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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”

#331

Post by marcusverus »

remram wrote: post #233
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…

If you're bringing in those buckets, you are already in the slippery slope bringing you to the current system. Why not a bucket for people who visit the site often? A bucket for people using advanced site feature A, feature B? A bucket for people who subscribe to /r/teen?

I don't see any issue with a site using their own data to provide targeted advertisement on that one site. As long as data isn't being aggregated between sites and users aren't being tracked between sites, the privacy risk seems minimal.

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

#332

Post by jamiequint »

weare138 wrote: post #161
jamiequint wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost all bidding on FB is oCPM and Google is tCPM, which means that clicks don't really matter at all in terms of Google/FB's ability to monetize. Transparency shouldn't matter for people bidding for conversions. The only transparency you need is to know where the visitors are coming from. If anything fraud (really misclicks for FB and Google search since there is no fraud incentive) is also bad for them as well as…

> which means that clicks don't really matter at all in terms of Google/FB's ability to monetize What? They get paid for the clicks, not the impressions. Serving ad impressions costs money, the clicks make money. I don't quite follow your line of reasoning here. > Transparency shouldn't matter for people bidding for conversions Why wouldn't it? How do we know the bidding process is fair and the clicks we're paying fo…

Google gets paid for clicks but most (or at least many) people bid on conversions, for those people it doesn't matter if google delivers 100 clicks at $2 per click, or 4 clicks at $50 per click as long as they get the same number of conversions, so to this extent the CPC doesn't matter. Similarly, I could care less if 50% of the clicks are fraudulent. As a buyer what I'm judging at the end of the day is if I got the value I wanted for the price I paid. Clicks don't map to value very well, conversion actions do.

Plus, it's not like if there was no click fraud that the auction becomes magically transparent, it's still as opaque as it was before, so really this is the only rational way to purchase ads (off of some basis other than "did the # of clicks meet my expectations?")

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

#333

Post by croutonwagon »

nvr219 wrote: post #93

I completely forgot Reddit even has ads. I was watching a screen share on someone else's computer who was looking at a news article and I was completely shocked at the experience. How do people live without adblock?

That and the new interface is awful. Even clicking into a thread you see like 5 comments and a ton of “suggestions” for similar threads. Not to mention all the wasted real-estate and whatever that “picture in picture” style of opening links is..

Its just terribly done by pretty much any metric.

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

#334

Post by [deleted] »

nickff wrote: post #129
noncoml wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Aunt Mae's cookie shop will never be able to compete with Pepsi for airtime It still can’t compete with CPM Getting 100 or 1000 impressions vs millions of impression is not really competing for air time.

If there's no user information/tracking, what are the chances that any of those ads will be served to a potential customer for the small business? The GP's bottom line is that nobody except large consumer brands should bother advertising.

[deleted]

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

#335

Post by CyrusL »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #327
rightbyte wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ye. These "You can't guess how 'random actor' looks now" and then a picture of some drug addict and not the actor. The actor in the ad is nowhere to be seen if you click the ad. I actually got fooled to click because I couldn't believe that the actor got like that and it looked like an article on the "honorable" newssite ...

What's the endgame for those ads? How is your click meant to convert to revenue? Plain old scams?

For the clickbait content ads on Taboola and Outbrain, the strategy is ad arbitrage. The landing page is probably broken up into a slide show with many pages. The goal is to get the user to go through 30 pages (misclicking a few ads along the way) and monetize as more revenue than the cost of their visit. There are other monetization strategies for other types of ads on Taboola and Outbrain.

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

#336

Post by seppin »

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…

[flagged]

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

#337

Post by Ajedi32 »

jamiequint wrote: post #308
Ajedi32 wrote: post #296

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. I'd argue the opposite. It's fundamentally selfish for a site to assume that _it_ gets to decide, without my agreement or consent, how I must consume the content it has freely and unconditionally sent…

So for sites where you have agreed to the ToS you agree that it’s fine for them to have that expectation? (e.g. Reddit, Facebook, etc)

Maybe? I don't really consider "by using this site you agree to such and such" to be consent, and I don't know of any sites that ban ad blockers in their ToS. But in a theoretical situation where a site made you explicitly agree not to block ads before allowing you to use the site, then yeah I think it would be reasonable for them to expect you to adhere to that agreement.

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

#338

Post by Enginerrrd »

samatman wrote: post #225
lorthemar wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 posi…

>I'd like to see secondary markets for PID banned outright, personally.

I totally agree with this, but I think it'd be terribly hard to implement in practice. How would you eliminate the rise of a single large body that partners with everyone during data consent forms? Sort of like a VISA for personal data. The result is the same, or arguably worse, but wouldn't be banned under your scheme.

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

#339

Post by notatoad »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #295
notatoad wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In addition to google, it's likely to get you at least shadowbanned on any site that has ads and does any sort of basic fraud prevention.

What's Shadowbanning? Never heard of this.

It's where you're effectively banned without being told about it. You can still use the service, but any action you take is isolated from the rest of the site. The term I think comes from reddit but the concept is by no means unique to them: your upvotes or downvotes wouldn't affect rankings and nobody would ever see your submissions or comments other than you. The idea is to let spammers or fraudsters waste their energies on accounts that have already been flagged, instead of notifying them that they've been banned so they switch to a clean account.
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