.

Still, when we happen to recruit, we get like 10-20 decent applicants (of which 5 were pretty good) for $250 o so.

Re: Ad Fraud on LinkedIn

#268

Post by kimi »

jd115 wrote: post #107

The biggest mystery for me is why so many people believe so strongly in Facebook Ads. I have never gotten ANYTHING other than bot traffic from FB, or anything above 0% conversion, after repeatedly (mis-)spending thousands on FB ads. I must really be going all backwards about it, or something. (P.S. this is for content that otherwise gets a very healthy conversion rate from organic traffic)

My experience with FB ads stopped when they were estimating our target of interest as being 50% male and 50% female, with a large interested population living in Libya.

Re: Ad Fraud on LinkedIn

#269

Post by funman7 »

picodguyo wrote: post #111

I observed the same with Google's "Smart" display ads. I ran a campaign for a couple of weeks and watched all of the traffic with HotJar. The first fishy thing was 99.9% of the traffic came from foreign countries despite the target being US/Canada. When I saw the targeting wasn't effective, I even set up specific geographic exclusions for every country != US/Canada and still the traffic was from mostly underdeveloped…

Who would be paying the person or bot in this scenario. Surely LinkedIn wouldn’t be directly paying for that I wonder what is funding all this.

Re: Ad Fraud on LinkedIn

#270

Post by dang »

rdslw wrote: post #56

I dont agree with bowdlerization happening on Hacker News, wrt legitimate titles. This is effectively censorship @dang (I'm addressing it to you because you speak most often here, and set the tone, not because you personally did it. ) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expurgation I do understand that having less clickbaity _content_ is noble goal (and reason we read HN), but let US do our job in giving upvotes to good to…

The problem is that a title on HN's front page doesn't just represent what the author believes. It also represents what "HN" believes, to some extent.

Of course, HN doesn't exist as a person and doesn't believe anything at all, but that doesn't matter, because people receive those titles as if it does. So there are multiple ways that a title can be misleading and we have to balance them.

Upvotes alone don't solve this. On the contrary: indignation routinely gets the most upvotes. It doesn't matter whether it's true or not—people just upvote angry shit more than they upvote anything else. If we don't want the front page to be all-angry and mostly-false all day, then moderators have to intervene. Is that censorship? That's up to you—people use that word to mean whatever sort of intervention they don't like.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

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