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Comment by arbuge | Hacker News Reader

We advertise on X and have done so for many years now (well, it was Twitter for most of that period). Indeed we can confirm that we saw a big change happen around a couple of months ago or so - sometime towards the end of last year.

Our ads started getting literally orders of magnitude more traffic - we reduced the bids by a factor of 30x (no typo - that's thirty) and were surprised to see them taken up to the budget limit completely... we ended up spending a minor fraction of what we spent before for a lot more traffic.

So far, so good, right? Not so much. None of the traffic converted anymore. All useless. I can't remember the last actual conversion from X our conversion tracking software recorded at this point... weeks ago for sure. Formerly we got several a day.

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Your experience with twitter is similar to my experience advertising on reddit a couple of years ago. Their ads were dirt cheap compared to on other platforms but nothing converted. Most traffic from Reddit were roundtrip clicks with average sessions of about a second.

I would say that, from a user perspective, I do accidentally click on a lot of stuff on Reddit and Twitter. Almost every third post is an ad.

About 99% of the ads I’ve clicked on Reddit were by accident when I hit the back button and then try to click a link below an ad just as the page reflows to fit a taller ad and puts it under my cursor

An accident that happens repeatedly, its cause can be traced to a single actor, and that actor also benefits from all of instances of the accident.

Ad tech is weird.

I think "all clicks are click fraud" comes pretty close to the truth.

I have a love-hate relationship with this site

https://www.anandtech.com/

which runs some great articles but also runs a stupid roundup on large HDDs every month where they don't do any research but scrape prices from AMZN.

The thing is when I am visiting that site on mobile the content is always jiggling around, I think it is no accident because it means you want to click on a link but ka-ching you clicked on an ad.

Reddit has always been like that, but X formerly converted quite well for us.

> I would say that, from a user perspective, I do accidentally click on a lot of stuff on Reddit and Twitter. Almost every third post is an ad.

As a user, and not a person with advertising dollars to spend, try using reddit in firefox with ublock origin installed as a plugin. The experience is significantly better.

Also works well with firefox on android and ublock origin.

I use Brave for that reason and it’s a totally different browsing experience.

This might partially disappear with the nitter loophole closed but the number of bots under musk has gone up an order magnitude. I used to have 5 followers now I have anywhere from 70-100 depending on the day and I guarantee you I have not become more interesting. It’s all bots.

With nitter gone a lot of burner accounts are being created which no doubt they’re going to claim as a metric win. I’m running my own scraper with a lot of burner accounts. They can’t stop us from scraping.

What are you scraping for?

Posts that I want to see without using Twitter. I run several reposting accounts over on Mastodon.

Why do you think nitter going away will change anything? I would expect the set of users purposefully using nitter to be completely contained in the set of users with adblock on.

Other people are using the same technique for nafarious purposes so they will at least have to change techniques

I don't get what you mean here. Same technique as in loading the website? If there's money to be made, you have so many more options including paying people to register real accounts. Nitter does not have the same available motivation / resources as people who run serious scams.

Spammers will need to generate fake accounts to scrape using a different method than before. It may be more expensive but I doubt it’s prohibitively expensive

How does nitter increase ad traffic?

Malicious bots using the same technique as nitter to get into the site, and X blocking them will affect both.

How long with no conversions do you typically continue ad spend?

Depends on the type of ad and its intent.

But, no one should be advertising on Twitter for any reason anymore. It’s not brand safe and it’s always been absolutely trash; but, now it’s even worse.

Shift your budget to any other meaningful platform within the channel; you’ll be glad you did.

Political ads should do just fine.

I was in Hong Kong for two weeks late last year and every time I opened Twitter there I saw a promoted post for a voachinese.com article (something something China bad). It’s always VOA Chinese even though my language is clearly English, and my account is completely passive, never tweeted anything, liked anything or followed anyone, most of my visits are HN referrals about something tech related. It was quite surreal, like they bought the entire ad space of the region or something.

It’s not a bad idea to keep stuff running on a shoestring budget to keep an eye on things, in case things change again.

As of a few months ago, 99% of the ads I see are cryptocurrency scams. Blocking them doesn't help because the same ads are each being posted by dozens of accounts.

I guess this is fraud?

Isn't there an extension somewhere that got popular that clicked every Ad and just did not show it to the user?

Ad Nauseum?

Any idea what the traffic looks like? Phones? Windows? Mac? Any consistency behind it?

Looks quite human. Usual mix of user agents and visit durations. It’s not hard to fake that though, I guess.

you’re saying the ad click traffic from twitter is fraudulent?

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