“35-50% of clicks on Reddit Ads are fraudulent” • Hacker News Board

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

#241

Post by the8bit » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 7:47 PM UTC

ufmace wrote: post #94

What I don't get here is - who is doing this? I'm not sure who has the motivation to falsify clicks on Reddit ads. For Google ads, somebody might want to falsify clicks on the ads displayed on their site because they get paid by the click, but who other than Reddit would want to do that here?

The most common causes of false ad clicks on the web isnt fraud but unintended maliciousness. Eg. there are extensions around that 'click' and load pages or click through posts to cache contents, etc. Plenty of people write web scripts that end up looking to webservers like humans interacting with ad content.

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

#242

Post by dheera » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 7:47 PM UTC

jamiequint wrote: post #226

dheera wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I think law and morality are two totally separate concepts.

I operate by morality, but my risk tolerance is bound by legality. For example, for any human rights issue X, will I speak out for X in a place that has free speech but not yet legalized X? Absolutely. Will I speak out for X in a place that I might get a $100 fine? Probably. Will I speak out for X in a place that I might get jailed or beheaded? Probably not.

In this case though I don't consider it immoral to violate certain ToS terms, especially when they track and sell user data and don't offer a clear opt-in/out option to that, and perhaps even doubly on the sites that I actively contribute useful content to the platform in good faith, and the legal risk is extremely low.

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

#243

Post by ivalm » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 7:47 PM UTC

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 run an ad blocker, but I’ve also occasionally clicked on ads. Usually it was some cool looking gadget or clothing item, not sure if I ever purchased through ad-initiated interaction, but it definitely made me aware of products.

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

#244

Post by jedberg » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 7:49 PM UTC

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?

As the guy that helped build the first ad platform on reddit, no, I don't think the provider should choose.

When we built the first reddit ad system, none of us liked ads, and we knew that a lot of users didn't either. We knew that we had to make useful ads if we wanted people not to block us. We knew we had to make them unobtrusive and even enjoyable.

We knew that we had to build an ad product people enjoyed if we wanted them to be effective and not get blocked.

And we knew some people would block them anyway, and that was fine. Heck, we even added an option to turn them off if you paid us, so that people had options.

I used to not run adblock as a way of supporting sites I liked, but then all the ads got so bad I just couldn't do it anymore. Now I just find other ways to pay for the sites I love.

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

#245

Post by the8bit » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 7:50 PM UTC

criddell wrote: post #163

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…

Shouldn't ad buyers just assume that the high fraud rates are baked into the price? If Reddit gets rid of fraudulent clicks (whatever that means), then the ad price will probably go up.

Yep, reddit ads CPC is 2-5x cheaper than FB / Google. So assuming half of it is real fraud, the likely outcome of removing the fraud is just that CPC would double. Still better as misleading metrics are bad, but likely no real net change in cost per real return.

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

#246

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 7:52 PM UTC

cbsmith wrote: post #214

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 in…

[deleted]

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

#247

Post by jedberg » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 7:53 PM UTC

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 can't run an ad blocker on the Instagram app, but I really don't mind much. I end up clicking on ads all the time there. They're usually super relevant.

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

#248

Post by XCSme » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 7:55 PM UTC

Most dynamic ad platforms are similar, I also got 100% fake traffic from testing out Facebook ads: https://www.reddit.com/r/marketing/comments/4smisl/facebook_...

I know it could be improved with better targeting, but by default it should not give you 100% fake clicks.

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

#249

Post by the8bit » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 7:55 PM UTC

dpc_pw wrote: post #79

We need to get it to 99.99%, and then maybe they will all switch to some honest business model!

Reddit already has an 'honest' business model (awards) and people rage about that all day too.

I think mostly people just want the service but dont want to pay for it in any way.

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

#250

Post by ufmace » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 7:56 PM UTC

atian wrote: post #130

ufmace wrote: post #94

What I don't get here is - who is doing this? I'm not sure who has the motivation to falsify clicks on Reddit ads. For Google ads, somebody might want to falsify clicks on the ads displayed on their site because they get paid by the click, but who other than Reddit would want to do that here?

Let’s not first assume intent. There are tons of scrapers running on Reddit. Reddit ads are presented inline rather than iframed/complex load behavior like Google Ads. Also browser extensions, browser behaviors (which smartly preload pages, prefetching) all cannot differentiate a Reddit ad url vs a regular link. Reddit makes it much easier for any web traffic to follow through to ads. The issue is that Reddit doesn’t…

If it's all scrapers, why would somebody build a scraper that bothers to click ads? And if you wanted to scrape Reddit, why not use their public API instead?