Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 398 posts

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

#361

Post by earthboundkid »

rtkwe wrote: post #63
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…

There's a lot of reasons they're not done that way on the internet, for starters it's reverting back to requiring people in the loop for ad sales which is expensive on both sides of the equation. Add to that that the 'personalized' ads are, if the targeting is functioning properly, worth more to the buyer [0] than simple placement ads and you can see why automatic targeted ads dominate the space, human approved/sold,…

“Influencers” are a new category of ad where you pay people to use your makeup or whatever on Instagram or YouTube. It’s hugely popular with consumers and modestly profitable for “influencers”, and it all works with zero targeting.

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

#362

Post by ffpip »

Balgair wrote: post #216
ffpip wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Because Google calculates clicks as results, people are encouraged to click the ads, meaning news sites earn more money if clicks increase, and the advertiser has to pay more money to Google if clicks increase.

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

#363

Post by earthboundkid »

shajznnckfke wrote: post #18
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…

How are you going to tell which traffic is fraud if you ban tracking?

It doesn’t matter because your traffic is measured by Comscore or Nielsen or some other third party and can’t be faked. (I don’t consider being in a survey group “tracking” in the relevant sense.)

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

#364

Post by earthboundkid »

hammock wrote: post #30
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…

>Ban user tracking and targeting. It's a red queen's race and no one benefits Can you elaborate on this?

It’s a red queen’s race because ad buyers have a fixed budget. You can’t get them to spend more; just spend at different places. If tracking is available they’ll buy it, but it won’t increase the total buy.

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

#365

Post by ffpip »

jedberg wrote: post #247
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.

You can run an adblocker in the instagram app.

It's just a bit too much. You need to have a rooted android.

I did it when they increased the ads to one ad every 2-3 posts.

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

#366

Post by ffpip »

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…

> all cannot differentiate a Reddit ad url vs a regular link.

Every ad links to alb.reddit.com . Every post links to *.reddit.com .

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

#367

Post by chillwaves »

jamiequint wrote: post #303
chillwaves wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's dishonest to pretend that ads are not a significant and relevant attack vector.

First-party ads are not an attack vector in any way, shape, or form.

How is that a meaningful distinction from the end-user point of view?

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

#368

Post by sam0x17 »

abakker wrote: post #219
sam0x17 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Not really imo -- like I said upvotes and downvotes can do this just as well. Just have to have good anti-bot protections on that

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

#369

Post by gjvnq »

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.

If you allow for location based ads (eg: city level), there may be a chance.

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

#370

Post by taurath »

beervirus wrote: post #306
jamiequint wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a lot lower quality and there was a lot less useful stuff.

There was less stuff. Not sure it was less useful or lower quality.

Also lots of reasons there was less stuff then that has nothing to do with lack of ads.
Post reply on HN