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Comment by soared | Hacker News Reader

AppLovin will be caught in up in an ad fraud scandal within two years. I can't share the data but we've stopped spending any money through them due to obvious fraud. Previously we were spending ~20k/day with them.

To be fair, unity isn't clean either. For over a month in Q1 of this year they had a whole lot of ads where the "x" button to close was actually covered by the ad, so ~50% of ads were being clicked when a user wanted to close them.

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Isn't it standard practice to give the X button on ads a near-impossible-to-tap hitbox?

I'm amazed there's still so much money in mobile ads, as the games/apps that use them have become so obnoxious that I've got no desire to go near them any more.

It's moved on from 'annoying by somewhat honest' ads, to completely fake gameplay footage, and ads for real-money gambling in games that kids may be playing.

And the model of having thousands of short-lived/unprofitable games pushing ever more players towards the same few aggressively-monetised megahits doesn't seem like it should be sustainable.

> ads for real-money gambling in games that kids may be playing.

Exactly. The target demogrphic for these ads are kids with an Apple Pay account linked to their parents, who can be goaded into clicking on loud shiny ads.

Definitely not standard practice. There will always be bad actors, fraud, spam, etc, when so much money is involved. But most buy side systems are advanced enough to recognize bad actors and not spend money on them. So for any site/app that wants longevity in their revenue they will not implement shady tactics and they’ll earn high cpms.

Brands with real budget employ teams of people to avoid serving on the inventory you’re discussing. Nike blocks like 99% of available inventory.

Is it legally fraud of a ad SDK uses these kinda of tricks? I encounter these kinds of tricks in many of the games my daughter plays on the iPad and hate it immensely, but it seems everybody gets away with it ...

Are there any laws that should prevent these kinds of dark patterns?

I would imagine that if something is deemed fraud, it's the ad-space buyer that is deemed the victim, as they're paying for clicks that aren't genuine interest, and not the user/viewer.

IANAL etc, but I thought it would be good to add the distinction.

It's not a dark pattern, because it doesn't really benefit anyone. Just destroys the signal by drowning it in noise so advertising becomes just a little bit dumber.

It benefits the app creator, and whoever is behind the ad serving to the detriment of the person doing the advertising. They get charged each time someone clicks that add.

The person advertising has all the data they need to determine performance, just add statistics know-how.

> They get charged each time someone clicks that add.

Well, no. Not really. The client wants to buy an actionable contact with a real person at the end of the deal. The app creator can try selling counterfeit goods, but this trick only works once and the next time the client will demand payment on the basis of something other than clicks. (And this process has already happened many years ago; nobody charges per click in 2022.)

OP didn't directly say such dark patterns are fraudulent. They said AppLovin was committing fraudulent activity and then that Unity uses dark patterns.

I got Apple Arcade and it’s been great for my kids. I can limit what games get installed and they are free of this obnoxious crap.

Kindle FreeTime doesn't really offer much for limits except intended age but is similarly non-obnoxious.

Yes! I love Apple Arcade for this reason, too.

Especially because I only typically let them use it on the Apple TV and not a phone or iPad. They get to use a physical controller (DS4) and we can talk about their game as they play. So it’s less mindless and we can keep an eye on what they’re exposed to in game.

I got Apple Arcade subscription for myself for the same reason. No ads, no pay to win mechanics, and some great games, too.

There are virtually no good games on Apple Arcade. Had it for a year, nothing but goofy cell-shaded 6 year old child's games with maybe three or four titles like Jetpack Joyride or Crossy Road to piggy back off. I can't imagine how an adult can enjoy what's in the Apple Arcade and I really gave it the benefit of the doubt.

Alto’s Adventure and Alto’s Odyssey are a nice duo for 5 minute breaks. Samorost series are old, but nice adventure games.

Mini Motorways and Mini Metro are nice tactical games to exercise the brain.

Fantasian is a fantastic game and has a great story.

Lego Builder’s Journey is an excellent game that can be enjoyed by adults.

https://apps.apple.com/ie/app/lego-builders-journey/id144163...

What the Golf is great fun for all ages.

https://apps.apple.com/ie/app/what-the-golf/id1415190483

Simon’s Cat is a fun puzzle game. Kids love the story and the puzzles are challenging enough to be enjoyed by adults.

https://apps.apple.com/ie/app/simons-cat-story-time/id153501...

Mini Motorways is sublime

https://apps.apple.com/ie/app/mini-motorways/id1453901000

Sneaky Sasquatch and Alba are fun RPG lite adventures that you can play with younger kids to help them navigate more complex game experiences.

https://apps.apple.com/ie/app/sneaky-sasquatch/id1098342019

https://apps.apple.com/ie/app/alba-a-wildlife-adventure/id15...

Assemble with Care is a lovely puzzle game about repairing with a nice narrative.

https://apps.apple.com/ie/app/assemble-with-care/id145049869...

There are more but most of these keep my kids coming back and it’s a way to engage with them that you don’t often get in other games.

You have to report it and get the regulator involved to find out

If you just dismiss this as “kids games on an ipad” then everyone gets away with it

the reality is that the entire adspend industry is fraudulent or has a large component of fraud

I installed pi-hole in my house just for this.

How much time did it take to research + install a Pi-hole?

I used a pi-hole, but wanted it to work outside my home as well. NextDNS uses many of the same blocklists, and I happily pay $20/year for it. Also has apps for devices that roam from the house.

https://nextdns.io/pricing

They try to make it super easy: https://pi-hole.net/ and I have no recollection of encountering any issues.

OTOH I am a software engineer working with Linux and network related stuff.

The issues comes later when some pages may break. When that happens you need to stop bashing your computer and add some URLs to the Pi-hole whitelist (or skip those parts of the web...). In my experience there has been few issues. Some enterprisey stuff my wife needed for work depended on some oracle tracking URLs that were blocked if I remember correctly.

Can you write exceptions for IPs within your network? I’d like to exclude our work laptops from filtering. Both laptops have static IPs on my network.

Reading more I could just change my devices dns settings to use what I want. A little more cumbersome and requires local admin on windows.

You can create IP based exceptions, or you can point those machines at another dns resolver. Either works.

I configured my kid's tablet to use AdGuard's public DNS https://adguard-dns.io/en/public-dns.html

No more in-app ads.

Strange thing, I tried it on my FireTV to block youtube ads, but it didn't work. I wouldn't be surprised if the FireTV monkies around with user settings. The other explanation could be that youtube uses the same hostname for videos and ads, so the DNS blocking can't distinguish.

I ended up side-loading a 3rd party YT client that doesn't play ads. https://smartyoutubetv.github.io/

In every comparable instance the company will provide a “make good” where they don’t bill you for that same amount on the next billing cycle.

My company didn’t because the US is a small fraction of the company and they aren’t too invested in spending time/resources here.

Hard to definitely label it as a fraud, because from my experience mobile advertising SDKs tend to have a lot of bugs in their presentation layer, and not all of them may benefit ad provider.

> ads where the "x" button to close was actually covered by the ad, so ~50% of ads were being clicked when a user wanted to close them.

Even Android has patterns like these

This X being unavailable can be just incompetence. Esp on Android with all those slightly different screen sizes.

Recently i tried to run an app on an iphone mini but their layout was crap and both buttons on the first screen of the initial setup were on top of each other. Couldn't click either :)

Incompetence that for a curious coincidence advantages them and frauds both the user and the companies paying for ads.

For sure mobile screen variety isn't helping, but I don't believe that's the reason the X button doesn't work on ads.

Well I've also seen my wife playing a F2P game and sometimes the ads either crashed the app completely or locked up with her unable to click on either the ad or close. When they worked the close button was available.

I'm not rich enough to play free to play games so I have no personal experience.

I've seen many ads where the first "X" button that appears is fake, placed there to make you question yourself: "Well, the X is very small, it appears I fat-fingered it". It then becomes "real" after you switch out of whatever the ad opened and back to the app hosting the ad. It works on the second try, and that confirms your belief that it must have been your fault.

If you are spending thousands per day you should be backing out real time ROI/LTV which eliminates nearly all potential fraud.

The performance ad market moved from pay per impression to pay per click and then finally to pay per conversion years ago. Pay per conversion is the foundation of Facebook's lookalike audiences and Google's long-tail search campaign tools. When I see problematic campaigns these days it's usually because the media buyer hasn't set up their funnels/KPIs correctly.

The system is 100% deep learning, but most our our spend going to app lovin was in a new product that isn’t use deep learning yet unfortunately. You’re correct though :) we bid to roas/cpa and the affected campaigns were bidding to cpc!

That makes sense. I wouldn't call that ad fraud. That's the ML system optimizing for what you've said you want. If you bid for cpc you're going to get a lot of cheap clicks, but they're going to be nearly worthless. That would be the case on any large ad network, especially since mediation is so mature.

Great opportunity for Godot to take up space in 2d and low scope 3d games

applovin feels like the modern day embedded IE toolbar in your MSI

most major ad tech companies use borderline scammy ways to increase KPI's

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