Reading all the comments, it seems quite bleak to advertise. How do indies and SMBs reach audience these days then?
The standard advice I've always read: Get active in the niche for your app/game, be it a subreddit, a discord, tiktok or whatever.
I spent $220 on Google app ads and 60% of the installs were robots
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Re: I spent $220 on Google app ads and 60% of the installs were robots
#272When you are talking to your VC, they are just "installs"
Calling up a bot farm owner pre-pitch is "partnership"
Re: I spent $220 on Google app ads and 60% of the installs were robots
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can offer them a free anything, really. It's a pretty convenient way to pay, that mostly doesn't affect the user at all (unless their connection is very slow), but generates value.
"value"
Yes, it does. Just because the value is for someone else and not you, that doesn't make it any less real.
Re: I spent $220 on Google app ads and 60% of the installs were robots
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would suspect that entities affected don't have money for a lawsuit.
Are most Americans not able to fight an international tech conglomerate at the drop of a hat?
Even a failed lawsuit has the potential to cost the company a lot more money than it costs you.
If it's small claims court the company has to pay a lawyer hourly to attend as their representative, while you just have to show up and pay the small court fee.
If it's big claims court, well, you always have the option to represent yourself, and then you'll probably lose, but at least you won't have spent much money.
Re: I spent $220 on Google app ads and 60% of the installs were robots
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
Add Reddit Ads to that, all the alleged clicks not one comment or conversion. I get my app is probably bad but you'd expect at least one comment out of 100 "clicks" to say something.
I have a theory that there are far fewer genuine users on Reddit at this point than you'd expect.
I'm fairly certain it's true.
Here on YC News, even a minor comment a few lines long might get at least one or two upvotes (or downvotes). I'll get a reply about 50% of the time.
On Reddit there are posts with apparent huge volumes of "user interaction": thousands of comments, thousands of upvotes per top comment, etc... but if I comment on one of those posts... nothing. Zero up or down votes, zero replies, just... silence.
I'm learning to recognise these posts now, and they're the majority of the "front page" volume. The only posts where I'll get any interaction now is the really niche ones like the hobbyist ones or "owners of specific gadgets" and the like.
Re: I spent $220 on Google app ads and 60% of the installs were robots
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t use YouTube at all but I can still answer - Because $16 will become $20, $30, $50 … and then they will begin to show ads again anyway.
You won't pay for something because of inflation? How do you survive, since everything's affected by inflation? Ever buy gasoline for a car or a transit pass? rent? food? What else can't you pay for because they price will go up in the future?
Inflation helped me kick my junk food and fast food habits. I still buy groceries of course but when prices rise, luxuries are almost always the first items to go.
Re: I spent $220 on Google app ads and 60% of the installs were robots
#277I've been in go to market for the better part of 20 years now (anyone remember the DigitalOcean youtube ads of the 2012-2014 era?), paid online advertising has basically gone to shit, it started about 6 years ago, but over the past 3-4 years outside of linkedin it's effectively pointless, over 55% of Americans run ad blockers now and around 40% globally - on top of that, what you do get it mostly just... bots. In January I was helping a friend with some of his GTM efforts, we ran $10k over 3 weeks on meta, google, linkedin and X. On Meta, google and X the sub 1 second bounce rate was around 0.7% and hotjar+raw server logs registered zero activity on 99% of the inbound from those platforms, this was to a multitude of ICP specific landing pages with highly targeted ads AND relatively general targeting to the homepage. LinkedIn does still work, but it has gotten extremely expensive.
Re: I spent $220 on Google app ads and 60% of the installs were robots
#278I've been in go to market for the better part of 20 years now (anyone remember the DigitalOcean youtube ads of the 2012-2014 era?), paid online advertising has basically gone to shit, it started about 6 years ago, but over the past 3-4 years outside of linkedin it's effectively pointless, over 55% of Americans run ad blockers now and around 40% globally - on top of that, what you do get it mostly just... bots. In Jan…
I always like to link an AdContrarian post https://adcontrarian.blogspot.com/2021/01/the-inescapable-lo...
Re: I spent $220 on Google app ads and 60% of the installs were robots
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same thing happened to us. We were large enough to have an admob rep who reached out to the IVT team for help. After our first appeal was rejected, our rep negotiated a second appeal attempt but he said “This time make sure you take full responsibility for the IVT getting through. Funny part to me was Google was the only network bidding on these bots while others must have detected something and stayed out. We submit…
Why would you ever ever ever on record "take full responsibility" for something you did not actually do? If a person does that, then that's dumb. But a company? Don't you have like a legal department or similar telling you to not ever confess to something you did in fact not do?
I doubt there were any damages — they were already refusing to pay us any payments we were owed.
Re: I spent $220 on Google app ads and 60% of the installs were robots
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
I keep hearing it too. The bit I don't yet understand is, wouldn't it be in Google's interest to not do this? They ban on both sides of the market for seemingly no reason. Wouldn't maximizing all legitimate participation be much better? Also seems a lot more possible to do now with AI to check all campaigns, landing pages, etc.
I imagine it's a side-effect of another fraud prevention effort. In my experience ad fraud on a google search ad is at least 17% of traffic, and potentially a lot more. Whilst I don't doubt that Google invest heavily in fraud prevention, they're not actually succeeding.
Without the fraud prevention, it would be 99.9998%. Pushing it to 17% is impressive, even if not sufficient