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Comment by endisneigh | Hacker News Reader

Fight against ads by giving the ad networks money and further incentivizing captcha and other tech to stop bots.

It gives them money in the short term but it costs their clients money and makes the service overall less valuable. If everyone installed this it would basically wreck the online ads industry overnight.

But if only a few people install it then it's just a little bit more money taken from advertisers and given to ad companies. The tiny number of people who would actually consider installing an extension like this aren't going to substantially impact the perceived value of online advertising.

Marketing departments don't care. Attribution is already a joke, click fraud is the cost of doing business.

Folks think most marketing departments are these sophisticated analytics driven masterminds, when it's really number go up == throw more money at it.

In my experience, marketing does track the cost of user acquisition through ads, and of different ad platforms vs each other.

Isn't the purpose to cause ad networks to lower fee payments due to rampant click fraud and thus to destroy the business model?

The problem is it does not destroy the model of annoying ads, it jsut makes it less profitable for publishers. It works like an auction, which is that advertisers place bids. assuming there are lots of fraudulent clicks, advertisers would notice a lower conversion rate, which would hurt ROI and advertisers would adjust by lowering bids, so the problem sorta corrects itself by adjusting to a new equilibrium of profitability. the only one hurt are the publishers and ad networks like meta/alphabet who earn less. but the evidence only shows higher ad rates despite this, not less.

I don't personally run this extension (because I've read that the fraudulent clicks are easy to detect) but supposing that the clicks from this extension were both pervasive and indistinguishable from real clicks, it would seem to me that that would cause ROI to asymptotically approach zero which would result in the collapse of ad networks as a viable business model.

Unfortunately it just leads to more ads. 20 years ago we had way fewer ads on typical sites, today you can hardly find the text in between the ads on your average news site.

Thanks to uBlock Origin, I don't see any ads on any sites. It's great.

I think one should be careful using the term "click fraud" in this context. Someone who installs this extension doesn't in my mind qualify to be defrauding anyone. There is no contract in place, it isn't against the law to express interest in a product, and there's no technical controls being breached illegally as the browser is just sending a request to a server.

> Someone who installs this extension doesn't in my mind qualify to be defrauding anyone.

Bluntly, it doesn't matter what you or I think -- what matters is what politicians, police, prosecutors and judges think.

I don't see anything on the main github page that says the extension is intended to cause harm to the advertisers or the website, but IME governments have often not cared.

And when 1M people in a country install the extension, are they acting independently or as a group? One person protesting may be legal, 1M organizing may not be protected.

Stop being vague. Which specific law do you think that might violate. Provide a citation.

The U.S. Department of Justice Criminal Resource Manual Section 941.18 U.S.C. 1343 cites these as the key elements of wire fraud: “1) that the defendant voluntarily and intentionally devised or participated in a scheme to defraud another out of money; 2) that the defendant did so with the intent to defraud; 3) that it was reasonably foreseeable that interstate wire communications would be used; and 4) that interstate wire communications were in fact used.”

You have completely misunderstood the wire fraud statute. It isn't even remotely applicable here. Come on. Read the case law.

Since the ad agencies are the ones benefiting monetarily from this alleged fraud, would that not mean that they would be bringing about a case against themselves?

And this is why Google is speculating to integrate WEI on Google Chrome and business owners and advertisers are going to gladly welcomeand implement it and pressure web developers to do the same on their websites. Just because there's no direct defrauding going on, doesn't mean ad networks aren't noticing and accounting for it.

Apple already has shipped something similar. https://httptoolkit.com/blog/apple-private-access-tokens-att...

"hihi, my browser clicks ads in the background, I'm fighting Big Tech so hard rn"

Google implements WEI on chrome and normal users who just want to block ads can't use their extensions anymore.

"Google Bad! I want to block my ads and cause you financial loss too"

"NO" - Google

So, mission accomplished?

> incentivizing captcha and other tech to stop bots

At what place would this incentivize captchas? It can't be when you click on the ad, because users would just close the window.

It gives the networks money but it also hurts the companies actually running the ads, which would disincentivize them to do it at all, and the networks will only make more money if companies don't see a decrease in pay off for clicks and reduce their offers/stop running ads through that service altogether.

That being said realistically this is too niche for nearly enough people to run it to make any significant difference on the scale of the networks themselves, it'll just obfuscate your tracking a little.

It raises the cost per conversion, but whether that will translate to fewer ad-spend dollars isn’t clear to me. Maybe they will increase their budgets to maintain the same conversion numbers.

There was also an interesting Freakonomics episode on whether ads work at all. The incentives for advertising aren’t exactly rational. What’s good for a company isn’t always good for an individual working in the ads department of that company. Plus, the money is often there whether it works or not, and advertising departments will always insist that they do.

It will drive down key advertising metrics like conversion rate, and return on ad spend.

Which will lower bids for ads.

But it would be easy for Google, FB, etc to filter out this traffic.

Which I guess is the goal of the plugin.

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