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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”

#211

Post by rsync »

wtracy wrote: post #48
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! Ads should be individually approved by publishers and not subject to change after approval. Partially agree. Publishers should definitely be able to blacklist advertisers. However, networks like Google get thousands of ads that run for only a handful of impressions. Asking publishers to manually approve every single ad that might run is onerous. I would like to see approval required…

"However, networks like Google get thousands of ads that run for only a handful of impressions."

Yes, that is the promise of these networks - that there are exactly 8 people searching for this search string every day and I could show just those people this very targeted ad.

I wish this were the case, but unless something has changed in the last few years, it is not.

You see, google scores your ad on a "quality" metric and if your ad only rates a handful of clicks it will be disabled and can only be reenabled by paying a very onerous (20x, even 50x) premium. Even if the search terms are esoteric and not targeted by anyone other advertisers, google would rather show nothing than show your ad.

So I am afraid this dream of a niche product showing a highly targeted ad to a handful of searchers each day is actively thwarted by google.

Frankly it's no longer an issue for us - the venn diagram of "people smart enough to use rsync.net" and "people not using an adblocker" contains zero people.

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

#212

Post by proverbialbunny »

jamiequint wrote: post #192
alexggordon wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't contribute to the discussion, besides the incredibly naive viewpoint that allowing ads is the only way to support to a website.

Do you believe that people providing a service should not be able to choose how to charge for it in any other context outside of websites?

It doesn't work the way you think it does. Ads are paid for my the click. Some people never click on ads. The kinds of people who are likely to consider running an ad blocker are the same type who never click on ads regardless if they have ads or not.

The ideal situation is never advertising ad blockers, never bragging about them, never making a big deal about them, and keeping some mild barrier of entry. This way the average person who has less of a concern about ads will not run an ad blocker, and meanwhile the one who never makes money for the company to begin with doesn't have to deal with it.

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

#213

Post by dragontamer »

dylan604 wrote: post #208
shiftpgdn wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Small publishing sites are all but dead. The internet used to be a lovely village where everyone was on about the same playing field and now it's a handful of skyscrapers surrounded by slums.

i would actually consider those towering skyscrapers to be the slums, and the smaller sites to be potential hidden gems.

That's a lovely theory, but the money is in Youtube and its pretty obvious.

Nearly all the major tech reporting sites have died: TechReport, Hardware Canucks, Linux Journal, etc. etc. When you look at who can actually sustain a modern tech reporting site, its the Youtubers: Linus Tech Tips, Gamers Nexus, etc. etc.

Even then: when the tech reporting sites were around, they were mostly on Google Adsense. The others are on Facebook Ads.

----------

The sites that are making it possible for small-style discussion to thrive again are new "networks" like Patreon. A lesser evil for sure, but a "Skyscraper" nonetheless.

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

#214

Post by cbsmith »

I gotta say... this is an incredibly naive analysis.

To demonstrate Reddit Ads isn't doing click fraud protection, you should try to generate a fraudulent click yourself. Looking at what is getting through and finding that a lot of it as easily identifiable as fraudulent is NOT a valid signal.

It's incredibly likely that there are far more bots that are being blocked and that the bots that are getting through have invested a lot of effort in to fooling Reddit's fraud protection, but really don't care at all about fooling the landing page site (and of course, there are a lot more such sites, so it's a lot more expensive to design & operate a system that would fool all the other sites). Consequently, they're "easily identifiable" (though in truth the author is unfortunately use a very crude model for identifying fraud which will include a ton of false positives) by the landing page, but not by Reddit.

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

#215

Post by dheera »

jamiequint wrote: post #207
dheera wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. Those are physical goods. They hand me an avocado in return for $1.50. Actual ownership of that avocado is fully transferred at that cost. How my system renders code, or renders a webpage, and which instructions it chooses to run or not run, are upto me, as the owner of the system. Nobody else has the right to control over my hardware. They can only make suggestions, but the final decision about which lines of…

Nobody is trying to control your hardware, you agreed to receiving ads as a part of the terms of service, and then willfully violated those terms. To use a non-physical example, how is this any different than signing an agreement with a lawyer to give you legal advice, receiving said legal advice, and then refusing to pay?

> you agreed to receiving ads as a part of the terms of service

No, for 95% of the sites I read, I don't need to accept any terms of service. Hell, even the ones I do, often don't mention anything about ad blocking. I can't see anything directly prohibiting ad blocking here on the Facebook ToS, for example:

https://www.facebook.com/terms.php

> how is this any different than signing an agreement with a lawyer

ToS and a contract with a lawyer are very different things. It is not generally a crime to violate a ToS, but rather, merely a breech of agreement, and they can refuse service in return. If I violate a ToS, they can block me from using the site, and that's about the most they can do, unless I intentionally harmed the company (e.g. hacked other user data or compromised their servers).

(In the particular case of Facebook, it would also probably not be in their interest to block me, because I post a lot of original content to the platform that causes other users to spend more time on Facebook, and my presence on the platform is highly likely a net positive for them cash-wise.)

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

#216

Post by Balgair »

ffpip wrote: post #199
ValueNull wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve used AdNauseum for close to a year with no issues, it seems to be pretty good about simulating realistic clicks.

Okay, use it yourself. But do not encourage others to use it. It is adfraud and most people set it to full click through rate.

What is adfraud?

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

#217

Post by spideymans »

swader999 wrote: post #100

Does anyone here remember clicking on an add in the last week or month? How about just remembering an add or brand they saw online? I sure don't.

There’s one particular YouTube pre-roll ad I’ve seen maybe dozens of times. I literally cannot recall anything about the ad, other than I’m sick of seeing it. I’ve totally tuned it out at this point. But if they wanna waste their money advertising to me, be my guest

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

#218

Post by jamiequint »

proverbialbunny wrote: post #212
jamiequint wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you believe that people providing a service should not be able to choose how to charge for it in any other context outside of websites?

It doesn't work the way you think it does. Ads are paid for my the click. Some people never click on ads. The kinds of people who are likely to consider running an ad blocker are the same type who never click on ads regardless if they have ads or not. The ideal situation is never advertising ad blockers, never bragging about them, never making a big deal about them, and keeping some mild barrier of entry. This way th…

I ran the ads product org at one of the 10 biggest websites in the US. I'm pretty sure that ads work the way that I think they do.

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

#219

Post by abakker »

sam0x17 wrote: post #172
malwrar wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t necessarily need to implement bidding on a dedicated slot—-the TV comparison assumes you’re sending the same thing to each user. This isn’t TV though, you can display different ads to different people of you wanted. How about a system where probability of seeing an ad is weighted by how much money an advertiser pays? Then you just normalize across bidders and choose on that curve. Then perhaps the time slot…

The problem with any model where ad performance is based on how much cash you can throw down is that scams are much more profitable typically than legitimate services. A scam page can afford $5/click if it's scamming 1% of its clicks for $5000. Bidding on clicks is just a race to the bottom in terms of quality. We should instead be using user metrics to evaluate and punish ads that lead to pages users regret navigati…

But, then we'd need to track users even more deeply, right?

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

#220

Post by rsync »

zokier wrote: post #73

I find it so weird idea that people really click on ads. I don't know if I've ever done so (intentionally). As such I would have expected more like 90% of clicks to be fraudulent.

"I find it so weird idea that people really click on ads. I don't know if I've ever done so (intentionally)."

In the very beginning - say, circa 1995 when I was building my first websites - I would click on almost every banner ad I saw.

I wanted to send a signal to advertisers, and to the market in general, that there really were people out there.

I was trying to do my part to care for, and feed, the infant industry I was taking part in.

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