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Advertisers Could Soon Demand 'Verified Clicks'

amediaoperator.com

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Re: Advertisers Could Soon Demand 'Verified Clicks'

#41

Post by bee_rider »

toss1 wrote: post #11

Surprising it is taking advertisers this long to wake up, considering the decades I've been reading articles on HN about the massive fraud rates from entire fraud ecosystems. The saying in marketing used to be: "Half of all marketing dollars are wasted, but we never know which half". In the internet, it seems to be more like "90% are wasted" and literally never even get a human impression, nevermind a human click-thr…

A good marketing business model would probably be “I’ll only show your marketing material to my other customers, since they are evidently likely to fall for marketing material.”

I wonder if it is just the first internet-native generation getting older and getting into decision making positions. People with built-in ad blockers in their brains.

Or it could be “AI” clicks, who knows?

Re: Advertisers Could Soon Demand 'Verified Clicks'

#42

Post by usui »

nemomarx wrote: post #37
WarmWash wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People need to just take responsibility and pay for shit. Like if you don't want to be kicked around, you need to be the one kicking. People interpret business as hostility because they cannot conceive of the idea that they themselves should pay for a service.

When I do pay for services, they can just add ads anyway to get more money. Look at Netflix or Amazon prime for this, or even cable. How do I pay for something with a guarantee they'll leave the ad money on the table? I pay for Ars, I pay for YouTube, I pay for discord nitro at the highest tier. Notice that all of those services are still ad funded?

The same principle applies: You would have to leave the service when it starts introducing such things.

As a market-driving force in the real world, basically an impossible task for the collective. However, occasionally consumers do successfully band together to abandon a service due to some perceived slight.

Re: Advertisers Could Soon Demand 'Verified Clicks'

#43

Post by donmcronald »

I can't read the whole article, but beyond verified clicks in email I worry that tech like Passkeys is going to get used against us. As soon as you take away the friction of entering passwords, and let passkeys authenticate automatically, why not have authentication / authorization for every action?

I get prompted to add Passkeys constantly. It makes me wonder if vendors will start doing it automatically "for your own good", like DoH in browser.

Re: Advertisers Could Soon Demand 'Verified Clicks'

#44

Post by _fat_santa »

A little off topic but for anyone using Thunderbird, I highly recommend BetterUnsubscribe[1] to help combat spam. Since installing I've basically eliminated marketing emails from my inbox. I've used tools like unroll.me in the past but I found that a one-time review doesn't really help much since every signup and every form entry always risks you getting more marketing emails and having to go to another service all the time creates alot of friction. That extension lets you unsubscribe the moment you see a marketing email hit your inbox.

[1]: https://github.com/LucBennett/BetterUnsubscribe

Re: Advertisers Could Soon Demand 'Verified Clicks'

#45

Post by carlosjobim »

toss1 wrote: post #11

Surprising it is taking advertisers this long to wake up, considering the decades I've been reading articles on HN about the massive fraud rates from entire fraud ecosystems. The saying in marketing used to be: "Half of all marketing dollars are wasted, but we never know which half". In the internet, it seems to be more like "90% are wasted" and literally never even get a human impression, nevermind a human click-thr…

> What was always surprising to me was how the advertisers just went along with the scam.

Talk to them. They can't resist the temptation of throwing in a few bucks (whether that is $20, a few hundreds or a few thousands) into the online advertising casino whenever it's a slow day in the office.

Then Meta will tell them that their ad reached 40 000 people or Google will tell you that your website had 3000 more clicks, but you don't see any increase in sales and think that you'll do better next time.

Or if it's a bigger business with a dedicated team advertising. Of course they're not going to tell the boss that it's bullshit and doesn't increase sales - then they'll loose their jobs!

Re: Advertisers Could Soon Demand 'Verified Clicks'

#46

Post by abc123abc123 »

wolvoleo wrote: post #29

Tbh I'm all in favour of ad fraud because it undermines the whole industry which I'd love to see disappear. I love running ad nauseam which instead of hiding ads clicks them all in an invisible browser, making advertisers pay for ads I didn't even see. And devaluing the entire concept. I wish ublock origin did this too, it's so common that it would totally screw up entire ecosystems. The number of people running ad n…

I often wondered if this strategy could work with email/phone scammers as well?

Have an LLM write positive email responses, stringing them along as long as possible.

Imagine the Nigerian prince of scams... instead of getting 0.1% response rates that he can work on, he gets 99% responses of encouraging replies stringing him along. He would drown in false positives.

On the other hand, the Nigerian prince of scams would probably just use his LLM:s to take care of the answers, and we'll have email storms of LLM:s stringing along LLM:s.

Re: Advertisers Could Soon Demand 'Verified Clicks'

#47

Post by gdulli »

wolvoleo wrote: post #29

Tbh I'm all in favour of ad fraud because it undermines the whole industry which I'd love to see disappear. I love running ad nauseam which instead of hiding ads clicks them all in an invisible browser, making advertisers pay for ads I didn't even see. And devaluing the entire concept. I wish ublock origin did this too, it's so common that it would totally screw up entire ecosystems. The number of people running ad n…

If not illegal, what if it's used as justification to further lock down browsers and operating systems? Apple makes a ton of money selling traffic to Google and has a vested interest in preserving the effectiveness of targeted advertising.

Re: Advertisers Could Soon Demand 'Verified Clicks'

#48

Post by mrguyorama »

WarmWash wrote: post #23
CodesInChaos wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BTW Google had another go at forcing Treacherous Computing on people. This time it's a reCAPTCHA successor, which requires the user to scan a QR code using a Google/Apple owned phone.

People need to just take responsibility and pay for shit. Like if you don't want to be kicked around, you need to be the one kicking. People interpret business as hostility because they cannot conceive of the idea that they themselves should pay for a service.

There is nothing in US consumer rights law that prevents any of this being done to someone who pays.

As such, companies do all this to consumers who pay.

Re: Advertisers Could Soon Demand 'Verified Clicks'

#49

Post by pixl97 »

OroPla wrote: post #22
toss1 wrote: post #11

Surprising it is taking advertisers this long to wake up, considering the decades I've been reading articles on HN about the massive fraud rates from entire fraud ecosystems. The saying in marketing used to be: "Half of all marketing dollars are wasted, but we never know which half". In the internet, it seems to be more like "90% are wasted" and literally never even get a human impression, nevermind a human click-thr…

The entire internet ad business has never made sense to me. Have you ever clicked any of the links? The landing pages were always confusing and not at all designed for you to engage with them. I used to think, okay, I guess they don't care about visiting their sites and just want to get eyeball impressions to stay relevant in the cultural zeitgeist. Then I learned how ads worked in the print industry, where it is ass…

5 years from now: "I'm glad we banned ads from the internet, I can drink and ice cold coca-cola in peace now, it refreshes my totally human body".

Ads are going to be very very difficult to ban as the incentive behind ads will never go away. With that said, less ads is always better, but it will be a tit for tat battle.

Re: Advertisers Could Soon Demand 'Verified Clicks'

#50

Post by pixl97 »

blooalien wrote: post #24
wongarsu wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just lock down the OS so we can send a reliable signal whether the click originated from a real hardware input device or was software-driven Oh, you programmed your Arduino to present itself as a mouse via USB, so you can do automated click-fraud that way? No problem, only certified hardware allowed as input devices from now on I'm not sure what we are going to do about robot arms using touchscreens, or little device…

> I'm not sure what we are going to do about robot arms using touchscreens, or little devices that trick mouse sensors into thinking it's moving. Maybe continuous fingerprint reading? Heartbeat monitor paired to your mouse's fingerprint readers under the mouse buttons while your webcam verifies your Face ID? "Approved live human detected: Please spit in DNA analyzer to verify."

>Please spit in DNA analyzer to verify."

Ah, so this is why Anthropic is banning all biological work on it's LLM, it doesn't want you to make an automatic spitting machine to defeat its future ads.

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