Google Issuing Refunds to Advertisers Over Fake Traffic, Plans New Safeguard

Attribution is kind of a bitch, but the methodology above tends to work very well given the right traffic size/mix.

This is the correct answer. At that scale focus groups, surveys, econometric modeling, etc. are what determine success. The harder part is for mid size advertisers who don't have the budget to move the needle to make those things viable, but still need to be branding heavy.

Beyond that, digital is way more trackable and often more efficient as a result, even on the branding side.

When profit is the only metric that counts, the only way to send a message is to disrupt the flow of revenue.

> seems nothing but despicable

I'd suggest viewing it from the other side, but I suspect Upton Sinclair's caution may apply: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"

- They provide unsollicited information, which distracts and irritates users.

- They use screen real estate.

- They use bandwidth.

- They use energy.

- They make websites slower.

- They introduce security problems.

- They track users, collect their data.

- They incentivize companies to disrespect our privacy.

- They put users in an information bubble.

- Market failure: not the "best" product wins, but the one with the biggest advertisement budget behind it.

- They make people feel inconfident (see photoshopped fashion ads)

- They play with our minds.

- They are often targeted at children.

Why not? Many of us are so hell bent on not wanting to see ads that we actually run adblockers. Then ad companies want to dmca or prosecute adblockers and advertisers call us thieves for using one (however, none of them would reimburse the ram, electricity, internet bandwidth, and time wasted with all that unsolicited spam). I don't care if they go bankrupt.

> What if the advertiser is not a rich company but a small business. How acceptable it's to destroy the potential value of her budget?

When they pay for clicks, they're gambling. No sympathy. It might be a good idea to cap that gambling budget and consider less risky ways to reach people if the yield isn't high enough.

Adnetworks don't take responsibility for what they publish. Malware, scams, illegal ads (such as targeting children), and resource depleting software are all ire-causing problems where it's the victim that have to shoulder it.

Then we have the ethical question about tracking and creating registers over people who search for medical conditions. To target the sick and vulnerable is very ire-inducing. Doctor-patient confidentiality exist for good reasons and many ad networks have no problems in ignoring that.

If adnetworks played by the common rules (ie laws) that we all have to abide to, then I would generally agree that citizen action like this is bad. But thats not the current situation, so its either activism like this or put our hope that global treaties is going to be signed that limit what companies can do and what legal responsibility they have.

However, it doesn't seem that hard for me to understand. If you see advertising as a social ill, that seeks to manipulate people into making purchases that they neither need nor will make their lives better. If that's what you believe it doesn't seem inconsistent to want to do everything you can to make advertising nonviable.

To some, the intent to operate a business, particularly one that depends on advertising, is despicable. They consider the act of making money (i.e. revenues > costs) to be evil exploitation of workers, and the act of getting people to buy something they can survive without (i.e. advertising influences whether and how much consumers buy) to be evil consumerist waste, part of a culture of buying shit you don't need, which they see as a cancer on human civilization.

Running a DoS attack against advertising has a decently advantageous risk:effectiveness ratio as a technique to fight capitalism, if that's your intention, and for some people it is.

Yesterday I was looking for a nice Android game and stumbled upon Mekorama. Not only is it a great game but the developer is asking very politely for some money without the use of ads. In the reviews you can see this is an absolute bonus. And because of this the game doesn't need ads for exposure. See, I just promoted the game on HN.

People just hate ads.

Have you seen modern ads? They're a direct security threat, a threat against privacy and, many would argue, a considerable social ill. AdNauseam represents one of the few available means of direct action against the ad industry. Personally, I think it's a great idea.

In fact, I would argue that until the ad networks take responsibility over the security implications of their actions, using AdNauseam is the ethical thing to do.

The end result being those websites (due to declines in revenue) cut their staffs, reducing the quantity and quality of their content. And then AdNauseum users complain on certain subreddits about the declining quality of the target sites.

AdNauseum seems to be a case of "you destroy what you love."

Literally nothing else seems to be working, so poisoning the advertising well strikes me like a fair tactic.

The type of business Doubleclick engages in is neither efficient nor effective on most web users but it causes a pervasive wide scale annoyance to all who enounter Doublclick's tentacles. One could argue that Doubleclick (now Google) must retain a certain level of schadenfreude to pollute the web with their garbage for so long knowing that, in the main, they are only creating a nuisance for web users, not generating revenue for their customers. If a salesman has to knock on thousands of doors to find only a single buyer, there is always the chance communities close their gates to keep the salesman out. Clearly, most people living in the community are not interested in what he is selling. Is it reasonable to annoy thousands of people to find one person who will buy? Who knows? But certainly, one can expect that there will be thousands of annoyed people.

Another way to look at this, especially after Google acquired Doubleclick, is that it could be the customers purchasing ads who are being deceived. It is hard to imagine that web users are deceiving Doubleclick and Google by clicking on ads and not purchasing products. Doubleclick knows most users do not click and do not purchase products/services in response to these ads. But those purchasing ads may not know this. The information asymmetry is in Google's favor.

These "adnauseum" users appear to be acting out of frustration in response to the promulgation of advertising that Google knows most users are not interested in. They are not achieving any financial gain, and certainly not by deceiving others.

It is easier to imagine a situation where those parties buying ads are being deceived by Doubleclick to believe that certain web advertising is more efficient, effective and reliable than it truly is. Hence the refunds.

Users are entitled to click on whatever they so choose. If they become frustrated and start clicking on everything, it is hard to argue this is "fraudulent" or deceptive. They are expressing themselves honestly: they are frustrated. The possibility that users can click on anything and everything in a page presented to them has always been there; buyers of web advertising should be aware of this when engaging a web ad sales company. Leading them to believe otherwise might be deceptive or even "fraudulent".

To put it simply: ads work against the free market; instead of the "best" product, the one with the largest advertisement budget wins.

MacKeeper ads

Your tone convinced me to go to the distance of moving to AdNauseam, and I'll be changing my recommendations to friends on unmetered connections as well.

However, given that one generally chooses to go on websites that serve ads, I think it's harder to justify messing with web ads as opposed to, say, billboards.

Only under the assumption that no competing, superior technologies exists. The worse the efficiency of the ad-model, the more attractive the alternatives will be.

Criticizing Microsoft over delivering an inferior user experience twenty years ago is in the same category as the critique against Google: as long as they have complete control over the market, it doesn’t matter at all. But when competing, superior technologies start appearing, it becomes their downfall. And the worse the user (advertisers, in case of Google) experience, the greater the incentive for competing technologies to appear.

If they randomize it, no.

http://www.businessinsider.com/thepartnership-msix-and-adloo...

> As the collected data gathered shows an omnivorous click-stream, user tracking, targeting and surveillance become futile.

This is (IMHO) a flawed and dangerous view, as by clicking on the ad you provide valuable information to the provider (I.e. that you visited the website on which the ad was embedded) and this information can be used to build a pretty detailed view of your browsing habits. As the largest ad networks have very high coverage on many domains (Google e.g is present on more than 80 % of the top 100k most popular domains) you will give them a wealth of data about you, which IMHO is a privacy nightmare.

"oh hey google, trust us, noone converted, we promise"

What I’m talking about would be impossible to detect, since it just amounts to regular users clicking regular ads. But it would also be more challenging to profit from, so it would amount to sabotage more than a profit scheme, unless somehow coupled with short-selling Google stock (a bit more far-fetched, admittedly).

It doesn't necessarily need to be targeted web ads, I suppose you could use newspaper ads, or TV or physical letters, or spam email. Any of these work, but I think a new business would probably get the most bang for buck by targeting.

Or we can talk about the purposeful obfuscation of the industry. How you have no way of verifying clicks, or views, or anything. How Cost Per Click is just an arbitrary number you and unknown others compete against, all for the pursuit of fake traffic and the hope of winning the advertising lottery.

It is more worth your time to play Three Card Monty on the street corner, because at least all parties agree that game is fixed.

When the online advertising bubble pops, it's going to go off like a fucking bomb, and we'll all be lucky to survive it.

Not to mention bots to scrape other legitimate sites and recreate them only with slightly reshuffled texts and a bazillion other ads and links to legitimate and illegitimate other sites, paid spamming to spread your malware and drive traffic into your network, spoof SEO and fake promotions by spam commenting on websites, blogs, etc. I'm probably missing a few thousand other things.

Worked in webhosting for a couple of years.. it was amazingly eyeopening to contend with the fact that yes, people actually make all of that junk content that I do my best to ignore, and that there are reasons behind it...

I have to admit that I was hoping that is what this would be about. I suspect that almost all ad clicks on mobile devices are "accidental" in the sense that those pages are optimized to ensure the maximum number of accidental clicks.