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Comment by rybosworld | Hacker News Reader

I've suspected that google has been turning a blind eye to ad fraud for a few years now. In the early-mid 2010's, ad fraud wasn't nearly as common.

And it's absolutely not the case that google can't detect ad fraud - in fact they are VERY good at detecting it when they want to.

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You had huge click farms back in the days.

Today the fraud is perhaps more obvious. YT has served me the same 20 min ad 200+ times over the last few weeks. I let the entire thing play 10 times and 50 times didn't press skip for the first minute (or the view doesn't count) It's so annoying Ive reduced video watching by 80-90%

The idea they have someone pay for this in the hope I will buy the product?

Or do people really intentionally run campaigns like that?

> It's so annoying Ive reduced video watching by 80-90%

This is the opposite of resourcefulness - unless the videos were a distraction, not a real goal of yours.

PS Genuine question: where is the fraud in a 20 minute ad?

Steve Balmer explaining his take on how local governments of the US work was a hilarious ad offering on my non-adblocked device the other day - I’m struggling to see vectors for fraud.

I couldn't imagine someone running campaign like that intentionally but it's apparently cheap to do so. 20 minutes of my time is apparently worth 3 cent. Those 5 hours watching the same ad again and again probably cost the spammer 2 euro.

It's not fraud, more like a cheap ass dystopia. It's some how worse than HP and MS combined.

> ..unless the videos were a distraction, not a real goal of yours.

You are not wrong but all work and no play... I will seek entertainment elsewhere. My apologies in advance HN :-)

These bug me so much. Those 20+ minute ads do nothing but piss me off. I have to grab the remote or switch tabs or whatever to get past them. To the point where I'm on the verge of adding YT to the permanent block list along with Facebook, Instagram, X, etc.

Serious question: Do you watch a lot of YouTube? Why not just cough up the $16 for YouTube Premium? Creators actually do get paid more for Premium users' views than they do from adsense. You get to see none of these ads that piss you off.

Look, I run UBlock Origin myself. But that's because there's zero other way to look at any Web content without going insane with videos and other garbage popping all over the place, and even when sites have memberships, I use too many distinct ones anyway, and the memberships may not remove the ads and junk.

But when it comes to sites like YouTube that let me choose between "ads" and "non-ads" experiences... I guess I'm just saying I see a ton of ROI on the $16.

I don’t use YouTube at all but I can still answer - Because $16 will become $20, $30, $50 … and then they will begin to show ads again anyway.

You won't pay for something because of inflation? How do you survive, since everything's affected by inflation? Ever buy gasoline for a car or a transit pass? rent? food? What else can't you pay for because they price will go up in the future?

Inflation helped me kick my junk food and fast food habits. I still buy groceries of course but when prices rise, luxuries are almost always the first items to go.

Corporate greed ≠ inflation

I don't get this commonplace logic. Why make the decision on the possible distant future? You can always just cancel when that happens.

The moment the cost went from free to more-than-free is “when that happened.” I’m not willing to participate.

You expect Google to serve thousands of petabytes per month (costing hundreds of thousands of dollars in raw bandwidth) for absolutely nothing in return?

Do you think it's that low? I would have assumed 7 figures in bandwidth.

I have zero expectations of any business. If they have an expectation to be paid then they need to offer something of value. Their costs to operate are not my concern.

If they're not offering something of value why are you using the thing that you say doesn't have value?

I don’t. Please see original comment.

Well this discussion about getting YouTube premium is clearly aimed at people who use YouTube but without premium, not people who don't use YouTube at all.

Follow the thread all the way up for the full context.

> I’m not willing to participate

Nah, you're participating by watching. You'd have 100% of my respect and 100% moral high ground with your stance just by avoiding youtube.com.

Your assumption I’m watching is invalid.

Sorry, I didn’t realize you weren’t the other guy.

No worries. :)

It's $29 per month for the family plan now.

I want to see and feel the product. Nowadays mostly to see how bad it is.

YouTube’s enshittification is shamelessly out of control.

If you really want it, you can vpn through certain countries they don’t show ads at all.

It is giving me 1+ hour ads now based on my view history (I think) and it is actually hilarious. I've watched two till the end. To keep someone engaged for that long you better bring something interesting to the table.

Those work. You'll remember that brand if you ever need that product.

I could call them, tell them I see their ad, ask questions then call again and again and again and again. I just read one may call a company as often as one wants.

Well… I’ll remember that I never want to give Liberty Mutual a single dollar.

I was never going to give any of the woo-woo secret health nonsense hucksters any money, though.

Before the ad, you had no brand awareness at all of Liberty Mutual. Now, you know their name enough to call them out specifically in a Hacker News comment. Your propensity to buy has improved a lot just based on that fact, regardless of whether you consciously want to avoid them now.

I did know Liberty Mutual. I had business with them.

Now I know them and I’m fucking annoyed that they exist. My “propensity to buy” has not improved.

You can save yourself the trouble of repeating more century old marketing truisms that aren’t. We’ve heard it all before, and it isn’t insight.

Is this a typo? 20 min ad?! I don’t use YouTube.

I’ve seen the intro to an audiobook be used as an ad.

Sometimes they put one at the start then again 1.5 min into a video and again around 4 minutes. If I don't skip them I may not even remember what the video was about.

>Or do people really intentionally run campaigns like that?

Isn't that what you see on free to view TV. The same ads over and over.

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