Hacker News Reader

Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

> Every newspaper in America has obvious scam ads on its homepage.

It's genuinely baffling, given largely bad-faith "fake news" accusations, that news organizations are willing to light their credibility on fire like this. It feeds the nonsense, and justifiably so.

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Turn off an ad blocker for a day after years of running one and you will routinely get solicitations for fake tech support lines, fake crypto ransom demands, and so on even if you are only browsing mainstream sites. This even goes for both iOS and Android phones. Digital display ads are major vectors of crime and the websites and the ad networks that serve them should be held liable for the damages that they cause to victims by facilitating the crimes. They are basically driving the cars for the burglars and helping them literally target victims like the elderly. Then they just say 'oops lol we're not liable.' It's a joke. The government should go after them like it dismantled the Japanese empire in the 1940s. Take everything they have and put the executives in prison for decades.

Given the hyper targeted efficiency of the modern ad networks, are you sure the fake crypto and tech support ads are going to everyone and not just to you?

It's the ad network's responsibility to never show scam ads, this has nothing to do with targeting.

My concern would be the opposite. What if scams are only targeted towards those that are likely to fall for it like the elderly, flying under the radar of anyone who has the skills to recognize it as a scam and report it?

I'm constantly amazed at the frequency with which articles posted to Hacker News have a bar of clickbait ads immediately following the body of the article.

Those rabbit-hole articles where they split eight facts across 12 pages and in some cases never mention the fact they were advertising in the original link. All so they can put six more ads per click in front of you.

Ye. These "You can't guess how 'random actor' looks now" and then a picture of some drug addict and not the actor. The actor in the ad is nowhere to be seen if you click the ad. I actually got fooled to click because I couldn't believe that the actor got like that and it looked like an article on the "honorable" newssite ...

What's the endgame for those ads? How is your click meant to convert to revenue? Plain old scams?

For the clickbait content ads on Taboola and Outbrain, the strategy is ad arbitrage. The landing page is probably broken up into a slide show with many pages. The goal is to get the user to go through 30 pages (misclicking a few ads along the way) and monetize as more revenue than the cost of their visit. There are other monetization strategies for other types of ads on Taboola and Outbrain.

The arbitrage isn’t illegal but it’s also not not a scam. If you’re running ads against the shite articles and you knew all the traffic to the ad was just people from a different site who don’t even really see your ads, you wouldn’t be very happy to pay for it.

It's not that baffling. Good investigative journalism costs money and now everyone wants news free.

Also it doesn't matter what the NYtimes puts on its site - Sean hannity calls it librul and they all just fall in line anyway, why even bother catering to that crowd?

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