There's a large circular economy with ad buyers, marketing/PR firms, ad-tech, and ad networks going on where a large amount of fraud is overlooked/ignored because everyone's jobs and ad budgets depend on ignoring it.
It's always been a surprise to me how much money is flowing from ads and how any business can be so reliant on it, since this makes it sound like it's fundamentally flawed. One would think the jig would eventually be up.
I guess my point is the alternatives to Google Maps aren't perfect but they have a lot more to offer than many people assume. When I drove across Canada, from Ottawa to Anchorage, OSM never let me down. It's a viable alternative.
Agreed. The real losers are the genuine content creators, as the adcash isn’t flowing to them. They can’t just average it out.
Of course there’s no way to contact and tell Google that Google gave me fraud traffic and got me banned from Google.
Honestly after the ad images/video, all the fraud detection javascript from the advertiser, the publisher, the advertiser's system of choice, the publisher's system of choice all doing "trust but verify" with each other is the largest contributor to how big ads are.
Best was when I kept seeing ads for a thing I was selling. I visited some big box sites about it to copy the specs on it.
I think if ads were smarter, you'd get ads for your vacuum's filter a few months after buying it and maybe replacement pieces just after warranty, but what do I know?
I wonder what would be reliable ways to spend money for advertising, then? I'm new to this, but I was thinking about spending some money for some online marketing until reading this.