Scroll. Down. And it explains the joke.

My first reaction to this was, oh someone discovered fraud. And then I read the disclaimer: this is securities fraud.

Decades ago, long enough that NDAs are long expired, I analyzed ad network traffic at Google, handling big entities with involved contracts like IAC, Mozilla, AOL, Yahoo, and so on. We looked for weird traffic that might be signs of an attack, organized crime, misconfiguration, and so on.

Lots of these entities were arbitraging ad traffic, which they were mostly explicitly allowed to do. They'd buy ads on Google search engine results pages, and after a click dump the user on their own SERP, often for a different but (nominally related) keyword. The game is, change the keyword just enough that ads on your own SERP are much higher cost per click, and make your SERP's organic results shitty enough that users are highly likely to click an ad instead of a real link.

We kept finding that several of these guys had SERP ad revenue increasing by double, triple digit percentages year over year—with almost no organic traffic, and offset by commensurate lockstep increases in Google ad spend. They mostly consistently lost money, with spend, ahem, traffic acquisition costs, a few percentage points higher than revenue. There were lawyers, finance people, and analysts trying to figure out what the fuck was going on.

With Google taking a cut at every corner, actually coming out ahead at scale was a tough game to play. They couldn't make a profit, but they sure could show sustained growth... offset by TAC.

Literal billions were spent this way. Most of the ad purchases, SERP results, and SERP ads came from Google. Almost all the rest came from Microsoft.

Check out the SEC filings from AOL and IAC in 2013-2015 if you're curious. Grep fro traffic acquisition costs.

No. GAAP already prevents what it is implying from occurring, and the website is aware enough of this to admit it in the footnotes, but tries its best to distract from that with big, spicy implications on top. GAAP revenue is booked when there are real deliverables at arm's length pricing, and isn't when there isn't.

Clickbait title and OP didn’t disclose this is his site. Flagged.

They spent 10k to get 10k so the profit is 0... I know this is a real fraud but surely accounting as we know it isn't fit for purpose if it cannot detect this scam

Lol, this is so Q2. Today you need the LARP Orchestror to spin up a dozen SubLARPs, then hook them up to an external ledger verifier so you can run them in a Enron loop.

Go look up some of their clients.

Edit: post is from the creator of the site, whose only other history on HN is trying to get interest in a vibe coded learning app by calling himself the “Elon Musk” and “Kanye” of Ed-Tech. Truly a larper.

We are living this "joke" right now.