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This might be satire, but I'm genuinely surprised that clicking the ad links is not yet mandatory to keep using services.

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Advertisers use click through rate to measure ad effectiveness.

That is the reason they went absolutely crazy when adnauseam was introduced, as it used a different approach: it didn't block ads but loaded them in an invisible way, then "clicked" them randomly so that although the user wasn't pestered by ads, advertisers would get completely bogus click through data.

https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam

Isn't that good for their numbers though? I would imagine there are some advertisers who are buying out their own bots to juice click through rate. Why not? Incentives are high, disincentives are a slap on the wrist if you manage to even prove anything at all.

What would be the incentive for an advertiser to spend money on bots to juice the click-through rate of their ads? More ad-clicks mean more money spent on ad networks, and bots are notoriously stingy customers, all the more so if they are your own.

To fool the client into thinking the ad spend does anything

Yeah, but they can force the click and use conversion rate to measure the effectiveness of the ad campaign

Advertisers would not measure click through rate now if conversion could be measured always.

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