Tbh I'm all in favour of ad fraud because it undermines the whole industry which I'd love to see disappear.
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.
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.
I can't read the whole article, but beyond verified clicks in email I worry that tech like Passkeys is going to get used against us. As soon as you take away the friction of entering passwords, and let passkeys authenticate automatically, why not have authentication / authorization for every action?
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.
A little off topic but for anyone using Thunderbird, I highly recommend BetterUnsubscribe[1] to help combat spam. Since installing I've basically eliminated marketing emails from my inbox. I've used tools like unroll.me in the past but I found that a one-time review doesn't really help much since every signup and every form entry always risks you getting more marketing emails and having to go to another service all the time creates alot of friction. That extension lets you unsubscribe the moment you see a marketing email hit your inbox.
The HTTP protocol and HTML fromat that Tim Berners Lee created, were meant for sharing documentation and information which foster collaboration via internet. It wasn't really meant for doing business in trusted environments.
The WWW acronym should stand for Worldwide Wild West.
Surprising it is taking advertisers this long to wake up, considering the decades I've been reading articles on HN about the massive fraud rates from entire fraud ecosystems.
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?
Big picture, it kind of blew my mind a few years ago when I realized this: If one concern is the surveillance panopticon thing, it's mitigated by the fact that online advertising itself is a business "fraught" with the fact that there is just as much of an incentive for the seller of ads to be loose with the truth and to use those sorts of tactics as it is for anyone else.
I think the end user will benefit from any of this happening. As a user myself, I'm so tired of "forced ads", which makes me think a high percentage of ads revenue is fake/generated, not genuine.
Tbh I'm all in favour of ad fraud because it undermines the whole industry which I'd love to see disappear.
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.
Seems like important context behind the push for things like Web Environment Integrity (similar in concept to "trusted computing" if you were around for that controversy in the early 2000s): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Environment_Integrity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Computing
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.
I can't read the whole article, but beyond verified clicks in email I worry that tech like Passkeys is going to get used against us. As soon as you take away the friction of entering passwords, and let passkeys authenticate automatically, why not have authentication / authorization for every action?
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.
A little off topic but for anyone using Thunderbird, I highly recommend BetterUnsubscribe[1] to help combat spam. Since installing I've basically eliminated marketing emails from my inbox. I've used tools like unroll.me in the past but I found that a one-time review doesn't really help much since every signup and every form entry always risks you getting more marketing emails and having to go to another service all the time creates alot of friction. That extension lets you unsubscribe the moment you see a marketing email hit your inbox.
[1]: https://github.com/LucBennett/BetterUnsubscribe
The HTTP protocol and HTML fromat that Tim Berners Lee created, were meant for sharing documentation and information which foster collaboration via internet. It wasn't really meant for doing business in trusted environments.
The WWW acronym should stand for Worldwide Wild West.
Advertisers should be grateful I even skimmed the subject line
No, they should demand 'Verified Purchases'. We know this is technically possible.
AI scraper traffic from residential bots is skewing all statistics.
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.
Surprising it is taking advertisers this long to wake up, considering the decades I've been reading articles on HN about the massive fraud rates from entire fraud ecosystems.
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?
Big picture, it kind of blew my mind a few years ago when I realized this: If one concern is the surveillance panopticon thing, it's mitigated by the fact that online advertising itself is a business "fraught" with the fact that there is just as much of an incentive for the seller of ads to be loose with the truth and to use those sorts of tactics as it is for anyone else.
Analogue hole. This 'Verified Clicks' doesn't make sense.
What makes a click 'verified', bots can still click links with browser use anyway and you will not be able to tell.
I think the end user will benefit from any of this happening. As a user myself, I'm so tired of "forced ads", which makes me think a high percentage of ads revenue is fake/generated, not genuine.
They won’t.