Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

YouTube doesn't want to take down scam ads

old.reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 375 posts

Re: YouTube doesn't want to take down scam ads

#101

Post by hotpotamus »

segphault wrote: post #32

I routinely see ads for fake medical treatments that they refuse to take these down when I report them despite the fact that the ads obviously violate Google's policies. So many of the ads on YouTube are for things that are obviously sketchy that when I see a new product I'm not familiar with for the first time in YouTube ad I just assume it is a scam. It's crazy because YouTube has probably more information about th…

I literally saw an ad that was telling me than an average penis is too small to please my partner. I watched just long enough to confirm that was the message because I could not believe it was that blatant, so I assume the pitch coming was some sort of penis enlargement scam, but I just couldn't watch farther. I don't have any real insecurity in that area, but I can imagine that in my younger days it could have been effective, and I imagine that it can be extremely effective on many men.

Google has come quite a long way from "don't be evil".

Re: YouTube doesn't want to take down scam ads

#102

Post by fallingknife »

ForkMeOnTinder wrote: post #71
passwordoops wrote: post #5

They're all like that. A whole back I reported an obvious real estate scam using Wayne Gretzky and some Blue Jays player (I'm in Canada). The reply was it didn't break any policy. When ads are the primary source of revenue, there's zero incentive to police the platform

It's even worse: the incentive is to police the creators, not the advertisers. Youtube will bend over backwards for advertisers whose "brand safety" team doesn't want their product to appear next to a swear word, and demonetize/strike/etc those creators. But the ad content itself isn't policed nearly as relentlessly.

In the Youtube economic model the advertisers are the customer and the creators are the vendors (the viewer is the product), so that actually makes sense and isn't really any different from any other business. The customer is king, and if a vendor pisses off a customer, that vendor is gone.

Re: YouTube doesn't want to take down scam ads

#103

Post by I_Am_Nous »

AlexandrB wrote: post #48
segphault wrote: post #32

I routinely see ads for fake medical treatments that they refuse to take these down when I report them despite the fact that the ads obviously violate Google's policies. So many of the ads on YouTube are for things that are obviously sketchy that when I see a new product I'm not familiar with for the first time in YouTube ad I just assume it is a scam. It's crazy because YouTube has probably more information about th…

> They have a ton of high-intent purchasing signal for reputable products, and instead they are showing me ads for trash. This shouldn't be surprising. Ad placement is based on who pays to be placed in front of certain audiences. It doesn't matter if you're really into hi-fi amplifiers if no hi-fi company placed ads for that audience segment or if the hi-fi companies were outspent by boner pill salesmen. Google is no…

All the more reason for me to block ads. If relevance were the optimizing metric, I might see ads for things I'm truly interested in, but if YouTube is only showing me the highest paying ads and it doesn't care how relevant those ads are to me, they are just noise I need to ignore or block.

Especially when they are mostly scams and trash paying to be in front of my eyeballs. I have no desire or obligation to be propagandized, tricked, or misled by bad ads just so I can watch a video I actually am interested in.

Re: YouTube doesn't want to take down scam ads

#104

Post by cool_dude85 »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #70
cool_dude85 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth, I've noticed a proliferation of scam ads on the radio over the past few years. Go to this website and get free cash now kind of stuff.

Where? In Europe I haven't heard any scams on radio.

In the US, Florida specifically.

Re: YouTube doesn't want to take down scam ads

#105

Post by dylan604 »

delecti wrote: post #54
segphault wrote: post #32

I routinely see ads for fake medical treatments that they refuse to take these down when I report them despite the fact that the ads obviously violate Google's policies. So many of the ads on YouTube are for things that are obviously sketchy that when I see a new product I'm not familiar with for the first time in YouTube ad I just assume it is a scam. It's crazy because YouTube has probably more information about th…

> despite the fact that the ads obviously violate Google's policies There's no contradiction here. Google's policies exist primarily in service of keeping their platforms safe for advertisers. The ads aren't placed on other ads though, so there's no reason for them to stress much about maintaining the same quality in their ads as the content being monetized. As for targeting, they're just optimizing for CPM. If adver…

Your ad could follow another ad which might be scammy. If the concerns about an ad appearing next to controversial content that they do not want to be associated with is legit, then why would that not be a concern for following scammy ads as well?

Re: YouTube doesn't want to take down scam ads

#106

Post by berkes »

GaryNumanVevo wrote: post #64

Twitter actually has some of the best ad oversight, almost entirely by accident too. Community Notes (formerly Birdwatch) lets users flag tweets that are misleading. Since Ads on Twitter are just normal tweets, they can be fact checked. Twitter's average ad quality has plummeted recently, but most of the scam ads I see have a massive user-added disclaimer outlining how it's a scam. I wonder how this affects the click…

> but most of the scam ads I see

So it doesn't work. If it worked, you'd see no, or very little, scam ads.

Re: YouTube doesn't want to take down scam ads

#107

Post by [deleted] »

RajT88 wrote: post #99
toomuchtodo wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I had Facebook money, I'd use Peertube to create a clone of Youtube with the Internet Archive as the storage backend of last resort ($2/GB for perpetual storage). Trust and Safety team to keep the stuff out that could cause you to lose your safe harbor. Cloudflare for new, high demand content, serve from the datacenter long tail. Plug into ActivityPub, Wordpress, Mastodon, etc. Not quite Wikipedia for video, but s…

You probably could do that just with MySpace money.

[deleted]

Re: YouTube doesn't want to take down scam ads

#108

Post by varelse »

ForkMeOnTinder wrote: post #71
passwordoops wrote: post #5

They're all like that. A whole back I reported an obvious real estate scam using Wayne Gretzky and some Blue Jays player (I'm in Canada). The reply was it didn't break any policy. When ads are the primary source of revenue, there's zero incentive to police the platform

It's even worse: the incentive is to police the creators, not the advertisers. Youtube will bend over backwards for advertisers whose "brand safety" team doesn't want their product to appear next to a swear word, and demonetize/strike/etc those creators. But the ad content itself isn't policed nearly as relentlessly.

[dead]

Re: YouTube doesn't want to take down scam ads

#109

Post by InsomniacL »

bluGill wrote: post #35
passwordoops wrote: post #5

They're all like that. A whole back I reported an obvious real estate scam using Wayne Gretzky and some Blue Jays player (I'm in Canada). The reply was it didn't break any policy. When ads are the primary source of revenue, there's zero incentive to police the platform

There is incentive, but they don't realize it. I know that online ads are often enough scams, so I won't buy anything from those ads. I do have to take effort to ensure that they don't effect me anyway (hint from basic psychology: they do, but I can make that effect less). If they did some work to ensure ads were not scams - I've seen ads for a number of interesting things that I intentionally did not buy because odd…

> I know that online ads are often enough scams, so I won't buy anything from those ads.

I'm exactly the same. I will try to go directly to websites instead of clicking on adds from search results to avoid the PPC charge too.

Re: YouTube doesn't want to take down scam ads

#110

Post by berkes »

kosolam wrote: post #85

Facebook and YouTube are the worst. They should be trialed in class action suite as collaborators in all the scams they advertise on their platforms. I’m speaking of paid ads only.

I could easily imagine that a platform can be fined for any harm a scam did between being reported by anyone and them taking it down.

Maybe not with current regulation, maybe not in the US. But in other places: why not?

I report a scam, ads continues being shown is now a risk assessment to be taken by the platform. Though, now that I think of it, the first thing these platforms will do is to make reporting even harder.

Post reply on HN