How 'One Weird Trick' Conquered The Internet

[orangethirty]

I stumbled into some weird data as to how startups may be able to use this kind of technique without exploiting people. Yeah, it sounds hard to believe. But you have to understand that every technique out there can be used for good. Anyhow, turns out that there are some tricks that these type of advertisers use to increase their response. One just needs to carefully read the source of their pages (specially the Javascript), and you will find lots of interesting stuff in it. Just beware. Once you dig into this type of advertising your view on the subject might change dramatically. You can learn more about it here: http://bit.ly/13wOrj2

Edit:

16 clicks on 2 minutes. This sort of technique works on everybody, including smart hackers. Its mostly about talking about what you want. Some people want to lose weight, others control their diabetes. Apparently, lots of people want to learn of a little known advertising secrets for startups. I should make a Copy as a Service startup. (:

See how many are suckered into clicking: http://bit.ly/13wOrj2+

[xeper]

I grew up in Utah. Living there taught me at least one thing that helps me deal with certain types of more fanatical or difficult people I meet and deal with on a near daily basis:

    Everyone wants to be part of a secret society or have some esoteric knowledge that
    makes them feel set-apart from the norm.

Unfortunately, this is incredibly easy to exploit and I've watched nearly every member of my family get taken in by someone or something promising them unrealistic benefits from some 'secret' or another.

[astine]

I don't think that anyone who clicked that link really believed that they were going to find out "one weird trick," so much as they just really wanted to know what you were really linking to.

[turtlerose]

Oh, come on. There's such an obvious difference of situations here it's not even worth going into.

[runn1ng]

Amazing. People click on stuff that is in comments. Genius.

[dan1234]

> 16 clicks on 2 minutes.

How many people usually click on the links in comments? Unless you have something to compare it with, your experiment is not useful.

[rhizome]

16 clicks on 2 minutes. This sort of technique works on everybody, including smart hackers.

Assuming facts not in evidence. Are you saying that all HN readers are "smart hackers?" ...or even that there's a greater likelihood of them being one simply by virtue of reading the site?

[emhart]

Some of us just click because we like seeing the punchline :)

[X4]

I would say nice try, but after seeing your EDIT, I'm shocked that it works that good.

[greesil]

Thank you. Best comment I've seen all year.

[lucisferre]

The value of "tricked" clicks vs. relevant clicks seems dubious to me.

[derleth]

Congratulations. You're smart enough to abuse a position of some minor trust. That's never been done before. The fact your draw a nonsensical conclusion from it just makes the moment that much more special.

[cLeEOGPw]

HN users have established a certain amount of trust in each other that lets us evaluate links in user's comments differently than links in other places, especially if the comment is upvoted. Your "technique" shows exactly that. If you would write anything like that on a thread NOT about advertising, you would just be downvoted and not get almost any clicks, so I don't agree that the same techniques work on everybody. Screening technique exists exactly for that - to screen people on who the techniques won't work.

[CGamesPlay]

http://www.oneweirdkerneltrick.com/

[dimatura]

I made this! Please see the slides, they are more "up to date" than the respective papers.

[azmenthe]

It is my professional dream goal to submit to SIGBOVIK

[hrktb]

Well done. I really wondered for 5 seconds if I was on a domain parking site judging from the design and stock photos.

[zem]

that is brilliant. also, it looks like someone spent a surprising amount of time and trouble on it.

[Groxx]

That is one of the funniest websites (and slides! I'm dying here!) I've seen in a long time. many many thanks for the link!

[patmcguire]

Oh my god, how deep are there fake links?

[iamthepieman]

YES! I want guaranteed, risk free INCOME from Algebraic Geometry!

This, this is lovely

[StavrosK]

That's amazing.

[MartinCron]

I would feel a lot better about Slate (and everyone else) if they didn't run those "SPONSORED FROM AROUND THE WEB" pseudo-article links at the bottom of each page with this exact same kind of manipulative ads in them.

Come on Slate. You think better of your audience than this, right?

[eli]

That's Outbrain: http://www.outbrain.com/engage/

In theory the ads are targeted to the content of the site, but I agree that they're often pretty crummy.

[wutbrodo]

A couple of years ago I read an NBC article[1] about low-quality, spammy ads on the Web. The article was decidedly negative about them....and yet (at least at the time) the page was full of them: "Billionaire prepares for financial ruin" etc, all the AdBlade/Taboola-type shit. It was pretty ridiculous, given that the tone of the article from the very beginning was positively railing against low-quality ads.

[1] http://www.nbcnews.com/id/32676456/ns/business-the_big_money...

[brandnewlow]

They are a plague run by publishers to try to boost their own traffic and revenue via arbitrage. I complained to the Slate folks about the image as running under their articles these day. Those are really awful.

[ibudiallo]

One weird trick that conquered the internet.

It looks like it worked, cause I clicked and read the article only to find out that it is exactly what I thought in the first place. But still I spent a good 10 minutes on it.

[valgaze]

Look at article #3: http://snag.gy/K0uB5.jpg

[brandnewlow]

When we launched Perfect Audience, we wanted to make things easy to use and as open as possible to marketers looking to get into retargeting.

Yes, we were a bit naive.

The sheer multitude of bad actors participating in the ad/marketing world is bewildering. It tooks us a solid month after launch to get processes in place that let us weed out the bozos swiftly without tying up the whole team.

We have many many of these "one trick" people sign up and try to use our tools. We'll keep turning them away and staying vigilant for the next ruse.

[nhebb]

> weed out the bozos swiftly without tying up the whole team.

I bet there's a trick to that. You should sell an ebook.

[iopq]

One weird trick that an advertising company found to filter out low quality ads. Click here!

[jacques_chester]

"Marketers hate him"

[MartinCron]

Keep fighting the good fight.

[M4v3R]

The article doesn't seem to mention this, but there is another trick in these guys arsenals - fake news articles about their products.

They build entire webpages, along with side-stories and article comments that support their product. They look SO real that once I (and I consider myself pretty tech-savvy, having access to Internet for 15 years) fell for it briefly, and then had to explain it to my wife who stumbled upon them as well. I was truly impressed by amount of work these guys went through not only to write a pretty long science-looking article, but to build a whole (albeit pretty static) webpage and write realistic comment sections. Sadly, this whole effort is done to deceive other people.

[junto]

This is the same as the 'Nigerian 419' fraud concept. They fill the email with spelling and grammar mistakes and in doing so, they filter out the marginally intelligent, resulting in a pre-filter to attract the most gullible.

The crappy, hand drawn ads, the dire videos, and the bad production have the same effect. The punter needs to be a gullible fool, since a fool and his money are soon parted.

[throwawayg99]

I work with a dozen or so people who are involved in this sort of work. I think it is very interesting to see how they rationalize and deal with their moral compass internally.

One of the guys is the most caring, liberal, loving person you'd ever meet; he justifies being involved in this sort of skeezy marketing work as "I can take a small amount from a lot of people and amplify the result to do good with a lot of money."

He genuinely believes this. A lot of the other guys simply try not to see the "punters" (potential customers [1]) as real people, they are disconnected through the impersonal nature of the internet.

[1] http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british/punter_2

[rogerbinns]

> “Research on persuasion shows the more arguments you list in favor of something, regardless of the quality of those arguments, the more that people tend to believe it,”

[1] has some different research which claims that people average the arguments made, rather than summing them up, which most expect. It won't make any difference if you have a whole bunch of low value arguments, but will if there a combination of strong points and weaker ones.

[1] http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/10/the_presentation_mistake_you...

[username223]

I'm sorry if this is trivial, but “what’s holding you back from the big penis you deserve" has to be one of the greatest phrases ever written.

[mistercow]

>Why are the illustrations done by small children using MS Paint?

None of those images look like the were drawn by a small child. The ones in the screen cap vary from "kind of crappy, but obviously done by an adult" to "probably the work of professional illustrator".

[cpeterso]

Another "weird trick" sites use is to include numbers in headlines. The sidebar of this very Slate article lists headlines for "7 of John Adams' greatest insults" and "'A Different World': 12 Things We Learned". There must some psychological lure that makes readers think "oh, that is such a specific number that it must be a very important and definitive list!" :\

[arnehormann]

If you have to watch the video for 15-30 minutes, I think it's not the persuasion aspect but probably loading different sites in an iframe to defraud advertisers: http://www.behind-the-enemy-lines.com/2011/03/uncovering-adv...

[corwinstephen]

The culmination of this article was just as obvious and unsurprising as the very ads it describes.

[Havoc]

I like how one of the stories in slate's sidebar is "The Secret Ingredient [...] will blow your mind"

[callmeed]

Scams aside, it would be interesting to use some of these techniques on landing pages for legitimate, valuable SaaS apps.

"One weird trick to improve your SEO/conversions/customer satisfaction/whatver KPI" which links to a page with a crude, long-form, un-pausable video. After that, you could probably at least get them to create a trial account.

Has/would anyone try this?

[D9u]

Conquered the internet?

I don't think so. I've never clicked on any of those ads, and I'm sure that millions of other users of Ad Block, etc, have never even seen these ads.

Of interest to me was the author's reluctance to click on links due to malware threats.

Even when I used WinXP, years ago, I never have been infected with any malware, but then, I'm not the average PC user.

[sokrates]

> You've seen them.

No. AdBlock.

[Agathos]

How this stay-at-home mom used one weird trick to conquer the internet! Click here!

(And yes, that's how I parsed the link title at first glance.)

[RyanMcGreal]

Once again I give thanks for AdBlock.

[runn1ng]

Well... I excepted the article to go deeper. Investigate who actually pays these ads,,where does the money go, why are they allowed to basically lie in the ads.

Instead the author just clicked on the ads and watched the videos. Well, I can do that too.