The article is about email marketing. Some company has a proprietary algorithm that purportedly detects whether a click is legitimate based on 8y of development and data collection.
It’s definitely a race against the growing capabilities of the models in use and one that will be very difficult to win which is why there has been a significant push toward verification across the Internet—not because of the children, but because of the revenue.
Big picture, it kind of blew my mind a few years ago when I realized this: If one concern is the surveillance panopticon thing, it's mitigated by the fact that online advertising itself is a business "fraught" with the fact that there is just as much of an incentive for the seller of ads to be loose with the truth and to use those sorts of tactics as it is for anyone else.
That's probably why Google tolerates all the blatant fraud against them by the avalanche of spam sites ruining the service. They're frauding google but google is frauding advertisers and they wouldn't be able to commit fraud to such a high degree if they couldn't tell advertisers that their ads got 10 gorillion fake impressions.
Surprising it is taking advertisers this long to wake up, considering the decades I've been reading articles on HN about the massive fraud rates from entire fraud ecosystems.
The saying in marketing used to be: "Half of all marketing dollars are wasted, but we never know which half".
In the internet, it seems to be more like "90% are wasted" and literally never even get a human impression, nevermind a human click-thru and sale.
What was always surprising to me was how the advertisers just went along with the scam. Perhaps as if the marketers' bonuses depended more on advertisement budget spent instead of sales increased.
If that's the case, what is making them catch on now?
It was generally believed that "pivot to video" was entirely fraudulent.
What's happening now is the retreat from the open internet; users are either taking the Google AI search summary as gospel and not clicking through, or just going to chatgpt by themselves. Traffic from actual humans to non-FAANG pages is falling.
Back when 90% of ad spending was wasted, they still made money from the 10% that resulted in sales. That expectation was built into the CPM, and hence the ad budget.
With the amount of bot traffic I'm seeing these days, I would guess that the waste ratio is more like 99% now. That means a 90% reduction in conversions for the same ad budget. Surely someone is feeling the difference.
The entire internet ad business has never made sense to me. Have you ever clicked any of the links? The landing pages were always confusing and not at all designed for you to engage with them.
I used to think, okay, I guess they don't care about visiting their sites and just want to get eyeball impressions to stay relevant in the cultural zeitgeist.
Then I learned how ads worked in the print industry, where it is assumed in the calculation that every magazine changes hands through at least twenty people who all look at all ads. So maybe everyone was just already used to getting screwed over paying for ads.
Then there's the fear of missing out angle. People paying for ads don't know whether it makes a different, but are too scared to find out. I also once read about a small business that took that risk and found out not paying for internet ads made no difference whatsoever.
Maybe it's time for an entire country to decide to just straight up outlaw all internet ads for a couple years and force everyone to find out what happens.
It is possible you do remember brands you've seen advertised but just don't remember you saw an ad.
I remember a long time ago seeing a study that asked people if they had seen ads for the California lottery and if so what they remembered about them. They also asked people if they played the lottery and if so why they played.
What they found was that in the people who said they had not seen ads and in the people who aid they had seen them but could remember anything about them a large fraction of those who played gave reasons that were almost word for word quote from slogans from the ads.
OTOH, I'm quite sure if you came to me with a truckload of $100 bills and a gun, put the gun to my head and asked me to tell you anything about an advert I saw 3 minutes ago, the truckload of cash is mine if I can say anything, and you'll shoot me if I can't, you'll end up shooting me. I'm pretty sure that is true for the next 100 people also.
There's a survey that pops up on Twitter/X every now and then asking about a specific brand and it always asks whether I remember seeing an ad for that brand... I usually cannot, but I'm going to assume that X knows whether it showed me an ad or not.
Completely agreed about being influenced without knowing it.
5 years from now: "I'm glad we banned ads from the internet, I can drink and ice cold coca-cola in peace now, it refreshes my totally human body".
Ads are going to be very very difficult to ban as the incentive behind ads will never go away. With that said, less ads is always better, but it will be a tit for tat battle.
I'm not saying all ads. Only Internet ads. Though, I'd very much be behind banning all unsolicited ads, too.
Or make it a human right to not be exposed to unsolicited ads. They are effectively a psychological attack. They target your mind with the express goal to alter your perception. And they work. It's baffling how this psychological warfare against everyone is legal.
Open web display inventory is a mess. Nearly entirely fraudulent. Every person in the supply chain for open web display inventory, sometimes even including the Chief Marketing Officer of the firm purchasing the ads, is incentivized to turn a blind eye to fraudulent impressions. Fraud is ultimately paid for by shareholders and owners.
This is because everyone in the supply chain is paid per impression, so they don't have any real incentive to root out (or even discover/report) fraud unless the buyer is leaning on them to do so. An unsophisticated firm looking primarily at reach and impressions as key performance indicators sees those KPIs inflated by fraudulent impressions, so even the purchaser isn't really incentivized to discover fraud in those instances. And if you suddenly decide you do care about fraud after not caring about it previously, you're faced with the prospect of having to report to your stakeholders that the metrics you've been giving them have been bullshit for years.
If you're looking at conversions as your key performance indicator then you do care about fraud and will lean on your ad buyer to discover and reduce it, or else just avoid open web display inventory entirely and buy exclusively on platform properties like LinkedIn or Instagram.
There have been various efforts to reduce fraud for a long, long time. Obviously nothing so far has really comprehensively worked. But there are some people in the industry who do make their money and earn their reputations as fraud-fighters, and they continue pushing new solutions. If the fraud problem for open web display inventory could actually be solved it would probably result in a bonanza for anyone positioned to capitalize on a fraud-free supply chain, so some people are incentivized to chase the dream (or at least convince others that they're earnestly chasing the dream).
A good marketing business model would probably be “I’ll only show your marketing material to my other customers, since they are evidently likely to fall for marketing material.”
I wonder if it is just the first internet-native generation getting older and getting into decision making positions. People with built-in ad blockers in their brains.
> What was always surprising to me was how the advertisers just went along with the scam.
Talk to them. They can't resist the temptation of throwing in a few bucks (whether that is $20, a few hundreds or a few thousands) into the online advertising casino whenever it's a slow day in the office.
Then Meta will tell them that their ad reached 40 000 people or Google will tell you that your website had 3000 more clicks, but you don't see any increase in sales and think that you'll do better next time.
Or if it's a bigger business with a dedicated team advertising. Of course they're not going to tell the boss that it's bullshit and doesn't increase sales - then they'll loose their jobs!
A lot of people willingly get into scams because they think they're entering a position to be "in on it." Lots of ponzi scheme victims are like this. They know it's a ponzi schene and they know how ponzis work, but they think they'll be one of the people who cashes out before it ends. The breaking point is when the wrong person tries to cash out and they realize it already ended a while ago.
If your service providers are funded by ads, and ads begin demanding "verified clicks", your service providers are greatly incentivised to begin pushing for locking down your ability to run what you want on your own hardware. Through manipulation of web standards, or through lobbying.
BTW Google had another go at forcing Treacherous Computing on people. This time it's a reCAPTCHA successor, which requires the user to scan a QR code using a Google/Apple owned phone.
I often wondered if this strategy could work with email/phone scammers as well?
Have an LLM write positive email responses, stringing them along as long as possible.
Imagine the Nigerian prince of scams... instead of getting 0.1% response rates that he can work on, he gets 99% responses of encouraging replies stringing him along. He would drown in false positives.
On the other hand, the Nigerian prince of scams would probably just use his LLM:s to take care of the answers, and we'll have email storms of LLM:s stringing along LLM:s.
> On the other hand, the Nigerian prince of scams would probably just use his LLM:s to take care of the answers, and we'll have email storms of LLM:s stringing along LLM:s.
I already see that happening in other ways.
On a forum I frequent there's been a user who instantly replies to new articles with a long irrelevant blahblah with a bunch of bulletpoints and emoji. And a while later another user started insta-replying to everyone with the same kind of crap.
Both were banned after a while and the forum now has a stricter "No AI" policy but even that caused some uproar, some users say they want it so they can be more elaborate without having the linguistic skills. But personally I'd love to see it go because most of these replies added nothing to the conversation.
You can do nice things with AI, yes. But it needs a human to tell it what to do. If you just put in a generic prompt "Write something insightful about this article" it's going to provide nothing but slop.
If not illegal, what if it's used as justification to further lock down browsers and operating systems? Apple makes a ton of money selling traffic to Google and has a vested interest in preserving the effectiveness of targeted advertising.
That will happen anyway. All the manufacturers want to do this so they can route every install through their app store and collect rent from it. It's Apple's primary source of profit these days.
Besides, I'm not going to suck up to the big corpos just so they might leave me alone if I'm lucky, tbh. I'm too rebellious for that.
I'd be happy with a lot of the current websites to disappear. There's way too much crap around anyway. And the ones that are worth it, yeah I'd pay for them.
Besides, I don't really care what the replacement business model is. I just don't want this one.
You know, there was a time when people actually paid to have their content hosted online. You read that right. Instead of trying to make money with a website, people PAID money to have a website.
I think the end user will benefit from any of this happening. As a user myself, I'm so tired of "forced ads", which makes me think a high percentage of ads revenue is fake/generated, not genuine.
The HTTP protocol and HTML fromat that Tim Berners Lee created, were meant for sharing documentation and information which foster collaboration via internet. It wasn't really meant for doing business in trusted environments.
The WWW acronym should stand for Worldwide Wild West.
I can't read the whole article, but beyond verified clicks in email I worry that tech like Passkeys is going to get used against us. As soon as you take away the friction of entering passwords, and let passkeys authenticate automatically, why not have authentication / authorization for every action?
I get prompted to add Passkeys constantly. It makes me wonder if vendors will start doing it automatically "for your own good", like DoH in browser.
A little off topic but for anyone using Thunderbird, I highly recommend BetterUnsubscribe[1] to help combat spam. Since installing I've basically eliminated marketing emails from my inbox. I've used tools like unroll.me in the past but I found that a one-time review doesn't really help much since every signup and every form entry always risks you getting more marketing emails and having to go to another service all the time creates alot of friction. That extension lets you unsubscribe the moment you see a marketing email hit your inbox.
43 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 21.6 ms ] threadWhat makes a click 'verified', bots can still click links with browser use anyway and you will not be able to tell.
The article is about email marketing. Some company has a proprietary algorithm that purportedly detects whether a click is legitimate based on 8y of development and data collection.
It’s definitely a race against the growing capabilities of the models in use and one that will be very difficult to win which is why there has been a significant push toward verification across the Internet—not because of the children, but because of the revenue.
The saying in marketing used to be: "Half of all marketing dollars are wasted, but we never know which half".
In the internet, it seems to be more like "90% are wasted" and literally never even get a human impression, nevermind a human click-thru and sale.
What was always surprising to me was how the advertisers just went along with the scam. Perhaps as if the marketers' bonuses depended more on advertisement budget spent instead of sales increased.
If that's the case, what is making them catch on now?
What's happening now is the retreat from the open internet; users are either taking the Google AI search summary as gospel and not clicking through, or just going to chatgpt by themselves. Traffic from actual humans to non-FAANG pages is falling.
Perhaps the threat that "AI" will soon be the only "eyes" that see (and subsequently ignore) their online adverts?
With the amount of bot traffic I'm seeing these days, I would guess that the waste ratio is more like 99% now. That means a 90% reduction in conversions for the same ad budget. Surely someone is feeling the difference.
I used to think, okay, I guess they don't care about visiting their sites and just want to get eyeball impressions to stay relevant in the cultural zeitgeist.
Then I learned how ads worked in the print industry, where it is assumed in the calculation that every magazine changes hands through at least twenty people who all look at all ads. So maybe everyone was just already used to getting screwed over paying for ads.
Then there's the fear of missing out angle. People paying for ads don't know whether it makes a different, but are too scared to find out. I also once read about a small business that took that risk and found out not paying for internet ads made no difference whatsoever.
Maybe it's time for an entire country to decide to just straight up outlaw all internet ads for a couple years and force everyone to find out what happens.
I remember a long time ago seeing a study that asked people if they had seen ads for the California lottery and if so what they remembered about them. They also asked people if they played the lottery and if so why they played.
What they found was that in the people who said they had not seen ads and in the people who aid they had seen them but could remember anything about them a large fraction of those who played gave reasons that were almost word for word quote from slogans from the ads.
OTOH, I'm quite sure if you came to me with a truckload of $100 bills and a gun, put the gun to my head and asked me to tell you anything about an advert I saw 3 minutes ago, the truckload of cash is mine if I can say anything, and you'll shoot me if I can't, you'll end up shooting me. I'm pretty sure that is true for the next 100 people also.
The question is, which matters?
Completely agreed about being influenced without knowing it.
Ads are going to be very very difficult to ban as the incentive behind ads will never go away. With that said, less ads is always better, but it will be a tit for tat battle.
Or make it a human right to not be exposed to unsolicited ads. They are effectively a psychological attack. They target your mind with the express goal to alter your perception. And they work. It's baffling how this psychological warfare against everyone is legal.
This is because everyone in the supply chain is paid per impression, so they don't have any real incentive to root out (or even discover/report) fraud unless the buyer is leaning on them to do so. An unsophisticated firm looking primarily at reach and impressions as key performance indicators sees those KPIs inflated by fraudulent impressions, so even the purchaser isn't really incentivized to discover fraud in those instances. And if you suddenly decide you do care about fraud after not caring about it previously, you're faced with the prospect of having to report to your stakeholders that the metrics you've been giving them have been bullshit for years.
If you're looking at conversions as your key performance indicator then you do care about fraud and will lean on your ad buyer to discover and reduce it, or else just avoid open web display inventory entirely and buy exclusively on platform properties like LinkedIn or Instagram.
There have been various efforts to reduce fraud for a long, long time. Obviously nothing so far has really comprehensively worked. But there are some people in the industry who do make their money and earn their reputations as fraud-fighters, and they continue pushing new solutions. If the fraud problem for open web display inventory could actually be solved it would probably result in a bonanza for anyone positioned to capitalize on a fraud-free supply chain, so some people are incentivized to chase the dream (or at least convince others that they're earnestly chasing the dream).
I wonder if it is just the first internet-native generation getting older and getting into decision making positions. People with built-in ad blockers in their brains.
Or it could be “AI” clicks, who knows?
Talk to them. They can't resist the temptation of throwing in a few bucks (whether that is $20, a few hundreds or a few thousands) into the online advertising casino whenever it's a slow day in the office.
Then Meta will tell them that their ad reached 40 000 people or Google will tell you that your website had 3000 more clicks, but you don't see any increase in sales and think that you'll do better next time.
Or if it's a bigger business with a dedicated team advertising. Of course they're not going to tell the boss that it's bullshit and doesn't increase sales - then they'll loose their jobs!
If your service providers are funded by ads, and ads begin demanding "verified clicks", your service providers are greatly incentivised to begin pushing for locking down your ability to run what you want on your own hardware. Through manipulation of web standards, or through lobbying.
I can't wait for the future where I need a burner phone and a robotic arm just to browse the internet.
Have an LLM write positive email responses, stringing them along as long as possible.
Imagine the Nigerian prince of scams... instead of getting 0.1% response rates that he can work on, he gets 99% responses of encouraging replies stringing him along. He would drown in false positives.
On the other hand, the Nigerian prince of scams would probably just use his LLM:s to take care of the answers, and we'll have email storms of LLM:s stringing along LLM:s.
I already see that happening in other ways.
On a forum I frequent there's been a user who instantly replies to new articles with a long irrelevant blahblah with a bunch of bulletpoints and emoji. And a while later another user started insta-replying to everyone with the same kind of crap.
Both were banned after a while and the forum now has a stricter "No AI" policy but even that caused some uproar, some users say they want it so they can be more elaborate without having the linguistic skills. But personally I'd love to see it go because most of these replies added nothing to the conversation.
You can do nice things with AI, yes. But it needs a human to tell it what to do. If you just put in a generic prompt "Write something insightful about this article" it's going to provide nothing but slop.
https://lennytroll.com/
https://github.com/sladesys/LennyTroll
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rz2LQCm4ymY
Besides, I'm not going to suck up to the big corpos just so they might leave me alone if I'm lucky, tbh. I'm too rebellious for that.
For what alternative? Paying money to each website to access it?
Besides, I don't really care what the replacement business model is. I just don't want this one.
The WWW acronym should stand for Worldwide Wild West.
That's why I created my own advertising platform for my niche. Loaded server side, only geo and context targeted.
No cookies, no focus on views.
Only click tracking (minimal bot noise).
I do have to find advertisers myself, but I rather go after advertisers with a good name than display scam ads for toe fungi remedies.
I get prompted to add Passkeys constantly. It makes me wonder if vendors will start doing it automatically "for your own good", like DoH in browser.
[1]: https://github.com/LucBennett/BetterUnsubscribe