Of course, Google might already be detecting it, but the intent of AdNeuseam seems nothing but despicable.
AdNauseum was created long after the "adpocalypse". I would not be surprised if some people are using it in protest of YouTube's attempts to ruin the ability for independent media to fund themselves.
To put it simply: ads work against the free market; instead of the "best" product, the one with the largest advertisement budget wins.
For example, why do you think reviews are so important?
Also, you are reading articles through HN, not by watching ads for them first.
Then there is the age-old word-of-mouth.
Or seeing products in action with friends.
I could go on and on.
We will gush about a movie/product/service launch on television and call it news. One might even consider incentivising people to write positive reviews, we will just not call them ads. Why havent we seen any of these yet ? I have my review-blocker, post-blocker, word-of-mouth blocker startups still in waiting.
Are you saying that ads are okay simply because we have no means to eradicate them?
In this vast sea of noise, it is very hard to find good information. These massive industries keep churning out ads in a million different forms & keep blurring the lines between ad/content with a motive to sell and trustworthy content from a real person without ulterior motives.
Its a constant never-ending war on trustworthy content and erodes the webs utility as a whole. In the past 10 years the web has become more and more of an artificially curated garden to sell you shit and keep you clicking.. and despite many protests about ads, they remain invasive and pervasive.
They ignore all these concerns and keep ramping it up. So I don't think twice about using AdNaseaum.
This
war against *
But seriously, I am genuinely tickled that my sarcastic comments on this post was mistaken for genuine lack of knowledge regarding paid reviews and submarine articles.
My goal was to point out that if one kills one specific form-factor it will reappear in some other form-factor and it already has; to point out that the notion that reviews, articles, word of mouth can be a substitute for ads is a silly idea [0]. Paid reviews and submarine articles being some of the other form factors. Those reviews and articles are just as dishonest if not more so and ignoring them to target others rather indiscriminately is not going to result in a better web. Thats closer to a baby throwing a tantrum than anything else.
An indiscriminate war against all ads is just childish and silly. Silly is the sweeping notion that _all_ ads are essentially motivated by malice [1] and only does harm to the reader.
Are you being sarcastic, or are you unaware that this is a real thing that happens?
By all means, give me all the ads when I'm actually looking for a product to buy. The sad thing is that when I do that, all the ads tend to be irrelevant. Even on sites like amazon, which should know what I'm looking for. They have these sponsored product placements that are supposed to be relevant to my search. In practice, they hardly ever are. And if they're somewhat relevant, they're still not relevant enough for me to consider purchase.
Online ads do an incredibly bad job of providing useful knowledge about the mere existence of a product.
In practice, I always need to turn to reviews, forums, word-of-mouth, etc. etc. etc., and finding useful information in the infinite sea of ad-spam is quite frustrating.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advertising_Standards_Authorit...
There are laws and guidelines stating that claims made in ads have to be backed up, or at least not misleading and there are companies who've been fined or forced to take down ads because of it.
Whether it works well is another question though.
You must be kidding, right ? I would be happy if it works at all.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
May be this will help https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15115082
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!"
I never discussed the level of impact for this type of direct action.
edit: Also, if the impact is negligible, I assume you're fine with more people installing adnauseam.
> Obviously fraud
Good luck making that decision. Are you willing to defraud the people hosting your ads with an overly-sensitive detector? Unlike the user that installs adnauseam that doesn't have any contractual relationship with the advertiser or ad-hosting website, the advertiser would be committing fraud if their false positive is too high.
Isn't that a win, for a user who already runs an adblocker?
Also, receiving untarged ads may mean you're no longer being tracked, which is a bonus if you're concerned about privacy.
I think this is why companies are paying real software engineers top $ to come up with real solutions to this non-trivial problem.
MacKeeper ads
Literally nothing else seems to be working, so poisoning the advertising well strikes me like a fair tactic.
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.
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."
I'm almost new here, if there is a way to send PMs to other people I didn't find it.
I can't think of any quality product that relies solely on advertisement, and I can't think of any product that has become better once advertisements became a part of its funding.
They don't. And I consider this a feature, not a bug. The www existed just fine before advertisers came onto the scene, and it can function even better when they leave.
For many ad-based sites, the loss will be minimal.
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.
Comparable to firing a guy who upset a huge portion of the company and false positives on hate detection algorithms. Sure.
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.
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".
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.
Also... this doesn't actually hurt Google. If the percentage of fake traffic goes up, the cost per click will just go down over the long term. And what, advertisers are going to lose faith? Give me a break. It doesn't matter if the traffic is 0% fake or 90% fake, all that matters is if the traffic is making you a profit or not.
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.
Google has a strong incentive to fix this because any money going to scammers is theoretically coming out of their own pockets as advertisers lower their CPCs to adjust for lower conversion rates, but it isn't an existential threat to the marketplace. Cut out the scammers and the CPCs adjust back upwards as conversion rates increase.
And again, Google has the tools to find the scammers. It's a game of whack-a-mole for sure, but at the end of the day the higher the level of fraud on the marketplace the easier it is to catch, so the scammers are somewhat limited in how much damage they do.
This is a perfect summary of what is going on.
In this case I trust Google because their incentives are aligned with advertisers', and they certainly have both data (from Google Analytics and other sites) and means to distinguish between a human and a bot.
Is it?
The better the overall search algorithm, the less the need to hack around it by paying for placement..
Some level of 'bad results' helps ensure that ads are needed in the first place, and junk sites provide a ready source of bad results..
Now, when junk sites cause you to lose revenue, the equation gets unbalanced, but that is not to say having the variable equate to 0 is good either, because the revenue would lessen..
Obviously it can't simply allow the fraud because that would make google fraudulent itself, but at the same time they cant just outright ban crappy sites, since there are so many that are only marginally crappy but otherwise legitimate, and could only be unwilling participants in someone else's dishonest scheme..
I would argue that google is attempting to maximize a set of equations here, and since at some point there is a grey area between 'crappy scammish sites' and 'full on fraud', google has some leeway to what extent it polices the grey area, and, further, to some extent can do this at advertisers expense so long as 'the house wins' to borrow gamboling terminology..
All the things you need are not necessarily known to you in advance. It’s entirely possible that someone has created a new product that no one knows about, and allowing these companies to pay for visibility allows you to discover these ideas that you might end up finding useful. The idea is that when advertisers pay for placement, they better have a useful product (that can recoup the cost), or else they’ll be throwing money out the window.
I’m not claiming any alternative exists right now. I’m saying that the less efficient Google is at converting dollars paid by advertisers into visitors, the greater the pressure from future (unknown) technologies that eradicate the inherent inefficiency in Google’s model.
If I knew exactly how to capture Google’s ad revenue, I would be starting a company rather than writing comments on HN.
If they randomize it, no.
things could get interesting.. or, more likely, they could not.
http://www.businessinsider.com/thepartnership-msix-and-adloo...
Google has more than enough training data to pick up on this traffic with a high degree of accuracy using rudimentary machine learning.
> 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"