Is it possible to defend against adbotage? | Hacker News Reader

Is it possible to defend against adbotage?

jesse.id

5 pointsjesse_dot_id8 comments

First, "adbotage", what great word. Second:

I am wracking my brain trying to think of a way to defend against this

Why not think of a way to perform this attack? Despite almost zero charisma, the No Kings people organized a truly massive, non-violent protest. Who can you get to pull off mass market adbotage? Once you've got a credible mechanism, you've got a better idea of how to defend. Maybe go so far as to try to make adbotage happen. The first few attempts will fail or have problems, but produce enough ad clickers that you'll stress test the system.

Well, the way to perform the attack is to organize millions of people with instructions to click on every ad they see. That's not really my thing. I think to try and do it programmatically would make it trivial to filter for talented engineers. However, my question is how would they defend against it if people were manually clicking on ads with their free time? I'm not sure how it would be possible.

I think things like this have been proposed - ad nauseum was mentioned in another comment. I think they're all doomed to fail for a number of reasons:

1. most people aren't running adblockers, so them turning them off and clicking on adds would add very little noise to the data

2. the ad companies aren't exactly honest with their numbers; remember the pivot to video? that was just an out-and-out fabrication. The ad companies would just lie to their clients about click-throughs, impressions, etc.

Right, but if millions of people suddenly began clicking on every ad they see, I think that would create a big problem. Clearly they lie about their numbers, and they probably engage with their own bots, but I feel like adding millions of clicks per minute for months would be difficult to mitigate.

Enough people use ad blockers that it's worthwhile for a lot of sites to beg you to turn them off, or maybe to just not show you the content if you're using an ad blocker.

Maybe if the marketing/ad industry stopped being so abusive, it would reduce the desire of people to counterattack.

there's an extension called "ad nauseum". this is it's goal. it doesn't seem to have destroyed the ad economy yet, but maybe if more people install it it will

for whatever reason you can't get it on the chrome addon store.

Ahhh, interesting, hadn't heard of it. I think that an extension-based approach is too easy to mitigate, though. I think to be effective, it would need to be people clicking on the adds themselves, because it would be much harder to separate their traffic from legitimate traffic. When people are manually clicking ads, their traffic looks organic, whereas an extension clicking everything in rapid succession probably looks programmatic and would be trivial to filter out.

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