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.
I was watching a screen share on someone else's computer who was looking at a news article and I was completely shocked at the experience. How do people live without adblock?
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.
Where I clicked while the page is still loading. But by the time my click is registered, an ad has loaded in the target location.
I suppose you could say loading ads asynchronously improves the user experience, but my skeptical experience is they intentionally load in high activity localities.
I can't run an ad blocker on the Instagram app, but I really don't mind much. I end up clicking on ads all the time there. They're usually super relevant.
I used to be like that, but for whatever reason a significant proportion of my adds these days are from smaller, local companies - a vineyard or clothing company for instance.
I click on these adds, and if I like what I see, I'll buy it. I feel a lot more comfortable supporting small businesses that someone has poured their heart and sole into. I want to see these companies thrive, and if targeted advertising is the way I'm alerted to them, then so be it!
Even if I’m both intrigued by the product advertised and really want to support the site/app I’m on, I’d rather go google the product in an incognito window than give any money or information to adtech with that click.
I gotta say... this is an incredibly naive analysis.
To demonstrate Reddit Ads isn't doing click fraud protection, you should try to generate a fraudulent click yourself. Looking at what is getting through and finding that a lot of it as easily identifiable as fraudulent is NOT a valid signal.
It's incredibly likely that there are far more bots that are being blocked and that the bots that are getting through have invested a lot of effort in to fooling Reddit's fraud protection, but really don't care at all about fooling the landing page site (and of course, there are a lot more such sites, so it's a lot more expensive to design & operate a system that would fool all the other sites). Consequently, they're "easily identifiable" (though in truth the author is unfortunately use a very crude model for identifying fraud which will include a ton of false positives) by the landing page, but not by Reddit.
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 improve over time as their ad network gains traction.
What I don't get here is - who is doing this? I'm not sure who has the motivation to falsify clicks on Reddit ads. For Google ads, somebody might want to falsify clicks on the ads displayed on their site because they get paid by the click, but who other than Reddit would want to do that here?
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 the literal opposite. If I have to see the ads, I don't want my data harvested, stored, and shared in an effort to serve them to me. Identify the target audience of the site you're buying ads from, and identify if that is a target audience that you can appeal to. Then buy ad time.
Like TV. That way my data is safe, and I'm still exposed to your ads that are relevant to people visiting 'x' site.
The ad is targeted by showing you a relevant ad on a relevant site. Looking at a hiking site, they'll have boot ads, looking at vacuum cleaner reviews, there are obviously going to be vacuum cleaner ads. Advertisers collecting every single personal detail they can so they can show you the boots you already bought months ago on an unrelated topic just makes the world a worse place.
Have you ever had that experience though? For me targeted ads just show me things I've already bought. "Great google, yep, last month I was reading midi controller reviews, and I bought one last month. " Amazon does the same thing after I've bought something from them. Just bought a printer? Amazon's gonna email me shit about other printers I might like for a week, not accessories that go with the machine I purchased, just other printers. So not only am I not really comfortable with tracking, I don't think the experience justifies it.
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.
I think the average (non-technical) person would agree.
I know a lot of very non-technical people, some of who dislike facebook in general, talk about how good facebook is at showing them ads that actually get them to discover and buy new products.
The people I've heard this sentiment from don't feel like they were manipulated into buying something that ultimately didn't meet expectations. I commonly hear things like "I can't believe how good the Facebook ads are. I only see ads for really nice Blouses in colors and sizes that I like. I've bought nice things via Facebook ads".
Granted, it's usually followed up by "I can't believe Facebook is able to be that good at showing me the right ads" ... but people I've talked to seem to feel neutral about the creepiness of it, I'm guessing because the upside is they get to discover and buy cool new things that they otherwise wouldn't have known about.
(Personally I don't like ad targeting on the basis of companies abusing / selling / harvesting data about me... but for the average person I think seeing well targeted ads is positive UX compared with showing non-targeted ads)
This sounded good to me on paper, so years ago I turned ad personalization back on for a while. At the time I was checking Pebble's site on a daily basis because they had short-term sales not announced anywhere.
AdSense then proceeded to push just that one "Pebble Smartwatch" ad on me, everywhere. Even a page with multiple ad blocks just had several of them -- sometimes all of them -- the same text ad for Pebble. It became more annoying than helpful because I was already going to buy one, it just tried to push me to buy it for a higher price.
I turned ad personalization off again and now any ads I get are mostly just related to the current page's content.
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.
Why can't ads simply be targeted based on the content of the page or type of website?
Show ads related to programming on /r/programming, ads for cars on /r/cars, and ads for antidepressants on r/wallstreetbets
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.
Many of the comments in this thread are talking past each other, by ignoring one side or the other of the cost/benefit balance. It's pointless to shout "But it has benefits, leave it the way it is!" and "But it has costs, eliminate the entire industry!" without engaging with the opposing value set.
I don't think that anyone would disagree with you that true product discovery - educating you about a thing you didn't know about that solves a problem you have - is a benefit of good advertising. Lots of advertising isn't about product discovery, for sure, it's about persuading you to buy a thing you don't want and reminding you about a product you already know about and building an image about the product, and many people want to get off the hedonistic, materialistic treadmill that such persuasion pulls towards, but let's ignore that for now and assume that targeted ads lead to a benefit to the consumer of improved product discovery.
However, I don't think this is a very big benefit, in the real world. I can count maybe 3 things that I've bought in the past year or so where product discovery was important to me, where I was genuinely surprised that the solution was that easy and available. Heck, one was such a big benefit, I'll share: I changed the faucet hardware in my bathroom vanity, but instead of laying on my back and trying to turn the nuts by hand or squeeze in a pair of channel-locks between the sink and the wall, this time I got a targeted ad in my Amazon search results for the faucet advertising a basin wrench, which I didn't know was a thing. That's genuine product discovery, it saved me a little discomfort and a little time, and cost $6. I like the basin wrench, but if targeted ads didn't exist and I could pay a third party to provide me with the same advice I get from targeted ads, I'd value the service at maybe $2/year.
Targeted ads, especially as they're currently implemented, do have a cost to you as a consumer. It's largely invisible to non-technical users, but they do have a significant cost to your privacy. They cost computing cycles and battery life. They cost control of your devices, of your software, and of the websites you browse. Personally, those are pretty significant costs to me. And worst of all, IMO, they have a huge cost in mental fatigue, clamoring for my attention, because for every targeted ad that matches the "has this problem/wants to solve it with this product" combination there are 10,000 that fail one or the other condition. I value these costs pretty high, I bought an SBC just to run PiHole, I pay for Netflix so my TV is ad-free, I buy songs on my phone and wear noise-cancelling headphones in the shop at work so I don't have to listen to the incessant f*ing radio ads. Ugh. And there's little chance I can do anything about the billboards on my commute, though those are contextually targeted to my area rather than invasively targeted. I've probably spent hundreds of dollars avoiding ads, if I could pay someone hundreds more to make the entire industry disappear from my perception I would do so in a heartbeat.
That said, it's not possible to put a number on either the cost or the benefit that's true for everyone. Personally, I feel that those advocating targeted ads generally underestimate how much data is being collected, overestimate the benefits of product discovery, and underestimate the benefits available from alternative, less consumer-costly mechanisms for targeting, like content/context-based targeting.
How many dollars per year do you think the benefits of product discovery, as provided by non-GPDR, non-CCPA, no-holds-barred targeted advertising is worth to you? What price would you put on its costs?
Warning to not install this extension if you use google ads in any capacity (work/blog/other), it will get your account banned from google very quick for clickfraud.
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.
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.)
Advertising manager here - The real problem is that not enough companies pay attention to the results they are getting from their ad campaigns. Most big companies just dump money into a lot of different campaigns without putting in place strict measurement procedures.
So this puts the ethical ad seller at a major disadvantage. Currently you have companies spending tens of millions of dollars on digital ads each quarter and only looking ad metrics like cost per click or cost per impression.
So they are judging the effectiveness of the ad campaign on metrics the ad seller provides. They are not putting in place effective checks and balances.
Why you ask? Because if the huge companies buying ads wanted to actually measure everything it would be extremely time consuming and expensive. It is a lot easier to pretend the problem doesn’t exist and just go with the flow.
So small companies with small budgets are actually a lot better at measuring results in most cases. Also online only businesses are a lot better at it. Measuring the offline impact of online ads is very hard.
But the bulk of ad dollars are spent by huge companies with huge bureaucracies. So game theory says you need to capture those dollars to win.
Source – I’ve been doing digital marketing for the last 12 years at a variety of companies.
What ads? I block them all, at home, at work, and do the same for friends and family. The only ads I see are the half second ads during my DVR playbook, and then skip. I pay for the Internet, for email, for the software I use. I'm not suffering through ads. One project I'm working on is sorting out how to get the Pi-hole to block YouTube ads 100%. I don't see them on my Linux latops because of Nano Adblock, but my kids see them on their iPads. For some reason no one (yet) seems to be able to sort out how to block ad content on YouTube 100%. There has to be a way.
Does it really matter if they are fraudulent? Most advertisers measure (and are willing to pay for) conversions, not clicks. So even if there are lots of fake clicks, the number of purchases wouldn't change.
If advertisers have to pay for more than their conversion rates justify they will stop advertising on reddit which forces reddit to solve the fake clicks problem.
Many ads are not clicked on by a real person, but a bot, or someone clicking ads as fast as possible because it is their job.
Many comments would be considered "fraudulent" in the same sense, in that they were not authored by a real person, but a bot, or someone writing comments as fast as possible because it is their job.
I'm pretty surprised the aws bot got through. I used to be responsible for detecting fraud for ads in the past and we had access to a blacklist that likely would include a lot of these ips. If we didn't do things like this, advertisers would actually stop working with us.
Does this actually matter? If you are doing online advertising, you should be able to attribute a particular visit to a specific ad campaign, so you can calculate your conversion rate. If Reddit has lots of bots, it just means your conversion rate for those ads will be lower, and you can adjust your spending accordingly. There are a lot of things that can significantly affect clicks other than fraudulent clicks (popups people click on by accident, small "close" buttons, mobile vs desktop, etc.), so I think evaluating your success based on just clicks is going to be pretty useless regardless.
The point the poster was making is that they were paying money for clicks that had no chance of generating any conversion - and that it's Reddit's responsibility to detect those and not charge for them. So they're not complaining about lower conversion rate, but lower bang for their buck.
I don't see how they can be sure based on their criteria that those are fraudulent clicks. They could be web crawlers, users with various ad blocking tech, and so on. Going straight to fraud is premature.
I’m getting the same ad on the reddit app over and over again for what feels like a year, and it’s so bad I would never even think of clicking on it.
Now that I write this, I notice that’s actually true for most ads I see because they would require a pihole and I haven’t gotten around to setting one up.
It really feels like the ad business is inherently flawed these days. Who clicks on ads? How many of those are going through with a purchase? There is just way too many and poorly created ads for any brand to stand out from all that garbage people get shoved in their face all day.
This is less of a problem for pay-for-action type ads.
If you send X number of people to your site with Y conversions, it doesn't really matter that 'bots don't buy' - because the $Z spent on ads for Y conversions is the metric used.
It's much more of a problem for impressions or for ads without directly measured value.
It's one of the reasons Google makes so much money, the spend is generally optimized for the return, not for 'how many visitors are fake'.
[+] [-] earthboundkid|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nvr219|5 years ago|reply
I was watching a screen share on someone else's computer who was looking at a news article and I was completely shocked at the experience. How do people live without adblock?
[+] [-] zokier|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] loosetypes|5 years ago|reply
Where I clicked while the page is still loading. But by the time my click is registered, an ad has loaded in the target location.
I suppose you could say loading ads asynchronously improves the user experience, but my skeptical experience is they intentionally load in high activity localities.
Every time it feels like a bait and switch.
[+] [-] jedberg|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _jjkk|5 years ago|reply
This is the whole reason they do so much tracking and analysis, to suss out the idiots who'll just buy whatever is shoved in front of them.
[+] [-] fma|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] enjeyw|5 years ago|reply
I click on these adds, and if I like what I see, I'll buy it. I feel a lot more comfortable supporting small businesses that someone has poured their heart and sole into. I want to see these companies thrive, and if targeted advertising is the way I'm alerted to them, then so be it!
[+] [-] alkonaut|5 years ago|reply
Don’t show ad-network ads.
[+] [-] rsync|5 years ago|reply
In the very beginning - say, circa 1995 when I was building my first websites - I would click on almost every banner ad I saw.
I wanted to send a signal to advertisers, and to the market in general, that there really were people out there.
I was trying to do my part to care for, and feed, the infant industry I was taking part in.
[+] [-] SkyBelow|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cbsmith|5 years ago|reply
To demonstrate Reddit Ads isn't doing click fraud protection, you should try to generate a fraudulent click yourself. Looking at what is getting through and finding that a lot of it as easily identifiable as fraudulent is NOT a valid signal.
It's incredibly likely that there are far more bots that are being blocked and that the bots that are getting through have invested a lot of effort in to fooling Reddit's fraud protection, but really don't care at all about fooling the landing page site (and of course, there are a lot more such sites, so it's a lot more expensive to design & operate a system that would fool all the other sites). Consequently, they're "easily identifiable" (though in truth the author is unfortunately use a very crude model for identifying fraud which will include a ton of false positives) by the landing page, but not by Reddit.
[+] [-] danpalmer|5 years ago|reply
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 improve over time as their ad network gains traction.
[+] [-] ufmace|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dantheman|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Loughla|5 years ago|reply
Like TV. That way my data is safe, and I'm still exposed to your ads that are relevant to people visiting 'x' site.
[+] [-] Larrikin|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] libraryatnight|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryandrake|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cj|5 years ago|reply
I know a lot of very non-technical people, some of who dislike facebook in general, talk about how good facebook is at showing them ads that actually get them to discover and buy new products.
The people I've heard this sentiment from don't feel like they were manipulated into buying something that ultimately didn't meet expectations. I commonly hear things like "I can't believe how good the Facebook ads are. I only see ads for really nice Blouses in colors and sizes that I like. I've bought nice things via Facebook ads".
Granted, it's usually followed up by "I can't believe Facebook is able to be that good at showing me the right ads" ... but people I've talked to seem to feel neutral about the creepiness of it, I'm guessing because the upside is they get to discover and buy cool new things that they otherwise wouldn't have known about.
(Personally I don't like ad targeting on the basis of companies abusing / selling / harvesting data about me... but for the average person I think seeing well targeted ads is positive UX compared with showing non-targeted ads)
[+] [-] smileybarry|5 years ago|reply
AdSense then proceeded to push just that one "Pebble Smartwatch" ad on me, everywhere. Even a page with multiple ad blocks just had several of them -- sometimes all of them -- the same text ad for Pebble. It became more annoying than helpful because I was already going to buy one, it just tried to push me to buy it for a higher price.
I turned ad personalization off again and now any ads I get are mostly just related to the current page's content.
[+] [-] Nextgrid|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dekerta|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jellicle|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LeifCarrotson|5 years ago|reply
I don't think that anyone would disagree with you that true product discovery - educating you about a thing you didn't know about that solves a problem you have - is a benefit of good advertising. Lots of advertising isn't about product discovery, for sure, it's about persuading you to buy a thing you don't want and reminding you about a product you already know about and building an image about the product, and many people want to get off the hedonistic, materialistic treadmill that such persuasion pulls towards, but let's ignore that for now and assume that targeted ads lead to a benefit to the consumer of improved product discovery.
However, I don't think this is a very big benefit, in the real world. I can count maybe 3 things that I've bought in the past year or so where product discovery was important to me, where I was genuinely surprised that the solution was that easy and available. Heck, one was such a big benefit, I'll share: I changed the faucet hardware in my bathroom vanity, but instead of laying on my back and trying to turn the nuts by hand or squeeze in a pair of channel-locks between the sink and the wall, this time I got a targeted ad in my Amazon search results for the faucet advertising a basin wrench, which I didn't know was a thing. That's genuine product discovery, it saved me a little discomfort and a little time, and cost $6. I like the basin wrench, but if targeted ads didn't exist and I could pay a third party to provide me with the same advice I get from targeted ads, I'd value the service at maybe $2/year.
Targeted ads, especially as they're currently implemented, do have a cost to you as a consumer. It's largely invisible to non-technical users, but they do have a significant cost to your privacy. They cost computing cycles and battery life. They cost control of your devices, of your software, and of the websites you browse. Personally, those are pretty significant costs to me. And worst of all, IMO, they have a huge cost in mental fatigue, clamoring for my attention, because for every targeted ad that matches the "has this problem/wants to solve it with this product" combination there are 10,000 that fail one or the other condition. I value these costs pretty high, I bought an SBC just to run PiHole, I pay for Netflix so my TV is ad-free, I buy songs on my phone and wear noise-cancelling headphones in the shop at work so I don't have to listen to the incessant f*ing radio ads. Ugh. And there's little chance I can do anything about the billboards on my commute, though those are contextually targeted to my area rather than invasively targeted. I've probably spent hundreds of dollars avoiding ads, if I could pay someone hundreds more to make the entire industry disappear from my perception I would do so in a heartbeat.
That said, it's not possible to put a number on either the cost or the benefit that's true for everyone. Personally, I feel that those advocating targeted ads generally underestimate how much data is being collected, overestimate the benefits of product discovery, and underestimate the benefits available from alternative, less consumer-costly mechanisms for targeting, like content/context-based targeting.
How many dollars per year do you think the benefits of product discovery, as provided by non-GPDR, non-CCPA, no-holds-barred targeted advertising is worth to you? What price would you put on its costs?
[+] [-] Allower|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Dahoon|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] notmine1337|5 years ago|reply
Online advertising is a giant scam.
[+] [-] thrownaway954|5 years ago|reply
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 :)
[+] [-] user5994461|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ffpip|5 years ago|reply
It is based off uBlock Origin. Just use uBlock Origin.
[+] [-] dheera|5 years ago|reply
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.)
[+] [-] surround|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crumbshot|5 years ago|reply
Are there any downsides to using this?
[+] [-] sincerely|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rsync|5 years ago|reply
Just look it up - it's basically a cloud-based pi-hole and it's wonderful.
[+] [-] justinbaker84|5 years ago|reply
Why you ask? Because if the huge companies buying ads wanted to actually measure everything it would be extremely time consuming and expensive. It is a lot easier to pretend the problem doesn’t exist and just go with the flow.
So small companies with small budgets are actually a lot better at measuring results in most cases. Also online only businesses are a lot better at it. Measuring the offline impact of online ads is very hard.
But the bulk of ad dollars are spent by huge companies with huge bureaucracies. So game theory says you need to capture those dollars to win.
Source – I’ve been doing digital marketing for the last 12 years at a variety of companies.
[+] [-] ramenandtrance|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] commonturtle|5 years ago|reply
If advertisers have to pay for more than their conversion rates justify they will stop advertising on reddit which forces reddit to solve the fake clicks problem.
[+] [-] tehwebguy|5 years ago|reply
I was advertising officially licensed Minecraft merch (cardboard steve heads, foam pickaxes) and it did extremely well in MC / Gaming subreddits.
[+] [-] woadwarrior01|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jasonmorton|5 years ago|reply
Many comments would be considered "fraudulent" in the same sense, in that they were not authored by a real person, but a bot, or someone writing comments as fast as possible because it is their job.
[+] [-] lovehashbrowns|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GhostVII|5 years ago|reply
I'm not in advertising though so I have no idea.
[+] [-] SuperCuber|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] malwarebytess|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ffritz|5 years ago|reply
Now that I write this, I notice that’s actually true for most ads I see because they would require a pihole and I haven’t gotten around to setting one up.
It really feels like the ad business is inherently flawed these days. Who clicks on ads? How many of those are going through with a purchase? There is just way too many and poorly created ads for any brand to stand out from all that garbage people get shoved in their face all day.
[+] [-] jariel|5 years ago|reply
If you send X number of people to your site with Y conversions, it doesn't really matter that 'bots don't buy' - because the $Z spent on ads for Y conversions is the metric used.
It's much more of a problem for impressions or for ads without directly measured value.
It's one of the reasons Google makes so much money, the spend is generally optimized for the return, not for 'how many visitors are fake'.
Though it's a problem.
[+] [-] orange_joe|5 years ago|reply