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Comment by awongh | Hacker News Reader

I don't really believe the main thesis of this article- it reads like much of the fake cliff-hanger pseudo-insight endemic to marketing and business influencers.

Mainly, it avoids the main point- 73% of your traffic is "faked" enough to look real.

Who are the players in that scenario that stand to benefit from your traffic being fake?

You pay for Google (search ads) and Facebook ads but the traffic is faked by them (unlikely)

You pay other publishing networks (maybe adsense?) and the website owners profit from sending fake traffic (maybe true? if the article were really trying to make a case for this, just name them?)

Or, you work inside a company and just want to make your department look good?

I'm not sure I know what the point of this article is besides a click bait title.

Just tell me exactly what the mechanism is for this fake traffic- don't hint at some kind of conspiracy.

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It would take a lot more investigative journalism to track down the bot networks and figure out the why and who, which I agree is the more interesting information. It’s not surprising that nobody seems to be willing to be quoted by name as a source. The whole industry seems fake and shady.

Despite the “LinkedIn influencer” writing style of the article, the results don’t seem that shocking or unexpected.

It is the website owners that commit click fraud. It has been that way for the last 25 years. I mean the first thing I did as a kid was checking what will happen if I keep clicking on ad on my newly created homepage.

> just name them Does Adsense even gives you information where exactly your ad is getting published?

I can see doing it just to verify that the ads being shown on my site are not leading to anything I don't want to be associated with, e.g. porn, shock/tabloid content, politics, etc.

> You pay for Google (search ads) and Facebook ads but the traffic is faked by them (unlikely)

Unlikely?

Highly unlikely, because they obviously would never engage in fraudulent activity! I mean, what would even be their incenti-

Eh, you know what, let's just not think too much about it.

If they know it is a bot, it is fraudulent. They know it is a bot when it is time to pay from their Adsense arm. It is insane that the same click that isn't paid to the publishers still goes to google's pockets.

As I said above, I think it's likely they don't do that much about fake adsense clicks.

Fraudulently creating traffic and charging you for it is a whole other level of scam, though.

The distinction is between Google looking the other way if AdSense publishers are making them money, and Google generating their own fake traffic on their own search intent inventory.

I'd say it's unlikely they are generating fake clicks on search ads.

Mainly because they just don't need to in order to make money. They can still just charge you for impressions on searches that aren't the most well matched. No need to create fake traffic like this blog post conspiracy says.

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