Why is Google still serving dodgy ads?

Google wants the advertizers' money, who are really being scammed by Google if they pay every time Google serves an ad to me that Google presumably knows is not going to result in a purchase. I guess Google don't care - if they get paid for click-thrus and I occasionally do that, but never buy, then Google still gets their money.

It takes basically nothing to reliably identify these videos. They're extremely heavily promoted with ads running on other videos. Google does nothing with them when reported. Google does not proactively remove them. And because, contrary to the documentation, youtube doesn't pull the verified flag from a channel when its name is changed, these scams go out on channels that look like official sources for the celebrities in them (they steal some random verified channel then change its name to SpaceX (official) or Microstrategy or whatever).

Google even got sued unsuccessfully by Woz and some of the scam victims-- and their response was pound the "S230 is an absolute shield for externally provided material" table and continue to do nothing about the fraud except rake in money from pedaling it. They haven't even fixed the verified flag issue.

(Shades of the same conduct were seen in the old viacom v. youtube case, -- users were reporting copyright infringements so they took away the button.)

I have sympathy for the S230 shield and consider it very important-- but the law is the absolute worst we're allowed to be. They are free to do better (and the CDA shield was designed to assure they can moderate without picking up liability).

Google's conduct is irresponsible, unethical, and may well cost us this important legal protection because if society's choice is liability for hosts OR the biggest and wealthiest companies do nothing while raking in money from even the most flagrant scams we're going to eventually choose liability with dire consequences for free speech.

It's especially ironic that the smaller sites and forums (like HN) would be hit especially hard by a narrowing of S230, but these forms reliably work hard to remove the worse abuse-- and are seldom the source of anything that truly offends the senses at least not for long. Companies like google that don't are ones that are so wealthy and powerful that they're almost intractable to litigate against even without S230 like protection. Loss of it would hurt them gravely but it would hurt everyone smaller more.

And I suspect (would love some real data from scammy advertisers) that this is a bigger factor than most folks appreciate.

If you're a regular business that sells clothes or food or SaaS or insurance or whatever, online ads are a) not your whole customer acquisition system (you have regular marketing, word of mouth, maybe sales people, maybe brick-and-mortar brand presence, physical advertising, etc.) and b) not part of your expense sheet that you want to spend tons of time on.

The "b)" there leads companies to either overspend on stupid (but unlikely to be flagged) ads, or to try to keep their ad spend as low as possible for the highest reward, because they think of it like opex. After all, they have all the normal expenses of a normal business to worry about in addition to ad spend. Sure, there are outliers here who spend almost all their non-product money on online ads, but not most ordinary companies from Verizon to Dave's Local Auto Insurance to Safeway.

So "good"/ordinary advertisers aren't generating super high flag rates, but they're probably either a) spending lots of money without churn/support-needs risk or b) aren't spending that much ... compared to scam-ads-only businesses. Sure, google would prefer more upstanding customers in category "a)", but they're a near-monopoly and some of that growth is expensive to chase, while the scammers are beating a path to their door.

If you're a scam-ad business that produces malware or LLM-written gacha games or whatever, your product expenses are minimal and, if your business is lucrative, you can spend very large amounts of your balance sheet on ads for scam delivery channels. Tiny businesses in this area are likely to have whale-sized ad spends and a strong likelihood of growth (vertical as they get bigger/greedier, or horizontal as they keep spinning up new businesses to keep ahead of the law and bad press). I bet they punch above their weight ad-spend-wise, in other words.

You thought the unit economics of a SaaS business were good? Well, wait until you see the unit economics of a Play Store whitelabeled gacha game app with a credential stealer inside!

It's not magic because it relies on the "fuel" of cool water to evaporate.