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

I'd love to see fraud/mis-click adjusted returns for various social networks. I'd wager a significant percentage of ad engagement is non-productive.

Reddit's ads are terrible. It should come as no surprise that no one clicks on them.

This is awesome. I thought about exactly doing that at one point, since I block most ads, although I do it via /etc/hosts instead of AdBlock, so that makes it a little harder.

I also have custom CSS/JS rules to block those infuriating chat box popups on various websites and thought it might be fun to not only block them but also run a chat bot on them in the background for every chat box that pops up unsolicited. Waste their time and maybe they will learn very quickly that unsolicited chat popups are the most annoying UX ever.

(To be clear, I love chat UIs for customer support -- but not unsolicited "Can I help you?" sales chat boxes that pop up and cover part of the screen before you have even had a chance to understand the product.)

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 slots, not user impressions. Instead of selling by CPM, publishers should say "independent analyst X says we have traffic Y on an average Sunday. You can buy placement for next Sunday for $Z." This is how all offline ads are sold, and it's much healthier for everyone than CPM. It essentially kills the motivation for the Reddit fraud discussed here.

- Use anti-trust to prevent link aggregators from being advertisers. This is a bigger issue, but putting ads on the aggregators creates perverse incentives to promote bad content and not actually pay for it. Why would you pay to put an ad on publisher A which may or may not have traffic when you can put the ad on aggregator B which will definitely have traffic? The problem is this means A cannot pay writers and the whole system breaks down.

Comment by OP in other thread:

>I've compared this method to Twitter (6% click fraud) and Google (-26% click fraud, received more legitimate clicks than I was charged), so Reddit is definitely doing something different.

https://old.reddit.com/r/adops/comments/ikskpp/3550_of_click...