Advertisers Could Soon Demand 'Verified Clicks'
amediaoperator.com
amediaoperator.com
I love running ad nauseam which instead of hiding ads clicks them all in an invisible browser, making advertisers pay for ads I didn't even see. And devaluing the entire concept. I wish ublock origin did this too, it's so common that it would totally screw up entire ecosystems. The number of people running ad nauseam is unfortunately minimal.
And no, I'm not doing anything illegal. I can do whatever I want with the content on my computer. Ad fraud is a term invented for websites creating artificial clicks so they get paid, the end user doesn't benefit from it.
Have an LLM write positive email responses, stringing them along as long as possible.
Imagine the Nigerian prince of scams... instead of getting 0.1% response rates that he can work on, he gets 99% responses of encouraging replies stringing him along. He would drown in false positives.
On the other hand, the Nigerian prince of scams would probably just use his LLM:s to take care of the answers, and we'll have email storms of LLM:s stringing along LLM:s.
I already see that happening in other ways.
On a forum I frequent there's been a user who instantly replies to new articles with a long irrelevant blahblah with a bunch of bulletpoints and emoji. And a while later another user started insta-replying to everyone with the same kind of crap.
Both were banned after a while and the forum now has a stricter "No AI" policy but even that caused some uproar, some users say they want it so they can be more elaborate without having the linguistic skills. But personally I'd love to see it go because most of these replies added nothing to the conversation.
You can do nice things with AI, yes. But it needs a human to tell it what to do. If you just put in a generic prompt "Write something insightful about this article" it's going to provide nothing but slop.
Besides, I'm not going to suck up to the big corpos just so they might leave me alone if I'm lucky, tbh. I'm too rebellious for that.
For what alternative? Paying money to each website to access it?
Besides, I don't really care what the replacement business model is. I just don't want this one.
If your service providers are funded by ads, and ads begin demanding "verified clicks", your service providers are greatly incentivised to begin pushing for locking down your ability to run what you want on your own hardware. Through manipulation of web standards, or through lobbying.
Like if you don't want to be kicked around, you need to be the one kicking.
People interpret business as hostility because they cannot conceive of the idea that they themselves should pay for a service.
How do I pay for something with a guarantee they'll leave the ad money on the table?
I pay for Ars, I pay for YouTube, I pay for discord nitro at the highest tier. Notice that all of those services are still ad funded?
As a market-driving force in the real world, basically an impossible task for the collective. However, occasionally consumers do successfully band together to abandon a service due to some perceived slight.
There is also the degree to which people consider something ad free. A character using an iPhone in a show could be considered an ad to some, and not noticed to others.
If that's what the business really believed, they'd put up a paywall instead of literally giving away their content. Some businesses do believe that. Most of them realize it's more profitable to sell data about you instead. So screw 'em and screw this victim-blaming "well we wouldn't need all this invasive tech if it weren't for those pesky adblockers, you'll need a TPM to browse the internet because you didn't play along with my bad business model" nonsense. The internet existed before big adtech, and it will exist after. Long live free computing.
> Like if you don't want to be kicked around, you need to be the one kicking.
This is a punk stance but somehow the argument is "be punk and whip out the credit card?" My argument is "be punk and adblock."
...by giving rent-seeking corporations more money? The internet was always "free". I've been using Adblockers since decades and will continue to do so.
As such, companies do all this to consumers who pay.
I beg to differ.
I can't wait for the future where I need a burner phone and a robotic arm just to browse the internet.
I get prompted to add Passkeys constantly. It makes me wonder if vendors will start doing it automatically "for your own good", like DoH in browser.
The saying in marketing used to be: "Half of all marketing dollars are wasted, but we never know which half".
In the internet, it seems to be more like "90% are wasted" and literally never even get a human impression, nevermind a human click-thru and sale.
What was always surprising to me was how the advertisers just went along with the scam. Perhaps as if the marketers' bonuses depended more on advertisement budget spent instead of sales increased.
If that's the case, what is making them catch on now?
What's happening now is the retreat from the open internet; users are either taking the Google AI search summary as gospel and not clicking through, or just going to chatgpt by themselves. Traffic from actual humans to non-FAANG pages is falling.
Perhaps the threat that "AI" will soon be the only "eyes" that see (and subsequently ignore) their online adverts?
With the amount of bot traffic I'm seeing these days, I would guess that the waste ratio is more like 99% now. That means a 90% reduction in conversions for the same ad budget. Surely someone is feeling the difference.
I used to think, okay, I guess they don't care about visiting their sites and just want to get eyeball impressions to stay relevant in the cultural zeitgeist.
Then I learned how ads worked in the print industry, where it is assumed in the calculation that every magazine changes hands through at least twenty people who all look at all ads. So maybe everyone was just already used to getting screwed over paying for ads.
Then there's the fear of missing out angle. People paying for ads don't know whether it makes a different, but are too scared to find out. I also once read about a small business that took that risk and found out not paying for internet ads made no difference whatsoever.
Maybe it's time for an entire country to decide to just straight up outlaw all internet ads for a couple years and force everyone to find out what happens.
I remember a long time ago seeing a study that asked people if they had seen ads for the California lottery and if so what they remembered about them. They also asked people if they played the lottery and if so why they played.
What they found was that in the people who said they had not seen ads and in the people who aid they had seen them but could remember anything about them a large fraction of those who played gave reasons that were almost word for word quote from slogans from the ads.
OTOH, I'm quite sure if you came to me with a truckload of $100 bills and a gun, put the gun to my head and asked me to tell you anything about an advert I saw 3 minutes ago, the truckload of cash is mine if I can say anything, and you'll shoot me if I can't, you'll end up shooting me. I'm pretty sure that is true for the next 100 people also.
The question is, which matters?
Completely agreed about being influenced without knowing it.
Ads are going to be very very difficult to ban as the incentive behind ads will never go away. With that said, less ads is always better, but it will be a tit for tat battle.
Or make it a human right to not be exposed to unsolicited ads. They are effectively a psychological attack. They target your mind with the express goal to alter your perception. And they work. It's baffling how this psychological warfare against everyone is legal.
This is because everyone in the supply chain is paid per impression, so they don't have any real incentive to root out (or even discover/report) fraud unless the buyer is leaning on them to do so. An unsophisticated firm looking primarily at reach and impressions as key performance indicators sees those KPIs inflated by fraudulent impressions, so even the purchaser isn't really incentivized to discover fraud in those instances. And if you suddenly decide you do care about fraud after not caring about it previously, you're faced with the prospect of having to report to your stakeholders that the metrics you've been giving them have been bullshit for years.
If you're looking at conversions as your key performance indicator then you do care about fraud and will lean on your ad buyer to discover and reduce it, or else just avoid open web display inventory entirely and buy exclusively on platform properties like LinkedIn or Instagram.
There have been various efforts to reduce fraud for a long, long time. Obviously nothing so far has really comprehensively worked. But there are some people in the industry who do make their money and earn their reputations as fraud-fighters, and they continue pushing new solutions. If the fraud problem for open web display inventory could actually be solved it would probably result in a bonanza for anyone positioned to capitalize on a fraud-free supply chain, so some people are incentivized to chase the dream (or at least convince others that they're earnestly chasing the dream).
I wonder if it is just the first internet-native generation getting older and getting into decision making positions. People with built-in ad blockers in their brains.
Or it could be “AI” clicks, who knows?
Talk to them. They can't resist the temptation of throwing in a few bucks (whether that is $20, a few hundreds or a few thousands) into the online advertising casino whenever it's a slow day in the office.
Then Meta will tell them that their ad reached 40 000 people or Google will tell you that your website had 3000 more clicks, but you don't see any increase in sales and think that you'll do better next time.
Or if it's a bigger business with a dedicated team advertising. Of course they're not going to tell the boss that it's bullshit and doesn't increase sales - then they'll loose their jobs!
The WWW acronym should stand for Worldwide Wild West.
What makes a click 'verified', bots can still click links with browser use anyway and you will not be able to tell.
Oh, you programmed your Arduino to present itself as a mouse via USB, so you can do automated click-fraud that way? No problem, only certified hardware allowed as input devices from now on
I'm not sure what we are going to do about robot arms using touchscreens, or little devices that trick mouse sensors into thinking it's moving. Maybe continuous fingerprint reading?
Heartbeat monitor paired to your mouse's fingerprint readers under the mouse buttons while your webcam verifies your Face ID?
"Approved live human detected: Please spit in DNA analyzer to verify."
Ah, so this is why Anthropic is banning all biological work on it's LLM, it doesn't want you to make an automatic spitting machine to defeat its future ads.
The article is about email marketing. Some company has a proprietary algorithm that purportedly detects whether a click is legitimate based on 8y of development and data collection.
It’s definitely a race against the growing capabilities of the models in use and one that will be very difficult to win which is why there has been a significant push toward verification across the Internet—not because of the children, but because of the revenue.
Email marketing is inexpensive, easier to measure, relies on the ridiculous CDPs and ESPs they’ve been tricked into investing in, and the measured numbers are larger than other digital channels.
The problem isn’t that bots are clicking, it’s that those big numbers aren’t going up and to the right in a reliable way any longer and those CMOs need to change how they’re measuring media.
At the end of the day, CMOs need to be measuring contribution to revenue, not meaningless marketing metrics the rest of the C-suite doesn’t give the slightest of fucks about. But that’s super hard for most organizations without competent Marketing Science or capable agencies, and it’s seemingly expensive because their budgets are already tight from all of the fly-by-night shit they’re over invested in. So; they continue to push what they know as well as chip away at their budgets with silly providers who provide little value instead of biting the bullet and doing the right thing.
My "Magic 8-Ball" says: "Signs point to yes."
That's why I created my own advertising platform for my niche. Loaded server side, only geo and context targeted.
No cookies, no focus on views.
Only click tracking (minimal bot noise).
I do have to find advertisers myself, but I rather go after advertisers with a good name than display scam ads for toe fungi remedies.