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Comment by curiousObject | Hacker News Reader

if you have a lot of fake traffic then ads on your site will have an even worse conversion rate than normal?

Yes, if you only count purchase/sale conversions

Maybe no, if you also count clickthrough and view conversions, perhaps even lead conversions sometimes (because fake sign ups are possible).

But you’re right. Purchase conversions are one incentive

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Next thing you know, the bots will learn how to purchase products, and we'll have come full circle.

I'd love to have an agent that goes online whenever I'm running low on toilet paper or something, browses all the stores and clicks all the ads, and automatically orders the best deal it can find.

I certainly wouldn't want to be caught in that arms race where sites continually attempt to find sneaky ways to convince my agent to buy things I don't actually want.

By clicking on all the ads you're raising prices in the long run and just funneling money to google and meta, forcing the toilet paper companies to make scratchier tp to try and squeeze out more margin. My bhole would thank you for not doing this.

Or maybe if everyone does it, market forces will suppress the cost per click and we'll be back to square zero.

That's interesting. Drive ad value to zero or force them to start blocking crappy traffic. I think the issue is this could take us down the device attestation drm for the web path to discern legitimate traffic which is bad for the open web.

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