38 People are looking at this post right now

Presumably for the little boxes which show up below certain Google ads with price points []. I know that's against Google Ads' policies, but has anyone heard of it happening nonetheless?

[] https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/2497706

Re: 38 People are looking at this post right now

#8

Post by lainga » Sun, Oct 20, 2019, 8:27 PM UTC

zzo38computer wrote: post #6

Yes, I think it is false advertising, so should be illegal.

The only way out of it I can think of would be: if the site could prove that some number of people, greater than 45, were hitting that specific query on that specific page, then vacuously, they could say that any number of people between 1 and 45 were also looking at the offer.

But then, why wouldn't they just display "at least 45 people" or the exact number? I'm struggling to find some way of doing this which could be any stupider (`view_notification_random` ??) than what we see.

Re: 38 People are looking at this post right now

#9

Post by colmvp » Sun, Oct 20, 2019, 8:31 PM UTC

I'm noticing that even Etsy does this by saying that "n people have this their baskets right now."

That might be so, but it's not like most of the items are scarce. For example, I ordered a t-shirt and the seller just used a local t-shirt company to produce the shirt and mail it to me since it was cheaper than mailing a shirt through international delivery lol

Re: 38 People are looking at this post right now

#10

Post by poisonborz » Sun, Oct 20, 2019, 8:32 PM UTC

So some manager came up with this, tasked a PO, who tasked a team, and a frontend developer implemented it - and in this chain, in the end, everyone complied. I know it's not like murder, but especially in a field where it's so easy to hop into another job/project, one should have greater integrity.