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“35-50% of clicks on Reddit Ads are fraudulent”

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Re: “35-50% of clicks on Reddit Ads are fraudulent”

#21

Post by Nextgrid »

unreal6 wrote: post #12
earthboundkid wrote: post #8

Every newspaper in America has obvious scam ads on its homepage. The whole online ad market is diseased and needs to be uprooted. Common sense fixes: - Never allow dynamic ad content! Ads should be individually approved by publishers and not subject to change after approval. - Ban user tracking and targeting. It's a red queen's race and no one benefits. Everyone is better off once it's illegal. - Pay for ad time slot…

> Never allow dynamic ad content To remove dynamic ad content ignores the value that can be unlocked through targeting to more specific individuals. It must be considered, especially for small businesses who may not be able to afford larger timeslots, as are being proposed here. I think it is important to remember that a huge part of this more personalized marketing approach is that it allows small companies (not the…

> To remove dynamic ad content ignores the value that can be unlocked through targeting to more specific individuals

Is that value worth it when it opens the floodgates for scams (manual review is impossible since the amount of ads is now near-infinite instead of being limited to a single ad per ad spot per period of time), misinformation (you can target your ad to only the people most likely to fall for it, while remaining completely invisible to those who might identify it as incorrect/malicious), malware or privacy violations (ad targeting involves collecting large amounts of personal data which can then leak or be misused)?

Re: “35-50% of clicks on Reddit Ads are fraudulent”

#22

Post by danpalmer »

ruined wrote: post #14
danpalmer wrote: post #7

I get the impression that Reddit's ad network is just immature. We're finding that Reddit ads perform well and are cheap, suggesting that there isn't much competition for clicks. More mature ad networks such as Google's and Facebook's are better at reducing spam clicks. Google bought a company focused on this about 10 years ago, I'm sure Facebook put similar effort in. I'm sure this is something they'll work to impro…

Reddit has been running ads for over a decade. If they are this far in and not doing basic fraud mitigation, something is wrong.

That depends on the scale though right? Reddit ads were for a long time very poor. They've become a lot more feasible for many companies in the last few years, as Reddit has also become a lot more mainstream.

Also we don't know if they are doing basic fraud mitigation. It's possible they are doing plenty of fraud mitigation, but that it's just not advanced enough.

Re: “35-50% of clicks on Reddit Ads are fraudulent”

#23

Post by sincerely »

thrownaway954 wrote: post #3

adnauseam.io i don't know how many people actually install this extension, but it is specifically designed to clicks ads so you don't have to :)

Always wondered how stuff like this/Decentraleyes etc work (or not, as the case may be) if you already have Ublock origin running.

Re: “35-50% of clicks on Reddit Ads are fraudulent”

#24

Post by ForHackernews »

shajznnckfke wrote: post #18
earthboundkid wrote: post #8

Every newspaper in America has obvious scam ads on its homepage. The whole online ad market is diseased and needs to be uprooted. Common sense fixes: - Never allow dynamic ad content! Ads should be individually approved by publishers and not subject to change after approval. - Ban user tracking and targeting. It's a red queen's race and no one benefits. Everyone is better off once it's illegal. - Pay for ad time slot…

How are you going to tell which traffic is fraud if you ban tracking?

If you're not paying for clicks, there's no such thing as "fraud" traffic -- there's just users who convert and buy your product and those who don't.

Re: “35-50% of clicks on Reddit Ads are fraudulent”

#25

Post by acoard »

unreal6 wrote: post #12
earthboundkid wrote: post #8

Every newspaper in America has obvious scam ads on its homepage. The whole online ad market is diseased and needs to be uprooted. Common sense fixes: - Never allow dynamic ad content! Ads should be individually approved by publishers and not subject to change after approval. - Ban user tracking and targeting. It's a red queen's race and no one benefits. Everyone is better off once it's illegal. - Pay for ad time slot…

> Never allow dynamic ad content To remove dynamic ad content ignores the value that can be unlocked through targeting to more specific individuals. It must be considered, especially for small businesses who may not be able to afford larger timeslots, as are being proposed here. I think it is important to remember that a huge part of this more personalized marketing approach is that it allows small companies (not the…

It seems like the main point you take issue with isn't dynamic ad content, but the next point:

>Ban user tracking and targeting.

You do bring up a good point though. Reducing dynamic ad content and user targeting reduces advertising "supply." Instead of showing 10 ads at once, you show 1 ad per timeslot.

Small businesses wouldn't have the in-house capacity to search for lower-cost ad options directly. They'd have to use brokers, eg some SaaS ad marketplace, or automated tooling to just submit to price-appropriate options. This does increase burden on small businesses. But most of all it increases burden on the companies that show ads. Now they have to hire (a team?) of people to manually review something that used to be automated.

I don't disagree with OPs point. Manual curation would lead to higher quality of ads, and probably benefit society as a whole. Just a lot of barriers.

As a counterpoint, most podcasts use this manual curation model with the hosts themsevles reading out the ads.

Re: “35-50% of clicks on Reddit Ads are fraudulent”

#26

Post by Nextgrid »

shajznnckfke wrote: post #18
earthboundkid wrote: post #8

Every newspaper in America has obvious scam ads on its homepage. The whole online ad market is diseased and needs to be uprooted. Common sense fixes: - Never allow dynamic ad content! Ads should be individually approved by publishers and not subject to change after approval. - Ban user tracking and targeting. It's a red queen's race and no one benefits. Everyone is better off once it's illegal. - Pay for ad time slot…

How are you going to tell which traffic is fraud if you ban tracking?

If the ads are billed per period of time and not per-click or per-view then "fraud" doesn't matter; all that matters is the overall ROI; if the advertiser gets more business than what it cost them to run the ad they will consider it a worthwhile investment, otherwise they will stop advertising there forcing the publisher to adjust their prices and eventually those prices will reflect the true value (as in how much ROI it brings) of the ad spot regardless of any "fraud".

Re: “35-50% of clicks on Reddit Ads are fraudulent”

#27

Post by _jal »

user5994461 wrote: post #13
thrownaway954 wrote: post #3

adnauseam.io i don't know how many people actually install this extension, but it is specifically designed to clicks ads so you don't have to :)

Warning to not install this extension if you use google ads in any capacity (work/blog/other), it will get your account banned from google very quick for clickfraud.

Well, yeah.

Similarly, if you work in a bank, I recommend not spontaneously shouting about the evils of capital while lighting the til on fire.

The entire point of the extension is to attack the incentive mechanism that makes ad networks work. This tends to mix poorly with trying to turn a profit from those same networks.

Re: “35-50% of clicks on Reddit Ads are fraudulent”

#28

Post by ceejayoz »

earthboundkid wrote: post #8

Every newspaper in America has obvious scam ads on its homepage. The whole online ad market is diseased and needs to be uprooted. Common sense fixes: - Never allow dynamic ad content! Ads should be individually approved by publishers and not subject to change after approval. - Ban user tracking and targeting. It's a red queen's race and no one benefits. Everyone is better off once it's illegal. - Pay for ad time slot…

> Every newspaper in America has obvious scam ads on its homepage.

It's genuinely baffling, given largely bad-faith "fake news" accusations, that news organizations are willing to light their credibility on fire like this. It feeds the nonsense, and justifiably so.

Re: “35-50% of clicks on Reddit Ads are fraudulent”

#30

Post by hammock »

earthboundkid wrote: post #8

Every newspaper in America has obvious scam ads on its homepage. The whole online ad market is diseased and needs to be uprooted. Common sense fixes: - Never allow dynamic ad content! Ads should be individually approved by publishers and not subject to change after approval. - Ban user tracking and targeting. It's a red queen's race and no one benefits. Everyone is better off once it's illegal. - Pay for ad time slot…

>Ban user tracking and targeting. It's a red queen's race and no one benefits

Can you elaborate on this?

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