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Hm... From the perspective of the ad network: Lower click quality drives up the merchant's cost of sale (COS). Sitting between the merchant and the publisher,

by chokma 10y ago

Hm... From the perspective of the ad network: Lower click quality drives up the merchant's cost of sale (COS). Sitting between the merchant and the publisher, the ad network tries to balance this out, by - mixing good and bad traffic sources - encouraging the merchant to spend more money so they can buy better traffic and/or rank the offers higher on their publisher's sites - punishing the publisher for sending bad traffic by lowering the amount the publisher is paid for each click - filtering out extraordinarily bad traffic AdNauseam will increase the amount of bad traffic. Merchants have to pay more money to get their ads through to those people who do not create fraudulent clicks. Publishers will receive less money per click. Ad networks will try harder to invade your privacy(1) so they can get more comprehensive data about those people who are worthy to be targeted. Startups which promise to detect fake traffic will get a boost. Companies which manage advertising via social influencers or in-game mobile ads etc cannot care less. I do not see the direct benefit of this for the end user... (1) for example by paying more money to antivirus providers to send your browsing habits their way. edit: formatting

TeMPOraL 10y ago
> I do not see the direct benefit of this for the end user... The hope is that publishers will understand why they're getting hit by the collateral of the fake-click barrage and move out of the blast range by changing their ads into unobtrusive ones, or even moving away from ads entirely into models like: - treating your webpage as an investment - sponsorship / patronage - subscriptions - paywalls Additional hope is that the whole ad industry finally implodes.
- deadbunny 10y ago
  How naïve. You think the entire advertising industry is going to throw their hand up and say "Hey, you got us. We'll just cave to your demand and drastically reduce our profits"? This will just be another volley in the ever escalating ad arms race.
  - rdw 10y ago
    It creates opportunity for disruption. The established players see their costs go up and effectiveness go down. A new player comes in who has non-obtrusive ads, and sees outsized success. Everyone else either dies off or fast-follows. I'm curious how The Deck is doing these days, seemed like they could have been that player.
    - deadbunny 10y ago
      So lets imagine somehow beyond all odds this doesn't result in escalation and actually has the effect you describe; How does AdNuseum detect the good from the bad? How does a "good" advertiser submit themselves to some kind of whitelist? How does AdNuseum verify the advertisers claims?
      - TeMPOraL 10y ago
        > How does AdNuseum detect the good from the bad? It doesn't. Or it gets evolved until it does, but there's no incentive to do that while there are very little "good" ads. > How does a "good" advertiser submit themselves to some kind of whitelist? They don't, that's the point. As AdNauseam currently works, there are no good advertisers, and for now it's a good enough heuristic. Any ad with an active component is a legitimate target. > How does AdNuseum verify the advertisers claims? It doesn't. It does not care.
      - rdw 10y ago
        AdBlock Plus is already doing this: https://adblockplus.org/acceptable-ads https://adblockplus.org/acceptable-ads It might just lead to escalation, it has so far. The point is there is a plausible way forward. It's the story of countless industries, just because it hasn't happened yet for this one doesn't mean it won't ever.
criddell 10y ago
> I do not see the direct benefit of this for the end user... Even in the long term? If plugins like this are super effective, then the value of tracking becomes less than the cost of doing it. Eventually, advertising might revert to a less intrusive model like billboards or magazine ads.
davidgerard 10y ago
> I do not see the direct benefit of this for the end user... I posted it to my Facebook earlier. So far the response has been unbridled glee. I think you're tremendously underestimating the sheer joy people have at being handed a method of striking back at the people making their lives a misery, and need to recalibrate your model of how people will react to this.
- chokma 10y ago
  Okay, I see the appeal of sticking it to the man (in this case, the privacy invading tracking agency). If I could have an addon that _reliably_ hides my web browsing habits from advertisers and evil government agencies while making their life harder, that would be cool. I just do not see how this act of online vigilantism is going to change things or help. The cost that merchants encounter are opaque, they have mostly no control over the publishing side, if they even know where their ads are shown at all. So, advertising gets more expensive, but as one commentator here said: "I must advertise, else I will have no sales at all." Lastly, to click on an ad, the user will most likely need to execute the javascript associated with the ad. At that moment, they already have been tracked, and any malicious drive-by-downloads will run on their machine. Clicking on all ads you encounter will just make your browsing trail that much wider (user reads HackerNews, browses late in the morning, stays long on sites with cat memes), and your unique browser footprint will be associated cross device with your profile so you get more targeted ads on your mobile devices.

by chokma 10y ago

TeMPOraL 10y ago

> I do not see the direct benefit of this for the end user... The hope is that publishers will understand why they're getting hit by the collateral of the fake-click barrage and move out of the blast range by changing their ads into unobtrusive ones, or even moving away from ads entirely into models like: - treating your webpage as an investment - sponsorship / patronage - subscriptions - paywalls Additional hope is that the whole ad industry finally implodes.

deadbunny 10y ago
How naïve. You think the entire advertising industry is going to throw their hand up and say "Hey, you got us. We'll just cave to your demand and drastically reduce our profits"? This will just be another volley in the ever escalating ad arms race.
- rdw 10y ago
  It creates opportunity for disruption. The established players see their costs go up and effectiveness go down. A new player comes in who has non-obtrusive ads, and sees outsized success. Everyone else either dies off or fast-follows. I'm curious how The Deck is doing these days, seemed like they could have been that player.
  - deadbunny 10y ago
    So lets imagine somehow beyond all odds this doesn't result in escalation and actually has the effect you describe; How does AdNuseum detect the good from the bad? How does a "good" advertiser submit themselves to some kind of whitelist? How does AdNuseum verify the advertisers claims?
    - TeMPOraL 10y ago
      > How does AdNuseum detect the good from the bad? It doesn't. Or it gets evolved until it does, but there's no incentive to do that while there are very little "good" ads. > How does a "good" advertiser submit themselves to some kind of whitelist? They don't, that's the point. As AdNauseam currently works, there are no good advertisers, and for now it's a good enough heuristic. Any ad with an active component is a legitimate target. > How does AdNuseum verify the advertisers claims? It doesn't. It does not care.
    - rdw 10y ago
      AdBlock Plus is already doing this: https://adblockplus.org/acceptable-ads https://adblockplus.org/acceptable-ads It might just lead to escalation, it has so far. The point is there is a plausible way forward. It's the story of countless industries, just because it hasn't happened yet for this one doesn't mean it won't ever.

criddell 10y ago

> I do not see the direct benefit of this for the end user... Even in the long term? If plugins like this are super effective, then the value of tracking becomes less than the cost of doing it. Eventually, advertising might revert to a less intrusive model like billboards or magazine ads.

davidgerard 10y ago

> I do not see the direct benefit of this for the end user... I posted it to my Facebook earlier. So far the response has been unbridled glee. I think you're tremendously underestimating the sheer joy people have at being handed a method of striking back at the people making their lives a misery, and need to recalibrate your model of how people will react to this.

chokma 10y ago
Okay, I see the appeal of sticking it to the man (in this case, the privacy invading tracking agency). If I could have an addon that _reliably_ hides my web browsing habits from advertisers and evil government agencies while making their life harder, that would be cool. I just do not see how this act of online vigilantism is going to change things or help. The cost that merchants encounter are opaque, they have mostly no control over the publishing side, if they even know where their ads are shown at all. So, advertising gets more expensive, but as one commentator here said: "I must advertise, else I will have no sales at all." Lastly, to click on an ad, the user will most likely need to execute the javascript associated with the ad. At that moment, they already have been tracked, and any malicious drive-by-downloads will run on their machine. Clicking on all ads you encounter will just make your browsing trail that much wider (user reads HackerNews, browses late in the morning, stays long on sites with cat memes), and your unique browser footprint will be associated cross device with your profile so you get more targeted ads on your mobile devices.