Why is Google still serving dodgy ads?
atomic14.com
atomic14.com
They have been putting thousands of scam adverts on our website for some time. Think "you have been looking at xxx and must pay a $100 fine" type popup nonsense. Hosted on the following websites:
azurestaticapps.net
azurewebsites.net
herokuapp.com
ondigitalocean.app
digitaloceanspaces.com
netlify.app
Google doesn't allow you to block these domains, because they consider them "TLDs" (the scammers use a new subdomain every day eg abcdefg.herokuapp.com). The scammers get banned and return the next day with a new account and subdomain (repeat every day). Therefore we cannot stop them. It's bizarre and baffling. But Google Adsense had to go.
- Add that attribution -- blame Google (or, supposing the ads are good, credit Google; a good header goes a long way toward swaying people's opinions)
- But it doesn't matter if a single website appropriately attributes Google's highest/lowest-quality ads. The last step (speculative and hand-wavy) is to incorporate that behaviour in some sort of software more people want to use. If you're fighting alone then you'll lose. If you can convince more people that appropriately crediting Google's advertising successes and blaming their malicious failures is advantageous, you'll (by definition) have more traction in the anti-megacorp-endorsed scams and other life-altering consequences.
If people are going to learn to install an extension, it should be UBlock Origin. That will solve more problems than attributing scam ads.
well thought I was getting some actual useful tip
These companies that abstain from adsense and it’s revenue are WWW vegans.
Nobody’s yet cared enough to sue them, or their managers at ICC yet. However, eventually an ambitious lawyer will try to make the case, especially if fraud and human trafficking continues to grow like it is.
Want to take bets on whether the US gov wades in if that happens?
The US gov is directly antagonistic to the ICC and will undermine them whenever possible. This would present them another chance.
If yes, then ... you are profiting from ... that shite. You must be OK with that and it does sound like you are actively complicit with it, despite your protestations.
If you really think that Adsense is awful and might damage your brand then dump it and don't whine on HN!
OK, that's probably a bit unfair because you are dealing with a monopoly with no recourse to arbitration. That's your real problem.
I created a tool that automatically follows ads to try to find scams.
But that was usually reserved to typosquat domain ads or ads on porn websites. I didn't know scammers used normal page ads too.
I know tech support scams used to use google search ads, but I don't think they do that as much anymore, so maybe they have moved onto things like adsense.
These scammers usually do IP address checks to check for residential IP before showing the scam, and some also do some basic fingerprinting checks, so that is how they get past detection. That said, it shouldn't be too difficult for google to do some better checks if they actually cared.
Google is absolutely smart enough to make these attacks un-economical. IMO they are unwilling to incur the loss in revenue this would involve (false positives, banned resellers etc).
As a result, even though "Enhanced" safe browsing can use Gemini Nano to do client side detection of scams and then flag it in google safe browsing for everyone, the entire domain and all subdomains are whitelisted, so that detection never seems to actually fire. https://blog.google/security/using-ai-to-stop-tech-support-s...
I'm not sure which domains this applies to, but it seems to apply to most of the domains that these scammers actually like to use.
Same issue with spam sms in my country: I think they geo-locate it so submitting the link to safe browsing project takes way too long
Is it your website or theirs? YOU are the one putting such ads there as YOU have chosen a sketchy ad company (google).
Brands work as a trust heuristic, so a fallen brand continues to trade on its old reputation for a while.
I hate ad technology but it does, to a small extent, empower creators. Is there a better way? I don't think geocities is coming back.
Strong regulations and splitting monopolies are the real solutions here.
And if Google breaks the law someone from the company needs to go to prison, too. Knowingly helping criminals is a crime itself.
Also, if you along are not big enough, it was common to join with others (beware of anti-trust laws). You only need a few websites on your new less dodgy ad platforms and those who want to advertise will run to you because you control impressions. You probably won't get as rich as Google running a new ad company, but there is plenty of money to make a nice living selling non-dodgy ads.
But I agree that it should not be like that and that governments around the world should regulate all these "free" services.
I've asked my Google partnered SSP to disallow ethically bankrupt ads like gambling, alcohol etc. They say "we've asked the partners to block those categories"... and then it just keeps happening. They're either unable or unwilling to help. I had to take ads down for several days at my own expense due to rogue ads. The ads are now in safe frames which doesn't pay quite as well but I'm okay with it.
- 'IAB9-7 Card Games' also includes Gambling
- 'IAB8-5 — Cocktails/Beer' and 'IAB8-18 — Wine' means Alcohol.
(Later taxonomy versions have proper values but not everyone supports these)
These blocked categories should be passed to all DSPs by your SSP.
If your SSP cannot block them then get a new SSP.
We have someone who's checking daily what's there, and they need to vet ads constantly.
It's a lot of anti-fungus advertisement (which made us block health products in general), but also a lot of fake software. Unfortunately we can't afford to block the entire software category.
Are there any solid, preferably European, alternatives for a site that doesn't really have any traffic yet but a fairly decent growth potential in 3-6 months timeframe?
Seems like two things 1) Google is losing at AI and Sundar wants to mask this 2) AI is going to destroy their ad business and they want to get while the getting is good.
Now their product strategy however…
I forget the name but I see one LLM chatbox that looked like one of those old world news media websites plastered from top to bottom with jumpy obnoxious ads. It did offer some good models for free. I honestly might even consider using it if I could remember what it was called.
If they turned Gemini into that today I think people would just laugh, shake their head and close the app.
If metrics measured what most people need from an LLM, it's competitive, IMO, and with their TPU chips, it's probably economically competitive.
Although I am curious if they are not worried and playing the long game confident that their distribution will eventually help them catch up (and worst case they own some of Anthropic). But obviously Anthropic and OpenAI have their own distribution now too.
Online advertising has completely broken from anything resembling the traditional social-contract of magazine ads, billboard, signs, etc. They're preying on your safety and privacy, not just your attention.
Nobody is doing well enough with AI revenue ATM (https://isaiprofitable.com/). At the moment it is probably more about market share of users, that is where the investment capital will need to be clawed back from when it starts to be called back (or replacement money will need to come from if the investment cycle simply stops giving generously).
[couldn't resist the snark, I don't exactly feel sorry for them here!]
They'll probably be less annoying than ads in Google Search results, because people ask LLMs more detailed, context-laden questions.
I expect aggregate ad revenue to climb, so this might sting less, but much of Google's stock price imputes their dominant market position (and implied moat). A large proportion of users don't first navigate to Google anymore. They ask ChatGPT. Commoditised LLMs (or worse, a dominant provider which isn't Google) is a very bad scenario for Google.
I think they're going to have to diversify. Cloud compute revenue keeps climbing. Their deal with Apple for "small" LLMs suggests they might have opportunities to specialise models for specific tasks. They still command a massive lead in things like Maps and Gmail, and they can lean on those.
[1] https://readwise-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/media/wisereads/art...
P.S. Google's real problem is that their web search is absolutely atrocious and completely broken. Even Qwen is better at searching the web than Google's AI search box.
But what I see and hear from technical consumers, businesses, and govts is that they would prefer their data stay local, and like the idea of edge compute being used for AI.
Claude/OpenAI's direction with their Apps enabling deeper integration is a good direction, but the trust with data is still a growing concern. OpenAI's math actions on the NS problem degrades their reputation a lot.
Rank Cloud Approx. annual revenue Growth My assessment
1 AWS ~$129B ~20% Clear leader
2 Microsoft Azure ~$90B ~40%+ Strong #2, rapidly closing
3 Google Cloud ~$59B 36% Fastest-growing historically, but smaller
which is to say that Google is still way behind AWS and Azure. Also, lots and lots of people have switched to using AI-interfaces now, I'm not hearing "I've googled that and that's what I found" anymore, it's all "I've chatgpt-ed and this is what it told me".
If you use it for even 15 minutes you will see this is not true. At all.
AI probably would help their display ad business overall -- they finally just launched a "have Gemini create your ad!" feature, and I imagine having to hire a designer was a common blocker for SMBs.
That's good. I hate ads. I will fight them down until they are gone.
But I don't think this is the case here. Ads are still pushed down onto the people willy-nilly style.
But I wouldn't write off ads yet. It seems plausible to me that LLMs will be able to slightly alter their output to casually mention paying brands and to profile users better than we could before.
My experience confirms this: many years ago I had a website banned from serving Google Ads. They said my pages didn't have enough content.
Then a competitor started showing ads on the exact same type of pages where I had previously been able to serve them. So I tried getting my website approved again and -- surprise -- now I can serve ads again.
What is not okay is them pushing a huge amount of ads into website, constantly asking you to enable auto-ads and vignette ads and what-not.
Firstly, try to imagine stuffing as many ads as there are on a SERP into a chatbot conversation. Good way to lose users.
Secondly, Google spent decades hyper-optimizing their ad business monopoly for maximum profit, including going to extents that were recently found unlawful. People should really look into the findings of the last two Antitrust cases against Google, both of which it lost but for which it suffered only slaps on wrists. The details are eye-opening, including the bits about how Google, leveraging its prime position as the middle-man playing all sides against each other, manipulated ad auctions to make itself more money at the expense of its customers.
Even Microsoft was dinged for screwing over just their competitors, not their customers.
But now because of the paradigm shift in how people discover information, very little of the Google ad monoploy advantage transfers over. I think their AI business will keep growing, even if they don't have the best models, and it will be an exceptional source of revenue.
But it will still be no match to their ad business -- a cash cow of incomprehensible proportions -- and that is the fundamental problem they face today.
There's zero chance that AI destroys their ad business. I get served ads from Amazon in podcast RSS feeds that were directly derived from things I said in Gemini chats. It's definitely not destroying ads lol
I'm surprised by the weird levels of incompetence on this website, use your brain or have you already hawked that off to your favorite AI lab.
Either way, I agree with the literal interpretation. They should vet the ads they serve and are complicit in this mess if they serve ads through Google et al.
In my state, which perhaps takes liability too far in the other direction, if I serve sober you a single beer, you proceed to visit a second bar, have ten shots of tequila in an hour, and kill a man driving home - I share equal liability as the tequila bar.
Perhaps there is a middle ground in this world where a firm that makes billions has to have some basic “Know Your Customer” systems to prevent abuse?
The reason for that is that you've been serving a hard drug to a customer. Don't do that if you cannot bear the responsibility (liability). In order to bear the liability, the price has to go up, including perhaps a safe escort home of the drug user, but of course that would be too expensive/socialist/authoritarian (blimey they want us to take responsible action regarding our customers! I knew a club here for young people where it was very normal to have them taxi'd home. Son, wanna go out? The taxi is part of the price), and lead to 'off the record' drug usage. Which is how we ended up in opioid crisis.
If alcohol would only be invented today, there's no chance it would be legal in the current umbrella of drugs. And, for good reason: it is too addictive, too harmful for self and their environment. Compare with the various empathogens or harmfulness of psychedelic drugs. These cause, normalized, far less damage to both user and their environment.
I abstain from drinking (I am sensitive to addiction which is how I ended up to that conclusion), and this weekend I had a tiramisu (it was on sale, wife bought it). Did I notice that? Oh hell, yes. Would you serve a child tiramisu? No, we should not.
Like you, I abstain. Yet I do have to deal with bartenders, and I will say that some are responsible and some are not. (I have pissed off some fairly powerful people along with people who commerially produce alcohol, and ought to know better, that they cannot serve alcohol because they are unlicensed, uncertified, or uninsured.)
The change has to start with Google, and they can't be bothered to do so, thus far.
The difference for the newspaper and magazine ads is you couldn't just click on it in an instant. You had to spend a lot more effort and had more chances to realize it is a scam.
Not trying to justify either, BTW. Its just scary how many different ways there are to defraud people.
They said they investigated it and concluded it did not break any rules and no actions where taken.
https://frinkiac.com/comic?b=AQIBBlMwNkUyMafYCwABEvQBygNqSSB...
It's not magic because it relies on the "fuel" of cool water to evaporate.
YouTube adverts frequently contain fraudulent, misleading information. It appears that no law is being broken.
ETA: the ads I've seen are still deceptive because they're claiming this is revolutionary new technology, which of course it isn't.
I loaded a stock web browser on VPN and checked Youtube looking for ads. Holy shit, it's all scams. Sample size of three, but not a single ad was a known company or a decent product.
The Internet is unusable these days without ublock origin or a pihole.
I use other means when I must have access to content that is only on youtube. I'm not paying money into a company so happy to allow as much scammy crap as the adverts on there are full off.
You can change it manually, but it's a defeat of the entire purpose..they intentionally removed the setting to apply the max. quality available to all videos you watch, while already charging you a monthly subscription for the goddamn premium. What a bunch of goo(gl)ns
“ My development environment was infected by unknown malicious software, as a result of which a few builds may have been affected. Once the issue was detected, I secured everything with a full disk wipe, restored a clean setup, and now all builds are scanned with VirusTotal. The F-Droid version will also be verified before release.
Public keys may have been compromised, which is why I am sharing this issue.”
And it just so happens that someone doing something for their personalized financial gain is a super strong negative indicator of everything.
Normally I have an ad-blocker and don't see any ads, but I happened to be using the YouTube app recently on my iPad so I was subjected to this insanity.
I guess scammer money is as green as anyone else's.
I believe the Jewish billionaire's wife's secret was to "longevity".
I think the target is the elderly. My understanding is they have always been a frequent target of these sort of internet scams.
1) Google wants the most money, so they don't care to let dodgy ads thru.
2) There are more ads going out then can be reviewed, so they would rather have people report them, then they automatically reject the report until enough people report it, then an actual person may review it.
As to why Google doesn't use AI to review them? Google would rather use the AI in a way that makes them more money, than review ads and if AI decides to take them down then that's less money for Google.
(To be clear: I don't work for Google in any way, these are just my guesses)
I would say it's just because there's no incentive to do anything unless a huge media storm breaks out or something.
turning a blind eye to this stuff probably makes them good money
Then there's the profits from scams, Meta is the only one with the stones to admit they like scam ads because they make up 10% of their revenue. I doubt it's a massive coincidence all the other big platforms are overrun with scams they do as little as possible to police.
https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...
https://www.wired.com/story/meta-failed-to-catch-hundreds-of...
If only there was a technology which could automate this... But we all know, AI is only used on users, not customers - and users get the two line perl script "AI" which says "We have reviewed your claim and decided to ignore it".
I have reported so many of those dodgy, scammy, sexualized ads on YouTube, that YouTube/Google has removed the option to report advertisements from my account.
They don't care as long as they're getting paid and there's no immediate liability for them.
That's what I do and why I don't even know what brooklinen is.
Don't use that. Use Ublock Origin.
Nowadays, Google will serve you those exact ads if you go to any major news outlet.
The "more than can be reviewed" might have been a logical conclusion in a purely human based workflow, even if you have the lowest cost per head click workers in like, an external contractor call centre type environment in Bangladesh.
As the author points out, the ordinary consumer class version of publicly available Gemini very accurately classifies the ad as malicious. I really doubt that there are THAT MANY unique new ads being submitted per day that they can't afford the compute to run them through a similar classifier.
More than can be reviewed for the time and money they’re willing to spend.
Even before AI, they absolutely could’ve done it.
Is it enough? Probably not, based on this article. Are their policies strict enough? IMHO no way, considering Youtube left an ad up for "Ukranian women" in the early years of the war which wtf. But they certainly do try.
Like most businesses, the actual people involved are also well-intentioned, at least in the abstract; they wanted to make ads that sell products without annoying people. Obviously there's material conditions beneath and around all that, but we don't need to explain that part here ;)
Adding friction to the process (on the advertiser side) means less money for Google: 1) due to the cost of implementing the checking, 2) because some legitimate advertisers will be falsely denied, 3) because the scam ads were still paying money.
Not adding the friction doesn't seem to come with any serious downside. One would expect that it would, e.g. due to publishers removing the most profitable properties from the ad network or governments legislating this out of existence, but that doesn't seem to happen.
So, given these incentives, the outcome is inevitable.
If Google had to pay a massive fine for every scam ad that gets through, or was liable for the damages the ads cause, etc. - or otherwise had a strong incentive - suddenly there would be enough resources to make sure every ad is reviewed, advertisers that push scam ads get fully banned on the first offense rather than being given second, third, and fourth chances, etc.
They have literally destroyed their own reputation, and all the reputations of legitimate products that might appear along these scams. Do you think anyone would want their car, smartphone, or tax software appear next to actual credit card scams?
TV has standards for decency, and factuality, and might ban entire categories of ads (financial services) altogether.
In any other normal market, the middleman would be held accountable. Big tech? Not so much. We seen the slap on the wrist regarding Microsoft at the start of the century/millennium. We can also witness the same with regards to the garbage coming from China, where China doesn't take responsibility. Learned from the best.
If you are reliant on ad revenue, you should be expressing your displeasure to google right now.
Like, Google removing Adblock directly caused that. Facebook allowing the ad caused that. The ad led to malicious page that was also hosted on a Microsoft thing, and I ended up reporting it to them too. Microsoft at least promptly took it down within a half hour after I reported it. But these big companies have almost no incentive to stop this, and some of them directly profit off of these scams happening.
Not me.
Is that because I stuck with Firefox?
> What Happened with Manifest V3
> Updated: January 2026
> In late 2024, Google completed its transition to Manifest V3 in Chrome, which fundamentally changed how browser extensions work. As a result, the full version of uBlock Origin is no longer available for Chrome users. Here's what happened and what your options are now.
* Got me a "BearSkin" jacket from youtube's incessant advertisement.
* Signed up for a $250 subscription to "The Daily Beast" when she was watching youtube tv right before bed and probably subscribed when she meant to just view.
* Signed up for Norton Antivirus when she got a gif that looks like a popup that tells you have a virus and it opens to a Subscription Plan on her phone.
None of these things were things she particularly wanted, some she didn't even consent to, but a combination of paid promotion / advertisement / confusion about the UI is basically doing things against her will.
I literally got her Youtube Premium just so she stops seeing all the ads that are feeding on her. It is a problem.
I don't blame you for your solution but it is so sad that we have to basically pay protection money to Google now so that our loved ones don't get scammed and robbed while they are consuming addictive/slop content.
It isn't even a shakedown, they are genuinely protecting you from others. But how did we get to the point on the web that this is needed?
I’ve never seen that. I report ads on YouTube all the time. I’ve reported ads for illegal drugs, illegal firearms, pornography, and all sorts of various scams. I’ve seen similar advertising to the example in this article, mimicking the phone’s UI. Ive reported them. I’ve never once seen Google reply to any of my reports to confirm what happened. I’ve always wondered, and since I continue to see the ads I just assume my reports go straight into a trash bin.
The illegal firearm ad I saw (more than a year ago, now) I was so shocked that I took screenshots and reported it multiple times. The ad advertised that the weapon was “easy to sneak through security” and “didn’t require an id to purchase” I saw the ad several times across multiple weeks. I reported it every time. I don’t think Google ever did anything about it. If they did, it took them weeks
It's so common and so clearly reported by many people that I'm left to assume Google likes the engagement the profiles bring and chooses to leave them up.
And since, as this article points out, Google does not need reports if they actually wanted to block such ads, it seems completely pointless.
Because some of us don't want to give in to the dead internet theory yet.
Maybe we should report obvious fraud or illegal content to the authorities.
90% of the ads I see on YouTube are obvious scams. Many from untraceable shady overseas organizations.
You can see the data if you report them. It's always some unheard of outfit out of Hong Kong or Brazil. I want to know who is funding this.
You don't need to be Kreskin to figure this one out.
That's at least something. Last I was on a streaming service, they were very fastidious about not revealing who was behind a spammer's rotating "music labels", despite them by law having some kind of payment details for them.
It's a network made by snake-oil salesman. People on Brazil yearns for passive-income, and they get told by a lot of influencers that dropshipping is what will give them their freedom.
Then you have thousands of people dumping fake ads about borderline fake products on Meta and Google. It's actually a hive-mind.
They simply have to allow a certain number of sketchy ads, perhaps not outright scams, but they need to pimp some level of questionable products and services to keep the money printer running.
Geography certainly plays a roll, the smaller the market, the less advertisers are available. When I occasionally wanders into the ad supported internet without a tracker-blocker I get the same ads on repeat. It's my local supermarket, where I shop regardless, it's ads for vitamins and assistive devices for the elderly and plastic junk from China. That's it... honestly I can't see how that funds the tech gigants.
If you are lucky, your third-hand owner still checks the oil and puts quality tires on it. If you are not, your third-hand owner pours customer relationships down the drain and doubles down on indiscriminate cost-cutting, alienating good people from the organization.
When we asked our reps, they dance around the question by saying they would "escalate to engineering" or some bs like that.
Google just makes far too much money to stop. My guess is that its >40% of AdX display revenue, based on the % of scam ads that come through ad manager.
Context: our site did ~$5m AdX revenue annually, mostly US audience. High CPM niche. This was ~7 years ago till 2 years ago when we sold the business, I would guess it's still happening based on ads I see browsing the internet.
I was feeling very guilty last night as I was watching YouTube and getting 30s+ unskippable ad blocks every 10 minutes in some video. And the repetition and low quality were grating on me. I thought: being rich is never having to watch another ad. Why am I letting these ads own spaced repetition slots in my brain that could be filled with knowledge? Instead of learning, my mental energy is being taken up by psychological manipulation to purchase? The relentless repetition of the mind-numbing ad interspersed throughout otherwise educational content.
Being rich is owning the real-estate of my own mind. I sometimes feel like a digital serf in my own head.
See the headline of this article for Exhibit (I've actually run out of letters in the alphabet) why adblocking is a moral imperative.
Now, there may be another "why don't you just ..." or "well, actually ..." response you have queued up, maybe some ramblings about a pi hole, or some anti-Apple hate, or some other solutioneering. Go ahead, tell me.
But it is the structure of incentive that forces this. The YouTube creators that make the content do need to get paid. And Google offers an option: Youtube Premium. That give both me and the creator what we want and (for the time being) removes the ads.
So either one is rich in time (doing whatever "why don't you just ..." hoop you expect me to jump through) or rich in money.
I think about libraries and how the world would be if instead of a free public resource, you had to watch ads before you were allowed to take out a book.
It is just the case that in this modern social media world, if you want your ideas to spread you have to put them onto social media. And if I want access to those ideas I have to consume them through social media. There is nothing about that environment that is my choice, it is the environment that I find myself in.
And I have few choices to get around it. I can twist up into a pretzel trying to block the onslaught with more "why don't you just..." advice. Or I could pay to make it go away. Or I could just go off-grid and forego access.
And when you look close at the options, it becomes clear that sovereignty of my own mind has a price. Freedom of mind is not free in this modern world, if it ever really was.
You also have no obligation to watch ads for creators to get paid. They can also set up things like Patreon if they would like. The ads are very lucrative, and that's their choice. But you are free to make choices too, if you would like to.
That is an active choice, not forced in any way.
> The YouTube creators that make the content do need to get paid.
There are better ways, and we would all be better off except for the small group of greedheads benefiting from the chaos
The ad supported internet is dying. Good riddance
Nope.
They may get paid, they may not. That's the risk they've chosen. They may also get their Google account banned with no recourse for something minor or even non-existent.
> So either one is rich in time (doing whatever "why don't you just ..." hoop you expect me to jump through) or rich in money.
That's what they want you to think, you've been watching too many ads.
The world would honestly be better if they didnt.
Ads don't just steal your time either, they invade your head. You are influenced by them and you have no choice as long as you watch them.
It's not advertising anything, it's just a straight up scam exploit site. It uses exclusively stolen or fake accounts. The links are shown as "amazon.de" or similar but of course do not go there, no doubt just a bug X haven't gotten around to fixing just yet.
This is on the kind of level where if we had actual law enforcement for tech companies, the next time some X executive lands in Europe they would be in cuffs.
You don't have to be rich to avoid getting those ads. You can make them go away for ~$15 a month. If you can't afford that, you have bigger problems in your life than YouTube ads, and your first step towards fixing them is to spend less time watching YouTube.
They're like Dr. Frankenstein, creating a monster and then just letting it roam the countryside. But worse, because they profit (immensely) from the chaos their monster wreaks.
Just try to convince Google to remove "MapsQuest Driving Directions", a browser hijacking extension advertiser who clearly impersonates one of Google's competitors: It's an extremely high value scam targeting seniors (the folks who mostly look for MapQuest on... Google) and it makes them way too much money for them to stop it.
I’ve reported these multiple times. They always get to the top of search results via paid placement, and Google always responds to the reports saying they found nothing wrong with them, even when provided with detailed evidence of the fraud.
- The carriers know, for a fact, that these are spam calls.
- The spammers know that the carriers know this as well.
- The payout on a successful scam is large
- Because of the above the scammers are willing to pay VERY large sums to the carriers
- The carriers are willing to take the scammers money
Nothing is surprising to me about this except the last point.
Seems like "allowing people to pee in your pool, for a price" is very short term thinking.
That being said, maybe it's like that old SNL parody ad [0]: "We're the phone company and we don't care. Why? Because we don't have to."
(for the younger folks, Bell Telephone was a monopoly back then. That's less true now but true enough for the economics to kick in for them)
I have no idea how you can get that wording and that landing page get passed the google review.
I’ve done a lot of ads on google and every time my ad was just a little off (use of trademark word or competitor’s name with a reserved keyword) it will be blocked.
She clicked it, it was basically ourplacce.it, but like, not an easy thing to flag on her phone. Made it all the way through the purchase process until I got this from Citi: Please use only to complete your purchase with Grand Egypti for 9000.00 EGP using card ending 3551
I'm like "what the hell are you buying?" and sure enough, it's all scams the whole way down.
There's simply no excuse for Google to not use their advanced AI to block this sort of copycat/lookalike/impersonation scam every day of the week, at scale. The excuse, obviously, is revenue, but it's really upsetting how many people it's hurting.
To comment on this one: as long as there is no backlash from their real customers (those that buy ads) nothing will change.
[0] https://blog.miloslavhomer.cz/how-google-sees-your-site/
There has to be a way to enforce positive identification, right?
Google already does this for Google play developers. I can't use a US credit card to pay for the USD 25 fee for a student on Bangladesh for example because I understand the payment method is one of the signals they use to make sure the student developer is a real person.
Is this something Google won't do on its own without being forced to act?
To me this signals a huge opportunity for other companies to dive into. If a new internet search company appeared that returned actual useful search results and clearly delineated ads (like Google used to) I would switch to it almost immediately.
The only way these companies are ever going to change their game is when people vote with their feet!
Also, I type in something in the search bar and...nothing happens. There's a pop-up below the search bar which tells me nothing is saved with a "Dismiss" button. When I press it I'm being directed to the homepage telling me to pay-up.
As much as I personally disliked Susan Wojcicki, she kinda sort kept Youtube shenanigans in check. Yes, there were baity, inappropriate ads, but after she left it has gotten out of control.
Google signaled with "Lake America" they are playing along, and I don't think any real consquences will come of it as long as they keep pulling in billions and the QoQ keeps going.
Now, it seems like they just approve anything.
The cost of strictly enforcing stated rules for ads is felt immediately and fully by Google. It is concrete, measurable, and probably non-insignificant; the benefit is essentially goodwill from the narrow sliver of the web that is verbal about this. That is intangible, difficult to measure, even harder to assign a reasonable dollar value to (meaning the ROI could look negative), and the benefit would accrue to parties other than Google who might not even notice.
I'm sure if I submitted an app that on the iOS app store that mimicked a system warning that tried to scare people into giving me access, it would not pass the review process.
If instead I decided to embed a WebView and later changed the html to do the same I would likely get booted from the app store (afair Apple's very particular about serving remote content in PWAs, and changing said content, even under benign circumstances).
iOS seems to have less scareware and shady apps than Android anyways.
I once got a crypto-wallet PK leaked by a fake wallet app impersonating another very known brand. Found out on reddit it was a fake... After a few months the real app came out but yeah...
[1]: https://malcontentcomics.com/systemsboy/2009/09/the-google-a...
The publishers (websites or apps owners) that provide free content to users need a way to support the free content, and typically it's either donation (like wikimedia) or ads. To most publishers, ads revenue is far more predictable. By right most publishers also would like the ads to be reliable and relevant to the users consuming their content, but that's usually a secondary concern, compared to the revenue.
The users viewing the content are often annoyed by the ads, but as long as the ads are not too intrusive, they usually tolerate the ads. If the users occasionally find ads are actually useful, that's great, but most of the time in my experience, when I click into an ad it's usually a mis-click, not because I'm genuinely interested in this ad.
The advertisers need a way to reach more potential customers. Most advertisers are honest players in the game with real products or services to offer to users, trying to find ways to maximize the impression, click-through and conversion rate by optimizing their creatives, targeting, and bidding strategies etc. But there are always scammers that try to cheat the game, showing dodgy ads to rip off users whenever possible.
Google as an ad-tech platform sits between these 3 parties, trying to show the most relevant ad from advertisers in a publisher's ad-slot to the user. But the system has evolved into a complex maze over the years that likely nobody knows the full picture any more. New legal requirements and regulatory policies and industry landscape shifts keep pushing the system to extremes. There are teams to fight ad spams, but there are also business goals to make more money to fund the AI initiatives. The scammers keep finding new loopholes in the system, and the teams fighting the scammers are often steps behind, due to limited resource and budget. End result is many dodgy ads keep slipping through the policy filters.
In an ideal world, ad-tech platforms should optimize for satisfying all 3 parties at the same time: publishers, advertisers, and end users, in addition to making money for themselves. But that's probably hard to achieve, given the dynamic nature of the world. AI can help fight scams, but AI can also help finding loopholes in the scam-fighting system. It's a sad state of the world.
Yeah, but
> trying to find ways to maximize the impression, click-through and conversion rate by optimizing their creatives, targeting, and bidding strategies etc
Rapidly turns them malicious and anti-human, preying on psychological bugs.
> End result is many dodgy ads keep slipping through the policy filters.
Therefore their platform / process is not fit for purpose, no advertising platform has effectively solved scaling.
Some comments make it seem like this is a new thing, it's not, this has been going on for at least 10 years now.
I try blocking the most obvious scams by blocking the announcers but it's basically impossible because the same dodgy ones keep coming back with a new name.
Also hard because they're not always in a language you understand.
I don't think I should do all this work instead of the biggest ad company in the world just to earn 5€ per day, but I'm also not aware of any better alternative.
When I reported them, they said the recruiters didn't violate LinkedIn's policy. (But they somehow stopped anyway. I guess LinkedIn actually listens to its customers.)
And I suspect (would love some real data from scammy advertisers) that this is a bigger factor than most folks appreciate.
If you're a regular business that sells clothes or food or SaaS or insurance or whatever, online ads are a) not your whole customer acquisition system (you have regular marketing, word of mouth, maybe sales people, maybe brick-and-mortar brand presence, physical advertising, etc.) and b) not part of your expense sheet that you want to spend tons of time on.
The "b)" there leads companies to either overspend on stupid (but unlikely to be flagged) ads, or to try to keep their ad spend as low as possible for the highest reward, because they think of it like opex. After all, they have all the normal expenses of a normal business to worry about in addition to ad spend. Sure, there are outliers here who spend almost all their non-product money on online ads, but not most ordinary companies from Verizon to Dave's Local Auto Insurance to Safeway.
So "good"/ordinary advertisers aren't generating super high flag rates, but they're probably either a) spending lots of money without churn/support-needs risk or b) aren't spending that much ... compared to scam-ads-only businesses. Sure, google would prefer more upstanding customers in category "a)", but they're a near-monopoly and some of that growth is expensive to chase, while the scammers are beating a path to their door.
If you're a scam-ad business that produces malware or LLM-written gacha games or whatever, your product expenses are minimal and, if your business is lucrative, you can spend very large amounts of your balance sheet on ads for scam delivery channels. Tiny businesses in this area are likely to have whale-sized ad spends and a strong likelihood of growth (vertical as they get bigger/greedier, or horizontal as they keep spinning up new businesses to keep ahead of the law and bad press). I bet they punch above their weight ad-spend-wise, in other words.
You thought the unit economics of a SaaS business were good? Well, wait until you see the unit economics of a Play Store whitelabeled gacha game app with a credential stealer inside!
Google has no interest in policing that because money and won't until they are forced to and since they are a transnational that's difficult since it requires multiple countries to do it with the added wrinkle that if you even hint at the possibility that just maybe you might consider doing something about US big tech you get immediate screaming from across the Atlantic.
What does killing dodgy ads do for Google's bottom line? It's removing paying customers and driving down competition for (and therefore value of) ad space. What's the cost of dodgy ads to Google? The sites that use Google Ads will continue using Google Ads if they do nothing about the dodgy ads. The sites that don't use Google Ads won't be swayed to use Google Ads if they do remove the dodgy ads. Google is not held liable for serving dodgy ads so there's no direct risk associated with serving them.
Why should Google remove the dodgy ads? "Don't be evil"? That motto exceeded its shelf life before it was first publicly posted.
Hanlon's razor is nice and all but there's a difference between malice and amoral apathy. Corporations would sell shredded orphans as fuel if it made economical sense to do so.
Because you're using an application which presents those ads to you.
Avoid Google/Alphabet application as much as is possible, and you'll see a lot less / none of this kind of ads.
It looks like you're using their YouTube client. Try NewPipe:
there are no ads with NewPipe.
Firefox + uBlock Origin: https://ublockorigin.com/
Brave Browser
Invidious: https://invidious.io/
Revanced: https://revanced.app/
SkyTube: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/free.rm.skytube.oss/
Clipious (app client for Invidious instances): https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.github.lamarios.clipious...
I've said this before, elsewhere, with this kind of thing plus the LG / Smart TV surveillance, it feels as if we're living in the paperclip maximiser world, except it's "advertising" instead of paperclips.
[0]: https://www.securityweek.com/fbi-recommends-ad-blockers-cybe...
Edited to add: Remember when 'piracy funds terrorism' was a thing? Surely Google is providing material assistance in funding organised crime and / or terrorism in their reckless indifference to what they allow their platform to promote?
And they, apparently, won't do anything about it.
A couple months ago I went searching for the book "Regime Change" by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, an NYT bestseller. The top search result at the time used the exact official cover art and author names, and was otherwise in every way indistinguishable from the real book.
I foolishly bought it and started reading. I quickly noticed that the text seemed like more of a mediocre college paper than a bestselling book. After a few pages I was like... wtf is this. Jumped to the end of the book and found an "Abort the author" section naming a fellow named Marcus Whitfield as the author.
I dutifully opened a ticket with Google suggesting that they should really remove this book. They refunded me, but told me they couldn't remove the book because their policy states that only the true copyright holder could request a take down, and I am not that.
WTF? I wasn't even claiming a copyright issue. I was claiming false advertising and fraud. I was claiming that Google Play's store was listing an obviously, maliciously fake book, selling it for real money, and that they should stop doing that. They take a 30% cut! How are they not doing even the most basic vetting of these listings? A human could trivially identify it as fake in 30 seconds and an AI even faster.
It appears that since then, the actual real book has risen to #1 in the search results (I think; it's hard to tell), and the exact listing that got me is gone, but there are still a whole lot of obvious fakes after it:
https://play.google.com/store/search?q=%22regime%20change%22...
And if you search for any other popular book, you get the same thing.
(Of course, no real publisher actually cares about Google Play Books, because nobody uses it, so nobody files takedown requests, presumably. Also presumably no engineers work on it, and that's why it's a wasteland. What I don't get is why haven't they shut it down?)
Shame that was untrue.
> What I don't get is why haven't they shut it down
Likely just because it's profitable enough. If nothing else, that seems to be the #1 guiding principle.
Relatedly, DMCA should be expanded to harmful ads content.
That's the biggest 'trick' companies like Google have pulled here. They've somehow tricked the regulators into thinking that because they're big companies serving a lot of customers over the internet, that any sort of fraud or product liability laws are irrelevant to them.
Because any other company doing this would get sued into oblivion, shut down and the executives criminally charged. If a brick and mortar business let blatant scammers and criminals advertise in their physical stores, that would be seen as a serious crime.
Same with a retailer that sold dangerous or counterfeit products, or one that turned their stores into surveillance panopticons where customer data was collected illegally and sold to the highest bidder.
Google, Amazon, Meta etc are doing things that would get a normal business owner sent to prison.
The solution isn't just technical, it's about being willing to enforce the law for internet businesses the same way we do for offline ones. If Sundar Pichai and the board were looking at 10-20 years in prison for fraud or cyber offences, then Google would fix those dodgy ads real quick...
Is it false ?
As much as we can lament the current state of affair, we must acknowledge everything that has been thrown at any of the bigger companies has resulted in slap on the wrists at most.
At this exact moment in the US money is straight power, in it's rawest form.
If they really wanted to fix these issues, antitrust could be a real thing again, and companies like Google would be forcefully broken up and barred from remerging later down the line. If Google doesn't have Gmail, Chrome, Android or YouTube and all these things are separate businesses, then their power is severely curtailed.
They could also arrest CEOs, board members and other people with a large amount of power at these organisations and charge them for the actions of the business.
Or levvy percentage based fines that obliterate the company's ability to function. Could Google function if it was charged 50-60% of a year's worldwide revenue until an issue was fixed? It'd probably have to cut way back on everything in that scenario.
The issue is that the government has been so thoroughly captured by corporate interests that noone faces meaningful consequences if they earn more than a billion dollars a year.
People at Alphabet and all website owners which use AdSense and showed scam and malicious ads must be arrested, prosecuted and sentenced jail time in order to stop this mess.
But it looks like all the countries are busy age restricting Internet instead. By age restricting, it means private information gathering which fuel ad companies more.
I have to believe Tim Cook never actually tried to use it. I don’t know how any executive using that app could allow it out the door… not at a company that claims to pride themselves on providing a good user experience.
I mean apple music/tv/icloud are always pinging me with "free 3 month subscriptions".
MS is no better with the "lets finish setting up your pc with one drive..." to which the options are [yes/ remind me again later]
I've moved mostly to linux and its refresing.
-A
In some ways the non smart nags are ok with me. We have food ording app in Boston called toast. They decided to get reviews for food orders and time those requests pretty much perfectly after your done eating. It’s weird and somewhat fascinating how they do that.
2023: $32B
2025: $91B
2027: $300B (projected)
2029: $400B (projected)
“I’m happy to go bankrupt rather than lose this race” -Larry Page
Because Google is an adCompany. It will not do anything about ads - quite the opposite, it has fought down ublock origin. Everyone sees that.
(Could also argue that the scam ad that won the slot for 10 cents would have gone for 9 cents without the scam and Meta's marginal revenue was only 1 cent... but if every ad is 1 cent more...)
Same problem when you want to buy a home in a place where real estate became a means for money laundering or uninhabited store of value
They're probably taking that into account in their 10% of profit coming from ads estimate.
Google bans people, but mostly the innocent ones. If you're running blackhat, you've built a setup that gives you very good avoidance, and the bans are calculated into your sheets. The reviewer and the system sees something else than the customer clicking the ad. And even if they get banned, they will just burn a cc and domain and then get back to printing after a few hours.
While a legitimate business never suspects it can get banned, and when it does, the process is Kafkaesque.
Our case: a month of back and forth on the appeal, no success. The best we got was a suggestion to read the TOS and check whether we had any "brand affiliations" we don't have in real life. Previous replies were pasted slop. We don't have any affiliations, and we still have no clue what they were talking about. Meanwhile our conversion rate on other ad platforms was decimated by us constantly changing stuff to please the Google reviewer.
They'll act if someone threatens to sue otherwise Google doesn't give a shit as long as they get paid.
In fact, these days ads have the opposite effect: A repetitive ad turns people off from EVER checking out that product.
F Grammarly and ClickUp etc. I've never tried those products but I have disgust for them thanks to their ads.
more like why company still want to receive money ????? is more correct term
Because they can. There's no meaningful way to prevent them from doing so.
Sometimes simple answers are not only elegant, but capture the essence of a problem.
It's not like they face any consequences for being party to fraud. Laws are for poor people.
There is a 3rd option: malicious stupidity / aka wilful ignorance.
Google is a collection of individuals, so it's very likely both sides of Hanlon's razor are true: a little malice from those in control, persisting a state of stupidity for those executing the process.
As others have pointed out, there will be resistance to improving a process that negatively impacts their bottom line. Incentives, dictate long term behaviour of organisations; whereas Hanlon's razor works better at an individual level IME.
Simple as that.
They should let people have more control over what ads they do and don't see.
If Google served me ads on stuff I was interested in (I'd be happy to tell them) rather than women's clothing, they I might buy it. I'm a guy - show me as many skimpily dressed women as you like, but I have no need for women's clothes! Try it once or a hundred times it you must, but maybe after the millionth non-purchase you'd think they might figure it out and use that screen real-estate to serve an ad for something that my purchase history or what they know about me indicates I might have some interest in!
Dumb as a rock.
It's like the whole purpose of ads, they're not trying to sell you stuff you need - they want your money.
Google wants the advertizers' money, who are really being scammed by Google if they pay every time Google serves an ad to me that Google presumably knows is not going to result in a purchase. I guess Google don't care - if they get paid for click-thrus and I occasionally do that, but never buy, then Google still gets their money.
For a long time, you could host your own adverts, put your own script on third party sites. I'm not sure if this is still a thing but judging from the screenshots, maybe it is. Madness.
If you want to advertise, you should have to prove you're selling what you're advertising in the market you're advertising it in. You should have to prove who you are. If you're caught doing dodgy crap, you should be held responsible.
And if you've taken billions over two decades in advertising, and you don't regularly test the adverts you host, you should be liable for the damage they create.
I reported months ago that Google's continual growth rate in revenues from Ads should be heeded with caution - its not from AI/LLMs.
They are juicing and juicing and juicing their existing assets for all the cash flows they can generate! That's why the revenues keep growing. They did not go to such extremities in the past - and they probably strategically held back.
Meta is facing the same predicament btw - both entities claim the growth is coming from new AI investments. The amount of impersination/Scam ad's I've seen on IG is hilarious. That is a flat out lie its from investments they made pre-LLM hype + efficiency gains.
why is this a discussion?
It takes basically nothing to reliably identify these videos. They're extremely heavily promoted with ads running on other videos. Google does nothing with them when reported. Google does not proactively remove them. And because, contrary to the documentation, youtube doesn't pull the verified flag from a channel when its name is changed, these scams go out on channels that look like official sources for the celebrities in them (they steal some random verified channel then change its name to SpaceX (official) or Microstrategy or whatever).
Google even got sued unsuccessfully by Woz and some of the scam victims-- and their response was pound the "S230 is an absolute shield for externally provided material" table and continue to do nothing about the fraud except rake in money from pedaling it. They haven't even fixed the verified flag issue.
(Shades of the same conduct were seen in the old viacom v. youtube case, -- users were reporting copyright infringements so they took away the button.)
I have sympathy for the S230 shield and consider it very important-- but the law is the absolute worst we're allowed to be. They are free to do better (and the CDA shield was designed to assure they can moderate without picking up liability).
Google's conduct is irresponsible, unethical, and may well cost us this important legal protection because if society's choice is liability for hosts OR the biggest and wealthiest companies do nothing while raking in money from even the most flagrant scams we're going to eventually choose liability with dire consequences for free speech.
It's especially ironic that the smaller sites and forums (like HN) would be hit especially hard by a narrowing of S230, but these forms reliably work hard to remove the worse abuse-- and are seldom the source of anything that truly offends the senses at least not for long. Companies like google that don't are ones that are so wealthy and powerful that they're almost intractable to litigate against even without S230 like protection. Loss of it would hurt them gravely but it would hurt everyone smaller more.
That is it. They don't do it because it goes against their interests. Google is a scummy company doing scummy things. There is very little else to it.
Bonus points if you can get banned for any reason, by contrast, on sites like Facebook
Fuck all of you. Shut them all down, jail time for execs
I have the same question regarding “why is Workday’s resume parser so shit?”
Don't be Evil
Ask me another.
:)
In other news, water is wet.
The US regulatory authorities DGAF ever since Lina Khan exited the picture and the EU regulatory authorities might have the legal basis to hold Big AdTech accountable, but the EU is at the moment busy trying to fend off BS from the Trump admin, they do not have time and risk appetite (aka Trump retaliating on behalf of Big AdTech) left for scam ads.
The ad probably looks at the IP address, sees its from Google and show a legitimate ad.
Google can easily solve this with using external IP addresses, but doesn’t. Because money.
There’s nothing to appreciate here.