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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”

#281

Post by searchableguy »

ffritz wrote: post #149

I’m getting the same ad on the reddit app over and over again for what feels like a year, and it’s so bad I would never even think of clicking on it. Now that I write this, I notice that’s actually true for most ads I see because they would require a pihole and I haven’t gotten around to setting one up. It really feels like the ad business is inherently flawed these days. Who clicks on ads? How many of those are goin…

Average person in developed countries spend hours on online media daily. I see that as a worrying trend. 6-7 hours for Americans so that would be a huge chunk of your life.

I wonder if people don't have time to buy other things to spend their day on due to social media being so addictive.

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

#282

Post by syrrim »

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…

As long as you could still target based on:

- location of ip address

- article/page the ad is placed on

You could get targetting down to a very small number of people, and consequently make advertising very cheap.

Because of the degree to which paid advertising us about creating common knowledge that a product exists, ads of this sort are likely more useful to the advertiser anyways, at least in the long run. If you merely want to inform people that your product exists, there are usually cheaper forms of marketting.

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

#283

Post by dpc_pw »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #181
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!

Exactly.. I was just thinking about making an adblocker that loads the actual ads in a fake environment, it could really simulate the ad industry to look for other ways because it costs them too much money.

https://adnauseam.io/ ?

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

#284

Post by dblock »

I may or may not have participated in click fraud in 1997 with DoubleClick by forging source IP headers and going through a proxy ... that I may or may not have been running. I can only imagine how much more sophisticated click fraud has become today. Even if you raise that bar, I suspect a vast % of clicks are probably fraud anyway.

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

#286

Post by mgbmtl »

Shivetya wrote: post #267
hbn wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

on tablets pretty much everything directs you to the app and most people trust this is the best result which with regards to youtube can result in an incredible influx of ads

There's an uBlock filter "ublock annoyances" that filters most of those annoying "open in app" messages. Pretty useful for reddit/imgur.

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

#287

Post by cbsmith »

TwoBit wrote: post #271
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…

OK but doesn't OP demostrate that the same IP clicked 15 times in a short period of time and he was charged for all of them? How could that be complicated to handle?

Well, for starters, the IP they see might not be the same IP that Reddit sees. If you are a fraudster, obfuscating IPs is something worth investing in to get by the ad network, not the publisher. There's no need to invest in fooling the publisher (in fact, appearing fraudulent to the publisher can be an objective).

Secondly, 15 times in a short period of time from the same IP might just be the ad system targeting a particular group of people who all use the same NAT (which does indeed tend to happen). So it might not be fraud at all.

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

#288

Post by GekkePrutser »

dpc_pw wrote: post #283
GekkePrutser wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly.. I was just thinking about making an adblocker that loads the actual ads in a fake environment, it could really simulate the ad industry to look for other ways because it costs them too much money.

https://adnauseam.io/ ?

Nice thanks!!!

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

#289

Post by grayfaced »

ramenandtrance wrote: post #202
eptcyka wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are what you like, given enough information, the ID becomes pointless.

If I allowed tracking, which I don't, the ad companies wouldn't know what to make of me. Middle age white guy devops nerd into manga, anime, fishing, ramen, lo-fi, and coding. Yet, I wear Wrangler jeans, boots, and drink wine. Even my wife thinks I'm an oddball. My kids think I'm cool until it's bed time on a school night and then howls of "Dad, what about Gundam! It's almost over. We promise!"

They offer that information as criteria the ad campaigns can select for. The criteria could be pieces of specific datum or analyzed conclusions (e.g. predicted sexual orientation, political affiliation). Those conclusions may be inaccurate but they are still more accurate then trying to make those conclusions in a tv/print campaign. So it's still effective.

There may well be a company selling big-ass belt buckles with anime themes that is trying to reach you. When designing their ad campaign they could say they want people with an interest in anime/manga AND interest in westerns, trucks, boots or jeans. They would have no way to do that with a traditional media campaign.

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

#290

Post by alkonaut »

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.

Even if I’m both intrigued by the product advertised and really want to support the site/app I’m on, I’d rather go google the product in an incognito window than give any money or information to adtech with that click.

Don’t show ad-network ads.

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