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

81–90 of 398 posts

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

#81

Post by wlesieutre »

lukeramsden wrote: post #61
wlesieutre wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are you saying they're going to do this to paid users too, or just free users?

Not positive, but since they don't say for free users only I'm assuming it's everybody. Mainly for their own exclusive "podcasts" but available for other networks to use also. I get the impression these take the place of the traditional "host reads a sponsor message" time slot.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/8/21056336/spotify-streaming...

> Spotify Podcast Ads offer the intimacy and quality of traditional podcast ads with the precision and transparency of modern-day digital marketing

Yeah, that's what I like about online targeted advertising. The transparency.

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

#82

Post by surround »

thrownaway954 wrote: post #3

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 :)

This extension hides ads, but doesn’t block them in order to click them. Which means you don’t get any of the privacy benefit uBO offers.

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

#83

Post by drdeca »

wtracy wrote: post #48
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…

> 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…

> You want a system where either you pay five figures to reserve a time block, or you don't get to play.

This is not what I observed from Project Wonderful when they were still around. Ok I guess it wasn’t precisely timeslots, so much as “amount of time” (though one could choose to only bid during the time you want), but the prices I saw were fairly often low enough that people would briefly get the slot just for a gag.

Pretty sure there were even bidding wars between groups who were both doing jokes?

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

#84

Post by ntsplnkv2 »

ceejayoz wrote: post #28
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…

> 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.

It's not that baffling. Good investigative journalism costs money and now everyone wants news free.

Also it doesn't matter what the NYtimes puts on its site - Sean hannity calls it librul and they all just fall in line anyway, why even bother catering to that crowd?

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

#85

Post by lorthemar »

eptcyka wrote: post #75
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…

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

True, true. I didn't think it that way.

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

#86

Post by jobigoud »

surround wrote: post #76
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’ve never bought anything because of an advertisement.

Consciously.

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

#87

Post by cblconfederate »

ruined wrote: post #14
danpalmer wrote: post #7

I get the impression that Reddit's ad network is just immature. We're finding that Reddit ads perform well and are cheap, suggesting that there isn't much competition for clicks. More mature ad networks such as Google's and Facebook's are better at reducing spam clicks. Google bought a company focused on this about 10 years ago, I'm sure Facebook put similar effort in. I'm sure this is something they'll work to impro…

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

Their ad "platform", i mean the page where you go to buy an ad was a joke until very recently. broken images and stuff. a kid could do better.

Not that they need to change, i like the simplicty of their ads

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

#88

Post by SkyBelow »

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 see something interesting in an ad I won't click it. I much rather just google it and get info that way.

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

#90

Post by Spivak »

Nextgrid wrote: post #26
shajznnckfke wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If the ads are billed per period of time and not per-click or per-view then "fraud" doesn't matter; all that matters is the overall ROI; if the advertiser gets more business than what it cost them to run the ad they will consider it a worthwhile investment, otherwise they will stop advertising there forcing the publisher to adjust their prices and eventually those prices will reflect the true value (as in how much RO…

It's not that fraud doesn't matter, it just moves to the publisher because they're the ones that have to track the eyeballs now in order to advertisers to know how good their ad space is.
Post reply on HN