Good luck on that. I have sympathy for OP, but running ads is really hard. It's why most people set targets for things that happen in the app (OP updated to a target of winning a game, not just installing), and why companies have entire teams dedicated to monitoring Google/Meta/X ads. Trial runs are often thousands of dollars, and it's easy to evaporate money. I've made the same mistakes, and its why y-combinator strongly recommends against running online ads, especially in the beginning.
this is unfortunately very common - I kept running very small ads regularly over many years (~10 years by now) and the % of bots has been steadily increasing, and Google doesn't really have any system to report those reliably to them. In fact, it's contrary to their incentives to investigate & fix these problems - unless they feel some pressure from competition...
What is the incentive for the bot owners? Why do the bots download and install the apps? It has some (very small) cost to them, and I don't understand the value for them.
I once did this by accident and without a bot farm. It was very lucrative.
What I did was create a game with an action button. Then I served ads right next to the action button. I didn’t realize people would miss click on the ads at a high rate, but they did. They fat fingered it, clicked the ad, I got paid.
I looked into it after a couple weeks because my click rate was crazy high.
If you have their IP addresses in your dashboard, go to Google Ads > Admin > Account Settings > IP Exclusions. Then, add the entire network/data center range there (i.e. 123.4.5.*). In 99% of cases, these bot networks are not run from residential providers. You can confirm IPs at https://ipgeolocation.io/
After running Google Ads for a couple of years, our current exclusion list has over 4000 networks just in the US.
This is one of the primary reasons why fraud actors purchase residential proxies in bulk now. Google "residential proxies for sale" for the tip of a huge grey/black market iceberg.
You know all those trojan infected smart TVs and home routers and such? That's one of the things they're doing.
Residential proxies are achieved in many, many ways. The most common is simply people installing software and leaving some checkbox checked, or agreeing to it unknowingly. In the same way that smart TV downloadable apps and games tend to include them.
It's a possibility. I don't know about CSAM but I know someone who was arrested for death threats sent to a politician after running a tor exit node. Eventually not charged, but he lost all his computing equipment for a couple of months
Considering the question was "has that every happened?" regarding the police getting a report and you having to explain the proxy to them, I guess you mean the answer is yes and your attitude is misplaced?
Exactly my thought. For, say, $50/month I can get a second ISP to my house, host the proxy (and only that) on that link, and enjoy free movies. It is cheaper than having 2-3 streaming service subscriptions.
You're underestimating the ease of use of these pirate boxes.
Also most of them are for pirating live TV. You can't watch live TV through Bittorrent, you just can't, it doesn't work that way. Sports fans need less than 5 seconds of latency relative to the loudest neighbor they can hear, or they'll hate your service.
ehh, subvert is a stretch. But yes, you too can be a minor accessory to scams run by thieves to rob advertisers, with enriching the world's largest ad company as a side-effect. Not exactly a Robin Hood situation given that tons of the advertisers being robbed are just normal small developers trying to get their apps out there.
Anyone can buy traffic on the proxy, not just click fraud, but cc fraud et al as well. Caveat emptor, it’s really not worth it compared to setting up a 3 USD per month Hetzner proxy box yourself, if you’re looking to pirate movies.
For some more context: We run a business based on data scraping and metered residential proxies have never been cheaper. Countries that used to be 10 USD/GB just ten years ago are down to 1 USD.
> Caveat emptor, it’s really not worth it compared to setting up a 3 USD per month Hetzner proxy box yourself, if you’re looking to pirate movies.
How does that work? Wouldn’t Hetzner know who you are (because you pay them), meaning that if you’re caught pirating on it they could just know it was you and hand you over?
And don’t think Herzner wouldn’t hand you over. My only experience with them was during a job, when an external company complained about something on a single section of a massive website (everything was legitimate, we weren’t doing anything remotely shady) and Hetzner straight up took the whole website down and demanded a change. Shoot first, ask later. I wasn’t directly involved with managing the website, but the whole thing soured me on Hetzner.
This is the bread and butter for commercial VPN services. The VPN knows who you are (maybe, unless you pay crypto/cash), and the rights-holders know your VPN address (from joining/logging a BitTorrent swarm, for instance), but the better providers keep no logs, and I'm guessing there's too many individuals to target effectively.
I've received a nasty letter from the ISP over BitTorrent (someone's phone joined my wifi, torrenting without my knowledge), but using a VPN seems sufficient. I think the Hetzener suggestion is a VPS for running the software stack. You could alternatively self host on hardware in your home.
Hetzner?! No, I would never use them if I wanted to host a pirate proxy myself. Very crude, trigger happy, operating in a country very cosy with all the police organisations.
100% this. Pirating in Germany is probably the stupidest thing one can do, because enforcement is done by individual lawyers via a process called Abmahnung. Courts (and therefore providers) are very friendly to those. Everyone knows someone who got "the letter".
One downside is that some websites will mysteriously stop working for you with no appeals process. Either because they flagged fraud attempts from your IP previously (like credential stuffing or using a stolen credit card), or because a risk assessor proactively flagged your IP as being rentable from a residential proxy dealer (e.g.: https://scamalytics.com/ip/64.178.177.226 - "Is this IP address part of a residential proxy network?").
Enabling the credential stuffing and stolen credit cards are also bad on their own. No sympathy for the ad companies, though.
It makes sense when someone else is paying for the power. The AI capabilities of mobile cpus is for pushing cloud based AI to your device. You pay the power bill while retaining the same lack of privacy as cloud hosted AI.
I'm pretty sure the company that owns the compute is the one paying for the power. Who would agree to have an ugly noisy cube in their property that they have to pay maintenance for? What would they get out of that deal?
Yeah, the usual approach here is to offer a free VPN service, and then piggyback traffic over the user’s internet provider. Much, much more scalable and cheaper than offering to put GPUs at a user’s home.
You can offer them a free anything, really. It's a pretty convenient way to pay, that mostly doesn't affect the user at all (unless their connection is very slow), but generates value.
Which hyperscalers are doing that? I've heard of one startup trying this, XFRA, currently in early pilot phases. But I'd be pretty surprised to hear that AWS or Google are paying people to host GPU clusters in their home.
Nobody wants to admit just how bad the bot problem is, because it starts to dig into the fact that advertising isn't nearly as effective as advertisers let on
> advertising isn't nearly as effective as advertisers let on
Most marketers should know exactly how effective their ads are by measuring to the end of the funnel. This is standard for most business and while bots are a problem, if you're judging online advertising at the front end of the funnel that's to a large part on them for a bad setup and/or optimisation.
If the marketer is an employee or a consultant, is it in their interest to show that the ad-spend they are controlling is high ROI, or low ROI.
Maybe this is a cynical take, but, if they get to the bottom of things, and show their boss/client that the ad-spend is not returning so much, it seems it would portend bad things for the marketer.
I really don't know, and it seems like a very hard problem.
Maybe this is the time for that Upton Sinclair quote:
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it,"
That's not how ad performance is measured. Your ROI is based on end conversions. You need to know if your leads are _good_, not just plentiful. A company that doesn't do this at the start will figure it out pretty quickly.
Ideally that would be the case that all ad-spend can be tracked through end conversions, and for many businesses it can be. But for much of the corporate world, you don't know where your end conversions come from. (Think Nike shoes, etc)
It's estimated about that 35% to 45% of all digital ad spend goes to brand awareness, video reach, and other upper-funnel methods where direct conversion tracking isn't possible.
"They get paid anyway" yeah not really. Businesses have margins and marketing budgets. There's only so much you can spend on ads and if those ads don't convert, you go elsewhere, you literally have to. You spends less on Google ads and more or Meta or other channels (influencers, marketplaces, etc. etc.)
Google has to be careful, ads that convert less are less valuable (duh) and what happens is not "well the business will just buy more ads", but "well the business has a 35% gross margin and marketing expenses already account for 20% of gross profit, they can't just buy more ads"
And while it may point at what we could do with Google and the likes, the risk profile is still a bit different (make many people ill or die vs "unknowingly" stealing some money).
I find online advertising crooked as hell. Google charges by the impression and knowingly allows huge percentages of fake impressions. How is that anything other than fraud?
It’s not because it’s online advertising. And that sucks.
I am not disagreeing it's outright fraud. I am disagreeing it's the same thing as water company not testing the water they distribute on purpose (or hiding the negative results).
I am asking because I maintain botnet ASNs that are spamming/phishing/scamming our customers, and this would be a nice complementary category for it.
Most often I realized that a lot of those "growth" companies have rotating ASNs that they go through after each larger spamming campaign. I'd assume they do the same thing in the admob/adclick world.
So would human downloads, too. Mass audiences do not buy apps. They sometimes buy in-app purchases after installing them, but in terms of games, it's mostly the 'casino games for children' genre that make 90% of that kind of revenue.
Also, all else being equal, earning potential of paid or subscription apps on Android is usually an order of magnitude less than on iOS, due to the self-selection effect of people who buy $1200 phones tend to have more disposable income than someone who buys the median Android phone which costs much less. So, trying to sell a paid casual game, especially on Android, is not going to pay the bills the way an ad-supported free app would. Sadly.
Search for "datadog" and the first result is a sponsored link for Datadog. I click that and datadog had to pay google. scroll a bit down and there's the "real" natural link.
If someone searches for a specific product, you could still have competitor ads in a relatively fair way, but you have to put them after the correct link. Putting them first is going to mislead so many people.
And you could advertise related products, or unrelated products. So many options there.
Feels unfair. Guess humans could be hired to try to prevent the situation in cases where it was on the obvious side of what was happening. Would increase the cost of ads or reduce ad network profits, and feel more fair?
The fairer thing is what Google _used_ to do: organic results in the main column, ads in the sidebar. Searchers get to see competitors without confusing them for the real thing.
Digital marketing is a solved problem. You pay a commission on verified real sales to affiliates, and they can do what the hell they please to make those sales. If somebody like Google or Meta cannot promise X amount of sales for Y amount of ad money spent, then you are a fool to give them any money. They have all the algorithms and profiles on everybody, so it's their job to match your product to customers. Why should you have to tweak who will be targeted?
Well, the answer is that many people owe their paycheck to not letting their employers or shareholders know that digital marketing is a solved problem.
Depends on what you're selling. If you do it right, Google will give you plenty of organic customers who want to buy your product - no ads needed. You can market as much as you want on Meta also without having to pay for ads.
But if you need stronger marketing than that, there will always be willing affiliates.
SEO is not nearly as effective as it used to be. Organic click through rates have been trending way down since AI responses were added to the top of the search results. So this really isn't just a case of "you're holding it wrong".
If you're selling something, you love having the AI talking about your product. The move to AI is not a negative for businesses wanting to reach customers organically - on the contrary.
The main problem with Google Ads is that Google tries to squeeze money out of you in all possible ways.
I think the only sane way tu run a Google Ads campaign is to:
- only enable Google Search ads (i.e. disable all third-party publishers -- this may be a bit extreme but it's good if you're advertisting a niche product that people are actually searching for)
- only use "exact match" keywords ("broad match" is so broad that Google will show your ads in completely unrelevant SERPs)
- disable AI Max
- disable all automations
- reject any of their "optimization" tips
- set a max CPC even if they say it's bad for you
In other words, reject everything they suggest you to do.
Maybe I'm wrong, or maybe this only works for my use case, but that's how I've been using Google Ads succesfully without wasting money.
yes, they are wasting money, they know it, but caveats:
famous saying 'i'd cut my ad budget in 1/2 if i knew which 1/2 to cut'
'attribution' is the holy grail of hard thing in marketing.
so they know for sure the channel spend is iffy.
but it's hard to measure, esp. for brand and indirect campaigns.
so as a 'starting point' - it's a very 'noisy channel problem'.
the next wild idea is that ads come from a marketing budget which has $X to spend, and they have to spend it.
this is where the ROI stuff is wildy upside down.
large companies with 'market power' have a lot of surplus. they put that towards relatively lucreative marketing. the $ must be spent.
the cmo makes a budget, allocates, the managers follow the campaign, front line staffers spend. they try to get the best results they can.
there is often an unbelievable lack of true roi concern in all of that.
sometimes it's very aggressive, aka for some keywords, for sure.
but a remarkable amount of $ is spent in very unnacountable way, over what are 'grey' channels anyhow.
the marketing ops person is going home at 5pm and does not care one bit about bots. they were paid to spend it, they did. Facebook is paid to 'show a chart of view' ... they did that. 'everyone is happy'.
im not saying the whole system works that way, but much of it does.
the wild part is - there is so much 'dumb big money' in ads, it makes the whole thing very inneficient.
companies like P&G have 'distribution monopolies' on so many packaged goods, they have to keep up brand awareness.
It's why so many commercials are for commodity products like home stuff - the market is huge, the market channels are locked, they pay $$$ for ads for 'toothpaste' - the least novel and least productive kind of thing imaginable.
so 'Colgate' costs $5 at the store, it costs 50 cents to manufacture - that $4.50 gross margin is stuffed into a system of relative inneficiency up and down the economy. much of it in 'nearly useless ads'.
it's a deep market inefficiency people dont want to recognized because people assume private capital is inherently efficient and that a dollar spent = GDP = value and that's it.
our lives could materially be improved if we banned ads for a lot of things - feels like 'socialism' but really it'd just be about a kind of 'regulated market efficiency'.
So the gigantic incumbents with retail distribution being inefficient makes sense to me. What about the long tail of D2C brands that live on Meta ads? AFAIK, they live and die by their ROAS. I would have to believe that these companies just don't really exist to buy that Meta ads are a "con".
the roi is better at smaller corps that pay attention, but you would still be surprised.
and where it is more efficient its where there is better attribution models aka direct sales.
note: there are certain kinds of products that are 100% 'click driven sales'. they zero brand awareness, they want to sell you that 'fleece hoodie' on the spot. those guys have their funnel math down solid.
but startups and other companies ... not the same.
well funded startups burn $ thinking it's productive - and hugely: buying fake customers, or, spending $2 to get $1 in revenue to either pad the books, show investors, make themselves feel good or 'strategic'. FYI 'strategic' is often rational. those are big pools of money.
but usually campaigns are mixed and attribution is hard, even for smaller companies.
the tighter the budget, the more 'direct purchase', the more 'nominally efficient' it is.
also note - most ad $ is big companies who ironically spend a smaller share of their revenue on ads <- this is the power of scale.
"that $4.50 gross margin is stuffed into a system of relative inefficiency up and down the economy. much of it in 'nearly useless ads'." is easy to disprove because we know how much these companies spend on advertising (and marketing more broadly) and how much product they sell.
I didn't imply that all of their gross was going into ads.
I'm highlighting that the gross on commodity consumer goods is huge - and that it just pays for mounds of white collar bureaucracy, including advertising, and yes 25 points is about right.
Consider that companies pay more for advertising than COGS.
That should tell us something about 'productivity'
FB/Goog revenues could be cut by 60% and the good may very well flow just the same, aka they are not just capturing surplus but facilitate aggressive inefficient competition.
A western nation will post the $5.00 to the GDP when much of it is inefficient make-work.
This is why 'Pricing Parity' has to be used even to begin to compare relative wealth etc.
Toothpaste is a particularly high-margin product so it might not be the best example generally. COGS is generally the largest line item for CPG (or non-CPG products), and distribution isn't free either.
Toothpaste manufacturers can probably get away without advertising on FB/Goog, but I'm not sure that would work for other products or brands. It's not make-work to tell people about your product or service, although in markets with limited players you could see how a marketing arms race would drive prices up.
It's 'make work' because it's a unnecessarily competitive system wherein prices will by definition be driven up to absorb all of the surpluses of any given business.
Google and Facebook are in the business of 'economic rent' of people's attention.
25% of sales price going to Google might leave 5% for manufacturer and possibly even more for the Ad channel. Aka 'Google is where most of your profits are absorbed'.
You're not competing against product competitors - you're competing for attention of individuals, which is very narrow, through a very small number of pathways wherein there are quasi monopolists.
Your 'competitors' are actually 'value chain competitors' - Google and Meta - in this case, who require you to pay extraordinary amounts to access their captured audience.
Google is a massively 'high margin' business, which is an indication of their market power in the value chain, and they could be much more profitable if they wanted to be.
Whatever you make - you are bidding against McDonalds, Mondelez and Proctor & Gamble, not your just your competitor.
To realize this power, do a little 'thought experiment' and imagine of the 'ad layer' of the system would commoditized and extremely efficient, due to heavy competition and/or 'good' regulation (or socialization). Say for example, people were served ads with perfect efficiency, and accounting for some kind of community/regulatory guidance - which meant that 'local services and companies' were guaranteed a tranche of time, along with public services and community things - like School events, local street plays, art houses.
This could probably achieved for a fraction of the cost in the system now, and it would mean 1) the profits parked at G and Meta would be distributed to other layers of the value chain - aka the advertiser/maker, manufacturers, parts suppliers, and also to consumers. 2) likewise a system that defies the 'race to the bottom' competition of advertising (imagine very simple, relatively cheap and authentic ads) and 3) the hidden surplus of the benefit of community awareness, issue awareness, which is invisible on the GDP because 'money does not change hands'.
Another way to put it, is that the 25% spend on Ads is mostly spent on 'economic rent' not really on the cost and effort associated with that activity, in addition to that system being extremely optimized for certain outcomes (profits for private enterprise) and not others (aka 'financialization' of social and community aspects).
All of the extra money, time and effort people have to invest in fighting with each other over very limited attention, through captured attention, is inefficient 'make work'. It's the 'private economy' version of the government paying people to dig holes and fill them.
In almost all areas where there is heavy economic rent, there are inefficiencies; Advertising and Real Estate are huge ones there, there are a few others.
Obviously, Google and Meta do 'real things' - they're not fake businesses, but the massive profits are an indication of the oligarchic power and it's definitely sub optimal.
Basically any time you can get people to bid for a limited resource and can't make more of the resource, the house wins - no pun intended. Be the house.
Meta ads are mostly obvious fraud afaict - unregistered lotteries, jet washes that don't need power, flashlights so powerful they'll fry an egg by shining at them, household goods developed by NASA, air-conditioning/heating that doesn't need outside air and plugs direct into a socket, ...
I've reported a few to Advertising Standards in the UK, but they're not really interested in combatting Facebook/Amazon fraud.
What's hilarious is having reported an ad to Facebook, they show you that ad more because you didn't longer looking at it. Mad.
The ones advertised on Meta platforms (and others like YouTube), at least the ones I've seen, claim to do so in a device that looks like it can't have more than a tiny battery in there, or that they actualy show using standard AA batteries or similar. But they must be real, after all that nice man left NASA to work on it and now the nasty commercial interests are trying to shut him down!
The brand name that comes to mind is the Wicked Lasers Flashtorch, which uses a 65W halogen bulb that emits most of its energy as infrared, and a ~30 Watt-hour Li-ion battery. The old-fashioned light source is better suited to party tricks than illumination.
More modern, and also capable of improvised cooking are handheld searchlights from Acebeam and Imalent with many large LEDs, cooling fans, and even bigger Li-ion batteries. There are third-party videos of these and the older halogen type cooking eggs and setting fire to paper on Youtube.
What you're describing from the ads obviously violates the laws of physics. An alkaline AA would have a hard time cooking an egg on a dead short.
> What's hilarious is having reported an ad to Facebook, they show you that ad more because you didn't longer looking at it. Mad.
Which emotions does this bring up? For me its hate.
fostering hate is what these places mastered.
The data is clear - it skyrockets engagement and time-spent.
The question is if we want this as a society? I mean, they dont even tax any of the "earnings" aka "mental-health-money"
I wonder if this depends a lot on location? Or a Facebook thing rather than Meta-wide, though I think they don't actually let you distinguish when running ads?
Until last year I used Instagram and most of the ads I got were actually relevant. Zero scams, mostly local businesses. If I'd been visiting pages about home decoration I'd get local furniture shops and so forth. Google ads were - and are - the opposite for me, totally irrelevant and frequently scammy.
Why's it hard to believe? Look around you at how belligerently foolish, irrational, inefficient, dysfunctional, and confidently wrong every large organization acts. Marketing departments confidently report that their marketing campaigns work, because to report otherwise would be to have their budget slashed to zero. Ad networks confidently report that the ads you buy are effective, because to report otherwise would destroy their companies. Ads are just a tax on the consumer which result in no improvement to any product whatsoever, a pure rent-seeking middleman, an intellectual landlord, a red queen's race, a dead weight on the economy, and, of course, a trillion-dollar industry, because we live in hell.
SMBs can find an audience that would otherwise be impossible to reach. The thing that is advertised is so diverse it's hard to generalize, however the main thing I've noticed is SMBs live and die by the quality of their ad creatives.
For big businesses which make up the other 50% of Meta ads revenue: They are very effective in circumstances where your main offering is operational and the long term value of a customer is very large. For example it would be a very good place to advertise health insurance and TV subscriptions (which is a significant amount of the big business spend). Here I am more certain. If you didn't invent your product, and it is a beneficiary of the zeitgeist promoted by social media itself (beauty-focused, soft core brain rot), and your thing is basically fungible, you will thrive.
It works great if your goal is to pump up your install & conversion numbers so you can raise the next round of VC at 3x valuation. After a couple rounds of this, your VCs, in turn, can then use the valuation increase to tell their GPs that the value of their fund has increased by 10x. The GPs can use your reported valuation increase to report that they earned a 11.6% real return on the fund this year (13% nominal, using the reported CPI of 2.4%, which of course is nowhere near the actual increase in life's necessities but does show that you can get TVs cheap), and that therefore they beat their benchmark and should get their full bonus. Then the pension funds that invest in them can tell the state that everything is fine and of course every retiree will get everything due to them.
It's bullshit all the way down. The most valuable bullshit is the numbers that you can sell to someone else who is looking for bullshit. They're not lying; they are merely reporting what they are being told, and you can't fault them for trusting their ad networks / investees / LPs / LPs / pension plans.
>the reported CPI of 2.4%, which of course is nowhere near the actual increase in life's necessities but does show that you can get TVs cheap
I went through the CPI basket[1] and vaguely looked for categories "life's necessities" and came up with "Food and beverages", "Shelter", "Fuels and utilities", "Transportation", "Medical care", "Education and communication". Those categories alone make up 85.3% of the basket, and I didn't even bother going into detailed categories to look for other essentials. "Televisions" on the other hand makes up 0.1%, but I guess that's what you have to do to make baseless accusations about the accuracy of the CPI data.
Eh, I think you're correct in most cases but they work relatively well for our property leasing office. There's a convergence of factors at work there though; small number of high priced products being offered to a relatively small number of people in a certain geo location.
The incentives to create fake engagement to satisfy their actual users who want discussion are quite clear. Doing this also gives reddit an advantage when monetizing their data. Scrape posts & comments for free, and you won't know which are LLM-generated and which at least have a human in the loop (but the human still may use an LLM, so this is where fingerprinting comes in). Perfect for incentivising the ai labs / other consumers of reddit data to pay up for an official feed.
Here on YC News, even a minor comment a few lines long might get at least one or two upvotes (or downvotes). I'll get a reply about 50% of the time.
On Reddit there are posts with apparent huge volumes of "user interaction": thousands of comments, thousands of upvotes per top comment, etc... but if I comment on one of those posts... nothing. Zero up or down votes, zero replies, just... silence.
I'm learning to recognise these posts now, and they're the majority of the "front page" volume. The only posts where I'll get any interaction now is the really niche ones like the hobbyist ones or "owners of specific gadgets" and the like.
Even with certified real humans who actively clicked rather than being counted one if the many ways these counts are padded accidentally (or not so accidentally), you might be expecting far too much of their attention span when expecting a full 1% to care enough to think long enough to respond before scrolling on. It is worse these days than it used to be, because many who might previously have bothered may instead assume they'd probably be taking to a bot.
Unless you somehow insult their favourite entertainment franchise / political party / deity / etc., or praise one of the same that they don't like. That will get you piles of responses, though not in a way useful to your app!
My Reddit Ads sold app purchases. It’s especially hard for me since my app is “pay once and it’s yours” with no bs sibscriptions, instead of a trialware “free” app.
My bigger problem is, no matter what I did with various campaigns and audiences, I end up having to spend more than I make back. That was with high CTR and such.
For a while it felt like “ok well spend some money to seed users until word of mouth does some of the work.”
We have a customer who's seeing ~30k in monthly revenue driven by their meta ads. So they can work. But they have a consult running the ads, and I assume they're doing filtering or something.
Maybe I’ve just been unlucky for 14 years but ads almost never work (as much as you pay for them).
Ad business is the best business: you pay for something no one can reliably verify or measure. But you still pay because there is something somewhere with some correlational relationship with an uplift in some of your metrics and you’re afraid to turn it off. So you just keep paying.
I always wonder who the hell is clicking these ads. I skip all you tube ads (thanks Adblock)… I never click banner ads on principle. I assume anything paying for my eyeball time is a scam.
So who is this shit working on? These companies must have detailed profiles on “people who do what we tell them” as a whole class of people. Scary.
Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of actual end customers/humans (i.e. not bot farms or paid for actors) who click are not clicking on purpose. I've seen so many bad Android apps that have performance issues where content is still rendering and by the time you've tapped on where you go an add banner/link loaded up and registered you clicking on that. Zero purchase ever done but numerous 'ad clicks' generated
Effectiveness can vary a bunch but the majority of the time bad results are correlated to the setup quality.
There are definitely industries and situations where ads are difficult to make perform, things like a single business working against aggregator heavy environment or markets where growth is more important than profit, but overall there's reason for hundreds billions spent on online ads, this when most business can track ROI results.
One of the bigger issues I see is even 'experts' hand over control to the ad platforms to optimise their spend. For better results often you need to manipulate the systems to work in your favour, which platforms try to limit but you do what you can.
One change I feel we need is for regulation around controls and data on ad platforms to stop this ever increasing 'give us your money and trust us' type behaviour.
Spent a lot of money on meta ads and it worked well for a long time.
What doesn’t work is the nonsense people try to teach about how to optimize it.
It’s what got me into programming in first place, since most strategies can be automated, but there are still companies paying money to people to manage their ad spend.
Company I work for sees significant real, profitable traffic from them. I’m sure we’re losing some proportion to fraud, and we have a very experienced guy full-time on ad management, but money in vs money out is working very nicely for us.
This is plain untrue and misinformed, there's an entire category of companies where the whole business model is to pump money into ads to push apps and games. They carefully make sure that cost to acquire one paying user is lower than the amount of money the paying user brings. They usually achieve this by aggressive conversion tactics in the app and overly optimized apps with hundreds of variants. There's a whole industry built around this.
Today the fraud is perhaps more obvious. YT has served me the same 20 min ad 200+ times over the last few weeks. I let the entire thing play 10 times and 50 times didn't press skip for the first minute (or the view doesn't count) It's so annoying Ive reduced video watching by 80-90%
The idea they have someone pay for this in the hope I will buy the product?
Or do people really intentionally run campaigns like that?
> It's so annoying Ive reduced video watching by 80-90%
This is the opposite of resourcefulness - unless the videos were a distraction, not a real goal of yours.
PS Genuine question: where is the fraud in a 20 minute ad?
Steve Balmer explaining his take on how local governments of the US work was a hilarious ad offering on my non-adblocked device the other day - I’m struggling to see vectors for fraud.
I couldn't imagine someone running campaign like that intentionally but it's apparently cheap to do so. 20 minutes of my time is apparently worth 3 cent. Those 5 hours watching the same ad again and again probably cost the spammer 2 euro.
It's not fraud, more like a cheap ass dystopia. It's some how worse than HP and MS combined.
> ..unless the videos were a distraction, not a real goal of yours.
You are not wrong but all work and no play... I will seek entertainment elsewhere. My apologies in advance HN :-)
These bug me so much. Those 20+ minute ads do nothing but piss me off. I have to grab the remote or switch tabs or whatever to get past them. To the point where I'm on the verge of adding YT to the permanent block list along with Facebook, Instagram, X, etc.
Serious question: Do you watch a lot of YouTube? Why not just cough up the $16 for YouTube Premium? Creators actually do get paid more for Premium users' views than they do from adsense. You get to see none of these ads that piss you off.
Look, I run UBlock Origin myself. But that's because there's zero other way to look at any Web content without going insane with videos and other garbage popping all over the place, and even when sites have memberships, I use too many distinct ones anyway, and the memberships may not remove the ads and junk.
But when it comes to sites like YouTube that let me choose between "ads" and "non-ads" experiences... I guess I'm just saying I see a ton of ROI on the $16.
You won't pay for something because of inflation? How do you survive, since everything's affected by inflation? Ever buy gasoline for a car or a transit pass? rent? food? What else can't you pay for because they price will go up in the future?
Inflation helped me kick my junk food and fast food habits. I still buy groceries of course but when prices rise, luxuries are almost always the first items to go.
You expect Google to serve thousands of petabytes per month (costing hundreds of thousands of dollars in raw bandwidth) for absolutely nothing in return?
I have zero expectations of any business. If they have an expectation to be paid then they need to offer something of value. Their costs to operate are not my concern.
Well this discussion about getting YouTube premium is clearly aimed at people who use YouTube but without premium, not people who don't use YouTube at all.
I could call them, tell them I see their ad, ask questions then call again and again and again and again. I just read one may call a company as often as one wants.
Before the ad, you had no brand awareness at all of Liberty Mutual. Now, you know their name enough to call them out specifically in a Hacker News comment. Your propensity to buy has improved a lot just based on that fact, regardless of whether you consciously want to avoid them now.
Sometimes they put one at the start then again 1.5 min into a video and again around 4 minutes. If I don't skip them I may not even remember what the video was about.
Considering the government routinely both decides Google is violating the law but is unwilling to do things to change it, like split apart their ad monopoly, suing them is most likely futile.
Better ways to spend your money, like funding competitors.
A quote I once heard from an ad-biz Googler at bar, when I just asked "why did most of friend's adwords clicks for 'barn wedding east tennessee' come from Malaysia, before I set up geo for him?"
> We have never lost a lawsuit!
I never asked about that lawsuits. This was just a shouted response, from my pov, for no reason.
Governing Law; Venue.
All claims arising out of or relating to the AdSense
Terms or the Services will be governed by California
law, excluding California's conflict of laws rules,
and will be litigated exclusively in the federal or
state courts of Santa Clara County, California, USA,
and you and Google consent to personal jurisdiction
in those courts.
Okay, I do indeed live in Santa Clara County, California, so if I ever get in a situation where I might want to sue Google Ads, I might as well try and see how local courts work, especially if the claim is small enough for the small claims court. For those who do not live here, it might be a prohibitive requirement.
Same thing happened to us. We were large enough to have an admob rep who reached out to the IVT team for help. After our first appeal was rejected, our rep negotiated a second appeal attempt but he said “This time make sure you take full responsibility for the IVT getting through.
Funny part to me was Google was the only network bidding on these bots while others must have detected something and stayed out.
We submitted a second appeal taking full responsibility plus providing a long list of corrective action we took in house plus a full triage of what happened.
They again rejected our second appeal with no feedback.
I think Google's business model in large part is having a super complicated ad console that very few, if anyone, actually knows how to most efficiently operate.
So what happens is that the savvy media teams figure out what works through meticulous trial and error, and constantly monitor Googles weird changes to the levers you are given to operate the "console."
Would the casinos benefit from a careful presentation of the mathematical odds of all the games and how to best position your wagers ?
Or would they benefit by seeming like a fantastic place to wine, dine, splurge on things you can spend money on, and also make a few wagers on fun betting games while you are at it ?
The advertising market is a place that used to be dominated by the big advertisers meeting with the big networks (upfronts), but now is dominated by large platforms that only marginally care about the biggest users because the tail is so long
For a good chunk of businesses, ROI tracking is really not that hard. It gets harder as your business becomes larger, or oriented more towards B2B, or in specialized niches, or online only businesses. I know first hand small/medium businesses (whom I've helped myself in the past) that basically survive on traffic coming from ads.
Obviously it all depends*. But I just wanted to chime in that it's not all totally useless, and "nobody clicks on ads". Us (tech-adjacent people), are less likely to be prone to it, but still get swindled through other sort of ads as well. It works more effectively for people not in our group. And keep in mind, we're in extreme tiny minority.
Google makes a ton of money. It has to come from somewhere… so yes definitely agree that even though it’s hard to imagine for some people in the HN bubble, ads seem to be working for most people.
$220 is irrelevant to Google. The bot farms spend more. Hence, the small honest customer is not worth supporting when the large malicious customer will generate orders of magnitude more revenue. Viewed through the profit incentive, the end result makes perfect sense.
Perverse incentives will only change when regulators are made to care.
Ads seem to be working for most people or are people in protection racket where they have to pay to fend off the mobster from plastering the front of their store with roadblocks and directions to a competitor?
Yes and no. ROI tracking is not hard if you want to run 1 campaign on Google and nothing else.
ROI tracking is a whole subspecialty of adtech if you want to parse out one medium or campaign's spend from all the other spend have running -- imagine you spend $10m / month on media, you have ROI and you have spend across platforms and nobody except you is incentivized to figure out what ad spend should be credited for which response. That's real ROI tracking and it is quite hard
I keep hearing it too. The bit I don't yet understand is, wouldn't it be in Google's interest to not do this? They ban on both sides of the market for seemingly no reason. Wouldn't maximizing all legitimate participation be much better? Also seems a lot more possible to do now with AI to check all campaigns, landing pages, etc.
I imagine it's a side-effect of another fraud prevention effort. In my experience ad fraud on a google search ad is at least 17% of traffic, and potentially a lot more.
Whilst I don't doubt that Google invest heavily in fraud prevention, they're not actually succeeding.
Spam website owners pay for these bots, they get compensated for the conversions. In an ideal world, google’s ad prices and fraud detection would render this ineffective.
Hypothetically you would have already paid for the ads before your account gets suspended/banned then hypothetically Google just keep sending you automated replies denying your requests for support until you give up or lawyer up. And when you consider the shear scale Google's adtech networks run at, this would add up fast and generate revenue over costs. Hypothetically
I really don't get it. Ads are supposed to be Google's biggest revenue thing but the entire process is just so infuriating at times. Their ads dashboard/tool for running ads is one of the worst pieces of software i have used period. My theory is they just dont care about individual experience as long as businesses see value in it. Nobody is going to not run ads because the platform is from hell. They still need to run ads and thus suffering is okay.
When you want to keep your house warm, you ordinarily should not burn the rafters. However, when the house is about to collapse anyway, it is cheaper to dismantle the roof and to burn the rafters than to buy firewood.
Google is an overwhelming market leader vertically and horizontally. Not only do they not have to compete with their competition. They don't have to compete for their competition's business partners. They don't have to compete at all.
What's more, they're a publicly traded company. That means their primary product is no longer what they sell. Their primary product is stock dividends. That is their primary business now. Whether you're buying a service or a product from Google, you're no longer their true customer.
They treat such customers like they don't matter because they don't. And until they stop being in such a position of dominance, or someone magically transforms the whole of American business culture it won't change.
> What's more, they're a publicly traded company. That means their primary product is no longer what they sell. Their primary product is stock dividends. That is their primary business now. Whether you're buying a service or a product from Google, you're no longer their true customer.
It's not hero worship to think he knew what a customer was. It's pretty basic, and given he won the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, he probably knew more than the basics.
I know a company that spends >15M per year on Google ads, and Google blocked one campaign on a Friday night claiming it was fraud, in the middle of a hot sales season.
Took the rep two weeks to actually find out what happened.
It's just how the whole company operates at this point.
Why would you ever ever ever on record "take full responsibility" for something you did not actually do?
If a person does that, then that's dumb. But a company? Don't you have like a legal department or similar telling you to not ever confess to something you did in fact not do?
Seems about right, in the sense that these advertising companies are just fine dealing with scammers / taking their money … but there are corners of the same company that also have reasons to not allow that behavior and it becomes a circle where Google users and etc are banned for Google encouraged activity.
Last week on YouTube I was logged out of YouTube and on my work computer got an ad that appeared to offer access to underage girls, the pic was creepy as hell. Google took their money but if I posted that image in a video I bet I would be banned….
I was getting an advert that was obviously some scam software on YouTube mobile. The image looked like a system alert that storage was low. It was an obvious attempt to trick users.
Yikes, that is especially egregious. As the comment to that post mentions, you see it on adult sites (so I've heard) but that's also the kind of ad you'd see on an old forum where the moderators have lost all respect for their users and are trying to cash out.
There is too many ads to report all of them. But a don't show me this, that also affected on report as a negative signal to reduce the possibility of that specific ad to you.
Unlikely. The effectiveness an ad has on you is related to the amount you think about that ad - and nothing else. It doesn't matter whether they are positive or negative thoughts.
I’ve seen and reported that exact ad, and variations thereof, multiple times. Each time my report has been rejected on the basis the ad didn’t violate ToS for advertisers. Google absolutely sucks nowadays.
That's double ironic because Google feeds off of ad-money
addiction, but here it also uses that traffic to ban
people from the evil Google empire (which is actually
pretty good, if everyone would be banned then Google
would collapse quickly. Without adMoney this adCompany
would be useless. It has nothing to do with the old
Google company before the adMoney inflow addiction).
The bot farm is a profit center, not a cost center. A corrupt 'publisher' (someone who agrees to show ads on their site/in their app) is having the bots bring up their own site, view the ads and install OP's app, which takes, say, $3 from the advertiser and pays, say, $2 to the publisher.
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 88.4 ms ] threadGood luck on that. I have sympathy for OP, but running ads is really hard. It's why most people set targets for things that happen in the app (OP updated to a target of winning a game, not just installing), and why companies have entire teams dedicated to monitoring Google/Meta/X ads. Trial runs are often thousands of dollars, and it's easy to evaporate money. I've made the same mistakes, and its why y-combinator strongly recommends against running online ads, especially in the beginning.
What I did was create a game with an action button. Then I served ads right next to the action button. I didn’t realize people would miss click on the ads at a high rate, but they did. They fat fingered it, clicked the ad, I got paid.
I looked into it after a couple weeks because my click rate was crazy high.
After running Google Ads for a couple of years, our current exclusion list has over 4000 networks just in the US.
You know all those trojan infected smart TVs and home routers and such? That's one of the things they're doing.
And the pay for these things is "access to 500+ TB Jellyfin-like movie services for free"
Of course, it's all pirated out of country. And the pay is being a residential proxy.
And piracy being the only way to actually own, I'm not imaging this will stop anytime soon.
Theres your answer.
Also most of them are for pirating live TV. You can't watch live TV through Bittorrent, you just can't, it doesn't work that way. Sports fans need less than 5 seconds of latency relative to the loudest neighbor they can hear, or they'll hate your service.
Once the word gets around, even small non-techy businesses will pick up on it.
For some more context: We run a business based on data scraping and metered residential proxies have never been cheaper. Countries that used to be 10 USD/GB just ten years ago are down to 1 USD.
How does that work? Wouldn’t Hetzner know who you are (because you pay them), meaning that if you’re caught pirating on it they could just know it was you and hand you over?
And don’t think Herzner wouldn’t hand you over. My only experience with them was during a job, when an external company complained about something on a single section of a massive website (everything was legitimate, we weren’t doing anything remotely shady) and Hetzner straight up took the whole website down and demanded a change. Shoot first, ask later. I wasn’t directly involved with managing the website, but the whole thing soured me on Hetzner.
I've received a nasty letter from the ISP over BitTorrent (someone's phone joined my wifi, torrenting without my knowledge), but using a VPN seems sufficient. I think the Hetzener suggestion is a VPS for running the software stack. You could alternatively self host on hardware in your home.
Enabling the credential stuffing and stolen credit cards are also bad on their own. No sympathy for the ad companies, though.
Web scraping (for LLM inference / training) I guess has transformed "residential proxies" into a giant industry.
They get paid for adverts to bots don’t they? Unrelated?
Most marketers should know exactly how effective their ads are by measuring to the end of the funnel. This is standard for most business and while bots are a problem, if you're judging online advertising at the front end of the funnel that's to a large part on them for a bad setup and/or optimisation.
Maybe this is a cynical take, but, if they get to the bottom of things, and show their boss/client that the ad-spend is not returning so much, it seems it would portend bad things for the marketer.
I really don't know, and it seems like a very hard problem.
Maybe this is the time for that Upton Sinclair quote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it,"
Google has to be careful, ads that convert less are less valuable (duh) and what happens is not "well the business will just buy more ads", but "well the business has a 35% gross margin and marketing expenses already account for 20% of gross profit, they can't just buy more ads"
Don't all water companies do it?
And while it may point at what we could do with Google and the likes, the risk profile is still a bit different (make many people ill or die vs "unknowingly" stealing some money).
I find online advertising crooked as hell. Google charges by the impression and knowingly allows huge percentages of fake impressions. How is that anything other than fraud?
It’s not because it’s online advertising. And that sucks.
It is absolutely ridiculous that you have been either victim shamed, blamed or simply neglected by Google into doing it yourself.
In a mall, you expect to see mall cops ... where are they?
I am asking because I maintain botnet ASNs that are spamming/phishing/scamming our customers, and this would be a nice complementary category for it.
Most often I realized that a lot of those "growth" companies have rotating ASNs that they go through after each larger spamming campaign. I'd assume they do the same thing in the admob/adclick world.
[1] https://github.com/cookiengineer/antispam
Also, all else being equal, earning potential of paid or subscription apps on Android is usually an order of magnitude less than on iOS, due to the self-selection effect of people who buy $1200 phones tend to have more disposable income than someone who buys the median Android phone which costs much less. So, trying to sell a paid casual game, especially on Android, is not going to pay the bills the way an ad-supported free app would. Sadly.
Search for "datadog" and the first result is a sponsored link for Datadog. I click that and datadog had to pay google. scroll a bit down and there's the "real" natural link.
Fugazi!
In that context: suggest a fairer way.
Now, it may just be you don’t like advertising in this context - a valid take. But a different one!
And you could advertise related products, or unrelated products. So many options there.
Similar problems with mandating that they track what’s considered a competitor.
I'm talking about the actual search results. They already do that part.
> Similar problems with mandating that they track what’s considered a competitor.
Well I said fair not mandatory, but they make enough money off these ads that they could handle it being mandatory.
It ranks based on likelihood of what you’re search for - and yes, that’s different!
Well, the answer is that many people owe their paycheck to not letting their employers or shareholders know that digital marketing is a solved problem.
But if you need stronger marketing than that, there will always be willing affiliates.
I think the only sane way tu run a Google Ads campaign is to:
- only enable Google Search ads (i.e. disable all third-party publishers -- this may be a bit extreme but it's good if you're advertisting a niche product that people are actually searching for)
- only use "exact match" keywords ("broad match" is so broad that Google will show your ads in completely unrelevant SERPs)
- disable AI Max
- disable all automations
- reject any of their "optimization" tips
- set a max CPC even if they say it's bad for you
In other words, reject everything they suggest you to do. Maybe I'm wrong, or maybe this only works for my use case, but that's how I've been using Google Ads succesfully without wasting money.
Except then they just don't run your ads unless you're willing to pay silly amounts like $3 per click for bot traffic.
famous saying 'i'd cut my ad budget in 1/2 if i knew which 1/2 to cut'
'attribution' is the holy grail of hard thing in marketing.
so they know for sure the channel spend is iffy.
but it's hard to measure, esp. for brand and indirect campaigns.
so as a 'starting point' - it's a very 'noisy channel problem'.
the next wild idea is that ads come from a marketing budget which has $X to spend, and they have to spend it.
this is where the ROI stuff is wildy upside down.
large companies with 'market power' have a lot of surplus. they put that towards relatively lucreative marketing. the $ must be spent.
the cmo makes a budget, allocates, the managers follow the campaign, front line staffers spend. they try to get the best results they can.
there is often an unbelievable lack of true roi concern in all of that.
sometimes it's very aggressive, aka for some keywords, for sure.
but a remarkable amount of $ is spent in very unnacountable way, over what are 'grey' channels anyhow.
the marketing ops person is going home at 5pm and does not care one bit about bots. they were paid to spend it, they did. Facebook is paid to 'show a chart of view' ... they did that. 'everyone is happy'.
im not saying the whole system works that way, but much of it does.
the wild part is - there is so much 'dumb big money' in ads, it makes the whole thing very inneficient.
companies like P&G have 'distribution monopolies' on so many packaged goods, they have to keep up brand awareness.
It's why so many commercials are for commodity products like home stuff - the market is huge, the market channels are locked, they pay $$$ for ads for 'toothpaste' - the least novel and least productive kind of thing imaginable.
so 'Colgate' costs $5 at the store, it costs 50 cents to manufacture - that $4.50 gross margin is stuffed into a system of relative inneficiency up and down the economy. much of it in 'nearly useless ads'.
it's a deep market inefficiency people dont want to recognized because people assume private capital is inherently efficient and that a dollar spent = GDP = value and that's it.
our lives could materially be improved if we banned ads for a lot of things - feels like 'socialism' but really it'd just be about a kind of 'regulated market efficiency'.
and where it is more efficient its where there is better attribution models aka direct sales.
note: there are certain kinds of products that are 100% 'click driven sales'. they zero brand awareness, they want to sell you that 'fleece hoodie' on the spot. those guys have their funnel math down solid.
but startups and other companies ... not the same.
well funded startups burn $ thinking it's productive - and hugely: buying fake customers, or, spending $2 to get $1 in revenue to either pad the books, show investors, make themselves feel good or 'strategic'. FYI 'strategic' is often rational. those are big pools of money.
but usually campaigns are mixed and attribution is hard, even for smaller companies.
the tighter the budget, the more 'direct purchase', the more 'nominally efficient' it is.
also note - most ad $ is big companies who ironically spend a smaller share of their revenue on ads <- this is the power of scale.
It's more like 25% of their budget.
https://www.statista.com/topics/7725/cpg-industry-advertisin...
I'm highlighting that the gross on commodity consumer goods is huge - and that it just pays for mounds of white collar bureaucracy, including advertising, and yes 25 points is about right.
Consider that companies pay more for advertising than COGS.
That should tell us something about 'productivity'
FB/Goog revenues could be cut by 60% and the good may very well flow just the same, aka they are not just capturing surplus but facilitate aggressive inefficient competition.
A western nation will post the $5.00 to the GDP when much of it is inefficient make-work.
This is why 'Pricing Parity' has to be used even to begin to compare relative wealth etc.
Toothpaste manufacturers can probably get away without advertising on FB/Goog, but I'm not sure that would work for other products or brands. It's not make-work to tell people about your product or service, although in markets with limited players you could see how a marketing arms race would drive prices up.
Google and Facebook are in the business of 'economic rent' of people's attention.
25% of sales price going to Google might leave 5% for manufacturer and possibly even more for the Ad channel. Aka 'Google is where most of your profits are absorbed'.
You're not competing against product competitors - you're competing for attention of individuals, which is very narrow, through a very small number of pathways wherein there are quasi monopolists.
Your 'competitors' are actually 'value chain competitors' - Google and Meta - in this case, who require you to pay extraordinary amounts to access their captured audience.
Google is a massively 'high margin' business, which is an indication of their market power in the value chain, and they could be much more profitable if they wanted to be.
Whatever you make - you are bidding against McDonalds, Mondelez and Proctor & Gamble, not your just your competitor.
To realize this power, do a little 'thought experiment' and imagine of the 'ad layer' of the system would commoditized and extremely efficient, due to heavy competition and/or 'good' regulation (or socialization). Say for example, people were served ads with perfect efficiency, and accounting for some kind of community/regulatory guidance - which meant that 'local services and companies' were guaranteed a tranche of time, along with public services and community things - like School events, local street plays, art houses.
This could probably achieved for a fraction of the cost in the system now, and it would mean 1) the profits parked at G and Meta would be distributed to other layers of the value chain - aka the advertiser/maker, manufacturers, parts suppliers, and also to consumers. 2) likewise a system that defies the 'race to the bottom' competition of advertising (imagine very simple, relatively cheap and authentic ads) and 3) the hidden surplus of the benefit of community awareness, issue awareness, which is invisible on the GDP because 'money does not change hands'.
Another way to put it, is that the 25% spend on Ads is mostly spent on 'economic rent' not really on the cost and effort associated with that activity, in addition to that system being extremely optimized for certain outcomes (profits for private enterprise) and not others (aka 'financialization' of social and community aspects).
All of the extra money, time and effort people have to invest in fighting with each other over very limited attention, through captured attention, is inefficient 'make work'. It's the 'private economy' version of the government paying people to dig holes and fill them.
In almost all areas where there is heavy economic rent, there are inefficiencies; Advertising and Real Estate are huge ones there, there are a few others.
Obviously, Google and Meta do 'real things' - they're not fake businesses, but the massive profits are an indication of the oligarchic power and it's definitely sub optimal.
Sure there is innovation but nobody new ever enters the market.
aside, re: 'socialism', Moscow has no ads, and I have to admit it certainly helps with aesthetics.
I've reported a few to Advertising Standards in the UK, but they're not really interested in combatting Facebook/Amazon fraud.
What's hilarious is having reported an ad to Facebook, they show you that ad more because you didn't longer looking at it. Mad.
Flashlights that can do this exist. I don't know if they're being advertised on Meta platforms.
More modern, and also capable of improvised cooking are handheld searchlights from Acebeam and Imalent with many large LEDs, cooling fans, and even bigger Li-ion batteries. There are third-party videos of these and the older halogen type cooking eggs and setting fire to paper on Youtube.
What you're describing from the ads obviously violates the laws of physics. An alkaline AA would have a hard time cooking an egg on a dead short.
Which emotions does this bring up? For me its hate. fostering hate is what these places mastered. The data is clear - it skyrockets engagement and time-spent. The question is if we want this as a society? I mean, they dont even tax any of the "earnings" aka "mental-health-money"
Until last year I used Instagram and most of the ads I got were actually relevant. Zero scams, mostly local businesses. If I'd been visiting pages about home decoration I'd get local furniture shops and so forth. Google ads were - and are - the opposite for me, totally irrelevant and frequently scammy.
SMBs can find an audience that would otherwise be impossible to reach. The thing that is advertised is so diverse it's hard to generalize, however the main thing I've noticed is SMBs live and die by the quality of their ad creatives.
For big businesses which make up the other 50% of Meta ads revenue: They are very effective in circumstances where your main offering is operational and the long term value of a customer is very large. For example it would be a very good place to advertise health insurance and TV subscriptions (which is a significant amount of the big business spend). Here I am more certain. If you didn't invent your product, and it is a beneficiary of the zeitgeist promoted by social media itself (beauty-focused, soft core brain rot), and your thing is basically fungible, you will thrive.
It's bullshit all the way down. The most valuable bullshit is the numbers that you can sell to someone else who is looking for bullshit. They're not lying; they are merely reporting what they are being told, and you can't fault them for trusting their ad networks / investees / LPs / LPs / pension plans.
I went through the CPI basket[1] and vaguely looked for categories "life's necessities" and came up with "Food and beverages", "Shelter", "Fuels and utilities", "Transportation", "Medical care", "Education and communication". Those categories alone make up 85.3% of the basket, and I didn't even bother going into detailed categories to look for other essentials. "Televisions" on the other hand makes up 0.1%, but I guess that's what you have to do to make baseless accusations about the accuracy of the CPI data.
I get my app is probably bad but you'd expect at least one comment out of 100 "clicks" to say something.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaymcgregor/2017/02/20/reddit-i...
Here on YC News, even a minor comment a few lines long might get at least one or two upvotes (or downvotes). I'll get a reply about 50% of the time.
On Reddit there are posts with apparent huge volumes of "user interaction": thousands of comments, thousands of upvotes per top comment, etc... but if I comment on one of those posts... nothing. Zero up or down votes, zero replies, just... silence.
I'm learning to recognise these posts now, and they're the majority of the "front page" volume. The only posts where I'll get any interaction now is the really niche ones like the hobbyist ones or "owners of specific gadgets" and the like.
You don't get any up votes because nobody ever saw those comments to begin with.
Unless you somehow insult their favourite entertainment franchise / political party / deity / etc., or praise one of the same that they don't like. That will get you piles of responses, though not in a way useful to your app!
My bigger problem is, no matter what I did with various campaigns and audiences, I end up having to spend more than I make back. That was with high CTR and such.
For a while it felt like “ok well spend some money to seed users until word of mouth does some of the work.”
It just wasn’t sustainable on such a tiny budget.
It is not to protect the children.
Ad business is the best business: you pay for something no one can reliably verify or measure. But you still pay because there is something somewhere with some correlational relationship with an uplift in some of your metrics and you’re afraid to turn it off. So you just keep paying.
So who is this shit working on? These companies must have detailed profiles on “people who do what we tell them” as a whole class of people. Scary.
I don't think it even registers for them that they're ads (even though I have informed them multiple times).
Same for sponsored items in Amazon search results. As an adblock user it's really jarring to see their experience of the web compared to my own.
There are definitely industries and situations where ads are difficult to make perform, things like a single business working against aggregator heavy environment or markets where growth is more important than profit, but overall there's reason for hundreds billions spent on online ads, this when most business can track ROI results.
One of the bigger issues I see is even 'experts' hand over control to the ad platforms to optimise their spend. For better results often you need to manipulate the systems to work in your favour, which platforms try to limit but you do what you can.
One change I feel we need is for regulation around controls and data on ad platforms to stop this ever increasing 'give us your money and trust us' type behaviour.
What doesn’t work is the nonsense people try to teach about how to optimize it.
It’s what got me into programming in first place, since most strategies can be automated, but there are still companies paying money to people to manage their ad spend.
This type of fraud is almost as old as web ads themselves.
And it's absolutely not the case that google can't detect ad fraud - in fact they are VERY good at detecting it when they want to.
Today the fraud is perhaps more obvious. YT has served me the same 20 min ad 200+ times over the last few weeks. I let the entire thing play 10 times and 50 times didn't press skip for the first minute (or the view doesn't count) It's so annoying Ive reduced video watching by 80-90%
The idea they have someone pay for this in the hope I will buy the product?
Or do people really intentionally run campaigns like that?
This is the opposite of resourcefulness - unless the videos were a distraction, not a real goal of yours.
PS Genuine question: where is the fraud in a 20 minute ad?
Steve Balmer explaining his take on how local governments of the US work was a hilarious ad offering on my non-adblocked device the other day - I’m struggling to see vectors for fraud.
It's not fraud, more like a cheap ass dystopia. It's some how worse than HP and MS combined.
> ..unless the videos were a distraction, not a real goal of yours.
You are not wrong but all work and no play... I will seek entertainment elsewhere. My apologies in advance HN :-)
Look, I run UBlock Origin myself. But that's because there's zero other way to look at any Web content without going insane with videos and other garbage popping all over the place, and even when sites have memberships, I use too many distinct ones anyway, and the memberships may not remove the ads and junk.
But when it comes to sites like YouTube that let me choose between "ads" and "non-ads" experiences... I guess I'm just saying I see a ton of ROI on the $16.
Nah, you're participating by watching. You'd have 100% of my respect and 100% moral high ground with your stance just by avoiding youtube.com.
If you really want it, you can vpn through certain countries they don’t show ads at all.
I was never going to give any of the woo-woo secret health nonsense hucksters any money, though.
Now I know them and I’m fucking annoyed that they exist. My “propensity to buy” has not improved.
You can save yourself the trouble of repeating more century old marketing truisms that aren’t. We’ve heard it all before, and it isn’t insight.
What’s the name for this sort of marketing?
I really like the interface you’ve built for completing the puzzles. Very clean - it’s very nice to not be bombarded at every screen.
Guerrilla marketing.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_marketing
With a small budget, in 15 years I never managed to get any positive ROI on any online platform I tried advertising on.
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/marketing/comments/4smisl/facebook_...
1. Dev publishes app with Google Admob integration to the Play Store.
2. Buys Google Ads to drive traffic to the app.
3. Google Admob bans his account for invalid traffic.
https://www.reddit.com/r/admob/comments/1vzg3fu/i_paid_googl...
Better ways to spend your money, like funding competitors.
> We have never lost a lawsuit!
I never asked about that lawsuits. This was just a shouted response, from my pov, for no reason.
Funny part to me was Google was the only network bidding on these bots while others must have detected something and stayed out.
We submitted a second appeal taking full responsibility plus providing a long list of corrective action we took in house plus a full triage of what happened.
They again rejected our second appeal with no feedback.
So what happens is that the savvy media teams figure out what works through meticulous trial and error, and constantly monitor Googles weird changes to the levers you are given to operate the "console."
Or would they benefit by seeming like a fantastic place to wine, dine, splurge on things you can spend money on, and also make a few wagers on fun betting games while you are at it ?
The advertising market is a place that used to be dominated by the big advertisers meeting with the big networks (upfronts), but now is dominated by large platforms that only marginally care about the biggest users because the tail is so long
Obviously it all depends*. But I just wanted to chime in that it's not all totally useless, and "nobody clicks on ads". Us (tech-adjacent people), are less likely to be prone to it, but still get swindled through other sort of ads as well. It works more effectively for people not in our group. And keep in mind, we're in extreme tiny minority.
Perverse incentives will only change when regulators are made to care.
ROI tracking is a whole subspecialty of adtech if you want to parse out one medium or campaign's spend from all the other spend have running -- imagine you spend $10m / month on media, you have ROI and you have spend across platforms and nobody except you is incentivized to figure out what ad spend should be credited for which response. That's real ROI tracking and it is quite hard
Whilst I don't doubt that Google invest heavily in fraud prevention, they're not actually succeeding.
What's more, they're a publicly traded company. That means their primary product is no longer what they sell. Their primary product is stock dividends. That is their primary business now. Whether you're buying a service or a product from Google, you're no longer their true customer.
They treat such customers like they don't matter because they don't. And until they stop being in such a position of dominance, or someone magically transforms the whole of American business culture it won't change.
Who is their true customer then?
What else did you think the Friedman doctrine meant?
“Nice app you got there. It would be a shame if your account got banned.”
Took the rep two weeks to actually find out what happened.
It's just how the whole company operates at this point.
If a person does that, then that's dumb. But a company? Don't you have like a legal department or similar telling you to not ever confess to something you did in fact not do?
"This company is known for this kind of fraud" even though it isn't. But the paper says it is.
Last week on YouTube I was logged out of YouTube and on my work computer got an ad that appeared to offer access to underage girls, the pic was creepy as hell. Google took their money but if I posted that image in a video I bet I would be banned….
https://bsky.app/profile/atomic14.bsky.social/post/3mnc7ws2h...
Perfectly fine according to google.
It also tells me how primitive Google Ads are, when they keep showing me an ad I reported.
The frustrating thing is, this is very easy for AI to detect. Just feed the image into any AI and it will tell you it is deceptive.
Why wouldn't they? They still get paid for it, and if you could block an ad by reporting it, you'd just report every ad until there were no ads.
And in smaller websites it's mostly Malware and health-related scams.
The reason you don't see these on every website is purely because the website owner decides to block some of those.