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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”

#221

Post by jamiequint »

TheNorthman wrote: post #206
jamiequint wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a fundamentally selfish viewpoint that you instead of the site you're using should decide how you consume what the site offers, a point of view that would be considered patently outrageous in many other contexts. Many people here confuse such a thing being possible with such a thing being morally justifiable.

It really can't surprise you that a common viewpoint on HN is that `Information wants to be free'. This is both in a descriptive sense and a normative sense. The descriptive sense obviously can't be selfish but the normative one can. So the question is then as follows: are the activists who further this narrative, out of a normative belief, selfish? I personally don't think so. I believe that people like Aaron Swartz…

I think that's a fair point, the motivations may not be selfish, but that's the expression. Maybe a better characterization of the motivations would be "naive". Nothing is free.

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

#222

Post by spideymans »

kikki wrote: post #97
24gttghh wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's one way to kill the ad industry, and I'm all for it!

And what should replace the ad industry - to keep websites running?

Spitballing here, so excuse me if this is a horrendous idea:

The reason we have aggressive web advertising is because the web has no revenue model to pay website owners for their content costs. So I’ve wondered if the web would be better off with a Spotify-like model, where ISPs pay web hosts per page view (or how long time is spent on a page). If websites want to be eligible to receive these payments, they’d have to commit to having no ads, or at least very unobtrusive ads without any tracking. And line Spotify, consumers would continue to pay a flat rate, regardless of how many pages they visit (within their data cap)

I think the major web players are far too mature and entrenched to make such a major shift in the web’s revenue model. But if this had been implemented decades earlier, it might’ve had a shot at success.

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

#223

Post by Scoundreller »

hbn wrote: post #210
optimalsolver wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I think whenever using someone else's computer.

Blows my mind when I'm watching someone just sit in silence waiting 10 seconds so they can skip an ad on youtube

Was visiting distant family ~10 years ago in a small Yugoslav village.

They had ~2mbit fixed wireless (w00t), but when I installed Adblock and dialed up their CRT to 85hz from 60, they didn’t even notice anything changed.

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

#224

Post by rsync »

algo_trader wrote: post #70
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…

Can u share any approx pricing/click-through rate ? We are considering driving some traffic into very basic sites. We dont really intent to monetize, so cheap trashy visitors are ok

"We are considering driving some traffic into very basic sites. We dont really intent to monetize, so cheap trashy visitors are ok"

Doing God's own work there, I see ...

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

#225

Post by samatman »

lorthemar wrote: post #65
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…

>Pay for ad time slots, not user impressions. This is probably the worst thing you can do to online advertising. It's probably one of the only good things about the online ad industry. If you book time slots, only the biggest players will be able to compete for that slot. Essentially killing the entire selling point of online ads, which is giving a chance to smaller players a chance at the game. I don't want to, ever…

> Advertisers shouldn't know what I like, they should only know that a certain device with a certain ID likes X,Y topics.

This is well-meaning but unfortunately it's also naive.

That kind of information, in aggregate, is trivial to de-anonymize at scale.

I'd like to see secondary markets for PID banned outright, personally. If you want that, go on the dark web and risk criminal sanctions. I'm sure there are some positive effects which would get thrown out with the enormous moral hazard, but I'd have to be convinced that it isn't worth it: as it stands, keeping personal user data should be a cost center for most businesses, something which exposes them to liability with no means to monetize other than providing whatever service they nominally exist for.

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

#226

Post by jamiequint »

dheera wrote: post #215
jamiequint wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Is your viewpoint on the morality of agreements that it is morally justifiable to break those which are not legally enforceable, but not morally justifiable to break those which are? Or to state it a different way, the law defines morality.

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

#227

Post by rsync »

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 :)

217 comments into this thread and not one mention of nextdns.io ...

Just look it up - it's basically a cloud-based pi-hole and it's wonderful.

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

#228

Post by mStreamTeam »

ffpip wrote: post #41
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 :)

That is a stupid idea and will get your accounts and IP banned from Google and Cloudflare. Use it yourself if you want, do not encourage others to use it. It is based off uBlock Origin. Just use uBlock Origin.

I've used ad nauseum for years without a problem.

So unless you have some proof to prove your point, I'm going to assume you're making this up

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

#229

Post by mikestew »

jamiequint wrote: post #190
staplers wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people just don't want malicious code being run on their computers.

What malicious code are first-party ad networks running on your computer?

That's a hell of a qualifier you just slapped on there. I'll answer as soon as I can track down a website that's not running a third-party ad network, which I'm sure you're aware is but a teensy percentage of web sites that run ads.

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

#230

Post by SamBam »

rsync wrote: post #220
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…

Yup. I remember those sites that would say "please click on the ads and support us!"

There was also that one in the early 2000s that claimed to donate a cup of rice for every ad clicked, and maybe another one that planted seeds or something. I think I clicked on those a bunch for a while. Doubt they ever did any good, and I should probably have just donated the $2 I probably "earned" for those charities with my clicks.

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