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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”

#41

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.

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

#42
post #33

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…

I'm no expert, but one observation I had is podcasts seem to follow this model. Most podcast ads I hear are read by the hosts themselves, though a small number splice in targeted advertiser-provided audio (eg a UK soccer podcast will play me local Canadian ads). For the podcasts that follow the former model, they don't seem to rely on timeslots (i.e. payment just for ad being shown), though some may be involved. Inst…

Spotify will be inserting targeted ads into their podcast streams, if they haven't started already. Something to keep in mind for anyone who was thinking of listening to podcasts on Spotify.

I think Stitcher does this as well.

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

#44

If I'm going to see ads, I'd prefer targeted ones personally. Show me something I might want - product discover is actually hard, if an ad can show me something that solves a need/want I have that's great for me and for the company.

You would still see yacht ads on the site for Yachting Magazine. What you wouldn't see is hemorrhoid ads targeted to you because you searched for hemorrhoid cream three days ago on a different computer.

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

#45

If I'm going to see ads, I'd prefer targeted ones personally. Show me something I might want - product discover is actually hard, if an ad can show me something that solves a need/want I have that's great for me and for the company.

Targeting as it is currently done collects an insane amount of data which is an ever-growing liability which will inevitably blow up when that data leaks or becomes resold/misused.

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

#46
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit has been running ads for over a decade. If they are this far in and not doing basic fraud mitigation, something is wrong.

That depends on the scale though right? Reddit ads were for a long time very poor. They've become a lot more feasible for many companies in the last few years, as Reddit has also become a lot more mainstream. Also we don't know if they are doing basic fraud mitigation. It's possible they are doing plenty of fraud mitigation, but that it's just not advanced enough.

Did you look at the link? The detection methods used, and the discussion of mitigation in the thread, make it clear that if they are doing any mitigation at all they are neglecting obvious red flags.

Every business is obliged to be ethical, vigilant against deception, and not blatantly lie, no matter what size they are. Even if you could make an argument like this, reddit was already pretty big ten years ago. That's why they started running ads.

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

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every newspaper in America has obvious scam ads on its homepage. It's genuinely baffling, given largely bad-faith "fake news" accusations, that news organizations are willing to light their credibility on fire like this. It feeds the nonsense, and justifiably so.

Turn off an ad blocker for a day after years of running one and you will routinely get solicitations for fake tech support lines, fake crypto ransom demands, and so on even if you are only browsing mainstream sites. This even goes for both iOS and Android phones. Digital display ads are major vectors of crime and the websites and the ad networks that serve them should be held liable for the damages that they cause to…

Given the hyper targeted efficiency of the modern ad networks, are you sure the fake crypto and tech support ads are going to everyone and not just to you?

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

#48

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…

> Never allow dynamic ad content! Ads should be individually approved by publishers and not subject to change after approval.

Partially agree. Publishers should definitely be able to blacklist advertisers. However, networks like Google get thousands of ads that run for only a handful of impressions. Asking publishers to manually approve every single ad that might run is onerous.

I would like to see approval required for anything executable: JavaScript, Flash, etc. Waking up to find that your website has become an attack vector through malicious banner ads is not okay.

> Ban user tracking and targeting.

Mostly disagree.

I click on a meme site. There's not a lot of relevant ads for that. I could get served ads for lolcats-themed merchandise that I don't want, or low-value broad-targeted ads that probably still aren't relevant to me. Nobody wins.

Or, based on my search history, I could get ads for computer parts that I'm actually interested in. I get ads that are relevant, the publisher gets more revenue, and the advertiser has a real chance at a sale. Everyone wins.

> It's a red queen's race and no one benefits.

That couldn't be less true.

Now, systems that try to track individual people (rather than blocks with similar demographic/behavioral traits) are a serious problem. We do need stricter controls to prevent this.

> Pay for ad time slots, not user impressions.

Here we go. You want to throw away the very thing that democratized digital advertising. You want a system where either you pay five figures to reserve a time block, or you don't get to play.

Hard disagree.

> Use anti-trust to prevent link aggregators from being advertisers.

I'm not sure how anti-trust ties into this. Are you alleging that, say, Fark has a monopoly status, and is abusing it to gain an unfair advantage in an adjacent market?

Now, I think you're on to a very real problem here--advertising dollars are being diverted away from the organizations that produce content--but severing the only real revenue source for most aggregators seems like an inappropriate response.

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

#49

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…

Extremely unpopular opinion but sometimes I like being targeted. Just last week I was looking for a ceiling lamp but couldn't really find anything I wanted. I finally found one that I liked by seeing it in an ad that was obviously targeted.

It was nice to not having to actively go through the hundreds of pages of lamps and instead get presented a few different ones in each ad group now and then, as a break in my usual feed. The drip exposure also made me contemplate each one in isolation instead of being overwhelmed.

What I don't like is that I keep getting ads for lamps now after I've already bought it.

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

#50

If I'm going to see ads, I'd prefer targeted ones personally. Show me something I might want - product discover is actually hard, if an ad can show me something that solves a need/want I have that's great for me and for the company.

I'm of the opposite view: If I'm going to see ads, I'd rather they be irrelevant. That way I at least have a little more assurance that my privacy was not violated in order to produce them. I don't care what the content of the ad is, because I will not buy a product from an ad, so a non-privacy-violating ad that I ignore is strictly better to me than a privacy-violating ad that I also ignore.
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