I can't believe we've accepted the term "ad fraud" for this, as if we were being any more deceptive than the ad industry is, or as if we had signed a contract that we violated.
As if not truthfully clicking on ads were a crime.
We don't owe advertisers anything, least of all the truth.
That's not the way it is being used elsewhere in this thread. They're calling what Ad Nauseam does "ad fraud" and are saying how easy it is to spot and fight against.
I don't see anyone here saying that using AdNauseam is ad fraud (unless you're visiting your own site with it). What the other comments you seem to be referring to are saying is that AdNauseam's behavior is similar to ad fraud, and therefore detectable via the same mechanisms that detect ad fraud.
The term itself is perfectly reasonable. If you're intentionally clicking ads on your own site in order to mislead the advertising provider about your CTR and thus generate more revenue for yourself, that's clearly fraud.
> I can't believe we've accepted the term "ad fraud" for this
“Ad fraud” is widely accepted when automated clicks are done by or on behalf of someone getting paid for the ads (the site owner selling ad space, usually, as the advertising network, if they were going to defraud the party buying ad placement, would just as easily invent false numbers that employ automated clickers to juice their own stats.)
I think the general public doesn't really shed a tear for the advertising industry. Those who cry over this probably have a financial stake in ads&marketing.
Most of the ad networks already fight with ad fraud and validate clicks and redirects. Their technologies are very sophisticated. So I don't think that it does more harm to ad companies than to plugin users, who marked suspicious and fraud. There are already plenty of bots who scrape ads and click on them. By different estimates around 20-30% of web traffic is already caused by bots. As for me plugin is a kind of way to say how you hate ad market and web in general, nothing more.
I worked in adtech a few years ago, and AdNauseam-style click fraud is a relatively trivial to detect and ignore. It does nothing, and adtech companies don't care about your hate of online advertising the least because that's what brings in the cash.
Also, the revenue of large ad platforms are pretty correlated with efficacy, because of conversion tracking and competitive bidding. IE, advertisers pay $x per widget sale. If a widget sale requires twice as many clicks because of fake clicks, the market will react pretty efficiently halve the price of clicks.
It's not perfect and adding noise/volatility bothers the industry, but it will be really hard to affect much at scale.
..maybe targeting one industry at a time, causing mayhem, and going after advertiser confidence in the platforms.
Halving the price of clicks makes the ad market less valuable. Publishers getting less money means publishers switching to a different marketplace or ditching ad-based revenue altogether. Also not likely to happen unless it’s at scale, but the point is cheaper clicks are make for a weaker ad market.
So worse than just not supporting sites you visit (via blocking or not clicking), you actively harm their conversion rate on ads, making their slots worth less to networks. Super.
I think this is an argument you could reasonably make if you give your money to web-sites that you find valuable.
Otherwise, the argument seems to be a case of "I don't like the way you got money/attention out of me", or "I want someone else to pay for the content I consume".
Other than sabotage, you can also "encourage" sites to find other business models by visiting other sites instead. You know, the ones that don't rely on advertisement. You might need to pay for those, but that's okay because you support alternative business models.
Most websites use ads (which contain malware or redirect to scam websites a lot of times), tracking, and sell user data to third party. The point of this addon is to harm these ad networks. I know websites need money to run but most don't even give you the choice.
Following a trend is no excuse for doing that in my opinion.
Seriously: when was the last time you were infected with malware from ads? This is a talking point from a different millennium.
Almost the same for redirects, at least for reputable publishers that will be most harmed by this.
This attitude has already resulted in almost all professional, reliable news sources to implement (metered) paywalls. So instead of being informed by dozens of sources, citizens now get their news from just reading the headlines on Facebook, or sometimes the single site they are willing to pay for.
You can't make decisions at the voting booth without being informed. This is such an obvious harm to the fabric of democracy.
Populism, corruption, and authoritarianism is on the rise worldwide. But at least you're not being annoyed by some ads.
Can you elaborate more on how it can be caught and make users more trackable?
Even if there are more "signals", individual advertisers won't necessarily be able to know that the same user clicked on all other advertisers' links.
Networks generally keep clickstream information a longer period of time than requests stream because requests can be counted in terms of billions per day and eventually very expensive to store.
When you visit a website, your request may normally be stored like 3 days, but when you click, it may be stored 3 months.
As more web pages you visit, as more tracking markers you've get. Yes, your tracking history will be skewed because of random clicking, it's kind of GIGO effect, but such kind of junk data is very easy to filter out. When you clicking on everything you provide too much events, which become suspicious and irrelevant. Also all clicks are made in background, which means that there is no rendering, no view tracking, which is obviously easy to catch. Check how vCPM and viewability work.
I don't believe users will lose this arms race. I don't have hard data, but from what I observe in various circles is that the Zeitgeist is that the user/consumer attention is valuable, content is cheap, so put up barriers and the user will bounce
The sad part is that this commoditization of content ends up affecting the quality content, that will probably end up becoming a niche market. Charge per content and the user will bounce, charge per month and you have to be the biggest because of network effects (try recommending a series from Amazon Prime to someone who subscribes to Netflix)
There is a trend to use ads disguised as content ("People are using this secret trick to earn mad $$ in [oddly specific location, close to you]"), or intertwined with content that is yet immune to ad blocking(like ads in the middle of youtube videos/podcasts), but that has a higher production and negotiation cost, it will probably not be a market as big as ad networks.
EDIT: Just remembered about ads on smartphone apps which are a viable option due to the lack of user control over hardware and software. There are some solutions, but these are much harder than installing a browser extension and thus not as widely adopted.
Readit News
As if not truthfully clicking on ads were a crime.
We don't owe advertisers anything, least of all the truth.
The term itself is perfectly reasonable. If you're intentionally clicking ads on your own site in order to mislead the advertising provider about your CTR and thus generate more revenue for yourself, that's clearly fraud.
“Ad fraud” is widely accepted when automated clicks are done by or on behalf of someone getting paid for the ads (the site owner selling ad space, usually, as the advertising network, if they were going to defraud the party buying ad placement, would just as easily invent false numbers that employ automated clickers to juice their own stats.)
Other than that, no.
Did we?
"AdNauseam: Fight Back Against Advertising Networks and Privacy Abuse" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13222733
"AdNauseam – Clicking Ads So You Don't Have To" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15109251
"AdNauseam Banned from the Google Web Store" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13327228
"Pale Moon blocks AdNauseam extension" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15112524
So every once in a while it get's reposted. Not bad perse.
Dead Comment
It's not perfect and adding noise/volatility bothers the industry, but it will be really hard to affect much at scale.
..maybe targeting one industry at a time, causing mayhem, and going after advertiser confidence in the platforms.
I have it set to "don't click on non-tracking Ads" and "don't hide non-tracking Ads".
Ads are fine. Tracking is not.
Otherwise, the argument seems to be a case of "I don't like the way you got money/attention out of me", or "I want someone else to pay for the content I consume".
Almost the same for redirects, at least for reputable publishers that will be most harmed by this.
This attitude has already resulted in almost all professional, reliable news sources to implement (metered) paywalls. So instead of being informed by dozens of sources, citizens now get their news from just reading the headlines on Facebook, or sometimes the single site they are willing to pay for.
You can't make decisions at the voting booth without being informed. This is such an obvious harm to the fabric of democracy.
Populism, corruption, and authoritarianism is on the rise worldwide. But at least you're not being annoyed by some ads.
Stick with the normal ad blockers.
Its an arms race and I think the advertising industry knows that eventually people will give up.
The sad part is that this commoditization of content ends up affecting the quality content, that will probably end up becoming a niche market. Charge per content and the user will bounce, charge per month and you have to be the biggest because of network effects (try recommending a series from Amazon Prime to someone who subscribes to Netflix)
There is a trend to use ads disguised as content ("People are using this secret trick to earn mad $$ in [oddly specific location, close to you]"), or intertwined with content that is yet immune to ad blocking(like ads in the middle of youtube videos/podcasts), but that has a higher production and negotiation cost, it will probably not be a market as big as ad networks.
EDIT: Just remembered about ads on smartphone apps which are a viable option due to the lack of user control over hardware and software. There are some solutions, but these are much harder than installing a browser extension and thus not as widely adopted.
- Access your data for all websites [You could take away my passwords]
- Download files and read and modify the browser’s download history [Why?]
- Access browser activity during navigation [Why?]