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Comment by chuckdries | Hacker News Reader

You are punishing me and only me. We don't use an ad network, we sell our ad space directly to local businesses. Fake ad clicks have been actively hurting our ability to sell ads for about a year now. Our ads are pictures. Pictures are not malware.

Also what ads cause damage? Like sure the ads on porn or piratebay are cancerous but no reputable newspaper will have anything harmful, just potentially annoying.

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Your story doesn't add up to me.

> We don't use an ad network, we sell our ad space directly to local businesses.

Fine, so you either (a) tell a business that you have XXX page views per month so they'll get YYY impressions (which may be blocked, but that you can try to make non-intrusive); or (b) you let the advertiser track the value they receive from ads placed on your site.

In the (a) case, there shouldn't be any difference between adblock and a fake clicking blocker. In the (b) case, a sensible advertiser should be able to weigh the value of the add they placed on your site no matter what mix of real and fake clicks they get: I ended up selling X USD to visitors coming through that place's ads, which amounted to Y USD in profit. Y > cost of the ads? Keep the ads going. Y < cost of the ads? sorry but we're out.

The only situation where fake clicks are bad is that where the advertiser suddenly realizes that "hey we sent you XXX people" is just a meaningless figure from which you just cannot infer a proper value metric to decide whether that ad is worth its cost or not. Which is another way of saying that it gives ad purchasers a reality check that can only be positive in the long run, disregarding the short-term loses of people who were selling inflated ad spaces until now.

As I understand it, what we do is closer to B. I'm not on the ad sales team, but the way it was explained to me, our ad partners have analytics on their website like everyone does these days, and they generally give us a link specific to our website that they can look at the analytics on and tell how many people visited that page, therefore how many people clicked the link. I'm told they see huge spikes in traffic that looks fake and get angry, threaten to drop us, etc. Basically they accuse us of artificially inflating our numbers, and without super detailed analysis it's hard to tell what is and is not fake. If you compare the traffic coming in to their affiliate links to the traffic we record on our own analytics, I'm told it looks super suspicious.

EDIT: apparently some advertisers have ad content prepared they give us that uses common advertising tools like doubleclick.net and such.

no reputable newspaper will have anything harmful, just potentially annoying.

That is, unfortunately, very incorrect: https://www.cnet.com/news/new-york-times-bbc-dangerous-ads-r...

That is appalling

That's why ad blockers are essential for normal people just to have security. We literally can't trust newspapers not to serve up toxic waste.

Perhaps you can be trusted! But nobody knows that, and it's reasonable to presume otherwise.

Put it this way: do you offer legally enforceable indemnity against people getting malware from ads you serve? If not, then you can't really tell them not to block the ads.

Forbes was running malware ads at least once in the last year iirc. Additionally, most places have ads from an ad network so it isn't like they are specifically choosing ok ads or anything. While porn and pirate sites have some of the worse ads, that doesn't make the rest of the ads much better.

I'm curious why you would feel The Pirate Bay is any more cancerous than a "reputable newspaper".

I just disabled uBlock and checked TPB. There were no ads on the landing page, and after using "search", had to scroll right to the bottom to find one small ad, for a reputable web hosting company (Siteground).

I opened our local news - smh.com.au. At the top of my page there's a similarly sized ad. There are also ads the full vertical length down each side of the page, which due to broken text rendering is just a picture of a man and I don't know what is being advertised.

If I scroll down a bit, there's a horizontal ad consuming roughly a third of the screen for American Express.

Most news articles have an auto-play video, and usually starting with ads. Several pages have ads with embedded sound, making this particularly embarrassing to test in the office.

I get that it's reasonable to have ethical issues with TPB. I wouldn't agree that reputable newspapers have a moral high ground on advertising.

See my other response above ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15112864 ) about why this extension wouldn't change anything for you.

> no reputable newspaper will have anything harmful, just potentially annoying.

Please look up "malvertising", install an ad blocker if you haven't already then come back and feel free to revise your statement. ;)

I personally use ublock origin in dynamic filtering mode, I use it like a blacklist, where I allow ads on all websites by default but block them selectively on particularly bad websites.

I can't seem to find which comment of yours you're referring to, I know that our ads are still blocked by most ad blockers and we've seen fake traffic and fake ad clicks in our analytics before.

I've edited my comment with a link to the response. Again, if your ads are actually safe and not obnoxious you could potentially just alter the markup every time you end up on an ad blacklist so the selectors no longer match.

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