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Comment by cronix | Hacker News Reader

That might be a fun thing to do. Make google and the others pay out the nose by actually clicking as many ads as you can instead of avoiding them. Just have everybody be their own click farm. We could have an international "click to support business day" (hah) where for 24 hours everybody around the globe just clicks ads. That's what they want us to do, isn't it? Maybe we should give it to them.

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If you like screwing with advertisers, I recommend the browser extension AdNauseam

https://adnauseam.io/

Basically, it hides and silently clicks on every ad in the background. It even has an archive where it shows you the ads it has hidden and clicked, so you can check in to see what advertisers think you are interested in, and it tries to eyeball the cost of those clicks to advertisers. Lots of fun to load the worst ad-ridden offenders' websites and get a smug sense of satisfaction that you wasted advertisers' money

You probably aren't. That's highly suspicious behavior that isn't hard for the ad networks like Google to detect and they'll just refund any costs as fraudulent activity.

Yeah, I wondered why it wouldn't just choose a random number of currently-visible ads to click, including 0, at random times? Clicking all ads all the time would definitely be conspicuous.

Then I found this on their FAQ (https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam/wiki/FAQ#what-is-the-clic...):

> What is the "click-probability" setting? This setting lets you control the likelihood that each discovered Ad will actually be clicked by AdNauseam. 'Always' means that every Ad discovered will be clicked, while 'Rarely' means that very few ads will be clicked(10%).

I wasn't meaning to use a plugin, or necessarily specifically target Google. Everybody manually click on ALL ads they see on ALL platforms. Make it so "the ad and tracking system" model just doesn't work and becomes to expensive for them to justify. They claim all of this capturing our data is to "provide better, more relevant, personalized targeted ads." They charge companies for those ads. We can basically make them ineffective by overwhelming them. All of them. I see nothing wrong, legally or morally, with everybody clicking on all of the links that they are putting before us. That's what they are there for, so let's utilize them en masse. If everybody did that on ALL platforms, what would happen? Where would they go? They would quit spending as much on these platforms, which is basically the entire revenue model of the platforms. The platforms would be forced to shift their behavior once it becomes literally ineffective for them to do business the way they have been and profits start to shrink, wouldn't they?

Another thing we can do: when you do a search, perform another search for the opposite. Or perform 2 irrelevant, random searches on things you literally don't care about or have nothing to do with your life. If we give them more crap than actual data, their algorithms would probably become ineffective.

Maybe not really click on all the ads though. Some of them can be shady as hell, or they open a new site with even more ads, and you'll never be done! Clicking on ads opened by other ads, I find that the "deeper" you, the worse it gets. By which I mean my personal feeling of: How likely whatever's being offered is a scam, but also how they are messing with my browser, pop-unders and other weird behaviour.

And most of the time I have uBlock enabled. I'm not entirely sure if messing with the tracking system actually weighs up against having to browse without uBlock.

It gets you banned rather quickly as a bot from most ad networks. Win-win.

But I suppose getting banned doesn't mean they stop serving you ads, right? It's more like a shadow-ban in that sense. There's still a win in that they'll have to invalidate a whole trail of tracking data about you.

Anecdote: I've hopped on a pot committed, 5+ device, aggressivly tuned AdNauseum bandwagon several times now, about one to two month spans spread over the past several years. I usually forget/ignore the increased background traffic for a short time then realize during a moment of inconvienient network congestion and flip back to ad-block, pie-hole, Blockada for mobile vpn etc... I have repeatedly observed a very steep increase in spam phone calls for myself (I take great effort to minimize the footprint of my personal emails across random db's) and email/social media spam for both other household members and office collegues, starting shortly after these heavy AdNauseum binges begin. Lot's of uncommon or specialized, high margin, high intent customer markets and service spam floods in. Never understood why they can stay so persistant. They often seem completely unfased, as if Google's prompt and voluntary fraud detection, disclosure and refund issuance can go entirely unnoticed. /s

Doesn't clicking on ads reward google, instead of punishing them?

The budget from advertisers is already credited to Google - if such tactic becomes popular, advertisers would get lower returns (bounces would be way higher than now), and move their budgets elsewhere, harming Google's business.

Here in the real world where that’s not gonna happen, they do benefit though. Adblockers getting popular makes sense, but some sort of ‘screw with google’ plugin (which already exists) is too niche.

Google doesn't bill the campaign upfront. It bills every time a threshold is crossed - for example, whenever you spend $500.

> move their budgets elsewhere

This assumes Google isn't effectively a monopoly. Is that assumption valid?

This is fascinating. It seems like it would be pretty easy to write a chrome app that runs a window in the background that interacts with every. single. advertisement.

Unfortunately the people to pay the toll would be the businesses running CPC campaigns, not google.

You'd have to run it at such massive scale that google wouldn't be able to collect because advertisers could show that something was wrong with google's model.

Um. Google would make money if you did that. At least short term. I guess if enough people joined in then advertisers would move to FB and google would lose money.

I don't care, I ruined their analytics and more importantly my online profile. The cross platform tracking exists, I'm going to fuck it over regarding my identity. Plus at an incredibly small scale I make it less valuable for advertisers.

Or when you're in a hurry, just click the least relevant ones.

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