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In related news, certain subreddits have been promoting the use of https://adnauseam.io/ https://adnauseam.io/, a fork of uBlock origin that automatically click

by madars 9y ago

In related news, certain subreddits have been promoting the use of https://adnauseam.io/ https://adnauseam.io/, a fork of uBlock origin that automatically clicks all the ads encountered. The same redditors also encourage searching for high-CPC terms (e.g. insurance or rare medical conditions) to maximize the impact.

cft 9y ago
This could be a coordinated 4chan attack https://files.catbox.moe/6ueduv.png https://files.catbox.moe/6ueduv.png
- MichaelGG 9y ago
  Yes, it's seen as, probably correctly, the only way to do anything that'll affect Google. Outside of getting laws changed, that is. It probably won't be effective - the people handling ad fraud are probably not the ones pushing their censorious politics. But hey, unlike most slacktivism, this causes them real damage. I imagine the response will be to ban people's Google accounts, for those dumb enough to sign in while using AdNauseum. (Anything more forensic might be a target for trolls.) We'll see if Firefox caves to pressure like Pale Moon did.
  - cat199 9y ago
    which, aside from being ironic, could create network effects to move people out of gapps and back towards more federated solutions.. things could get interesting.. or, more likely, they could not.
- tanilama 9y ago
  There is no proof it does. Even before it Google has estimated the fraud traffic compositing of 20% to 30% of all its inventory. I think 4chan bros are too caught up with themselves to think that a bunch of ideologists can cause tens of billions of damage. http://www.businessinsider.com/thepartnership-msix-and-adloox-ad-fraud-2017-2017-3 http://www.businessinsider.com/thepartnership-msix-and-adloo...
- Drdrdrq 9y ago
  Give me a break. It is laughably easy, even trivial for Google to filter out such traffic.
  - ManlyBread 9y ago
    How? If the clicks are random, how does one filter them out and separate them from actual traffic?
    - lugg 9y ago
      People don't click random ads at random times. Google has more than enough training data to pick up on this traffic with a high degree of accuracy using rudimentary machine learning.
birken 9y ago
You think Google can't detect this? Enough advertisers have conversion tracking that Google can detect if a person is clicking a zillion ads and never actually converting, in addition to the other multitude of ways they detect fraud. I'm sure in the battle between fake traffic producers and Google there are probably tricky ways you can fool Google, but a person clicking every ad is not one of them. Also... this doesn't actually hurt Google. If the percentage of fake traffic goes up, the cost per click will just go down over the long term. And what, advertisers are going to lose faith? Give me a break. It doesn't matter if the traffic is 0% fake or 90% fake, all that matters is if the traffic is making you a profit or not.
- bitJericho 9y ago
  looks like they just need to start clicking a lower random percentage.
- runeks 9y ago
  > It doesn't matter if the traffic is 0% fake or 90% fake, all that matters is if the traffic is making you a profit or not. Only under the assumption that no competing, superior technologies exists. The worse the efficiency of the ad-model, the more attractive the alternatives will be. Criticizing Microsoft over delivering an inferior user experience twenty years ago is in the same category as the critique against Google: as long as they have complete control over the market, it doesn’t matter at all. But when competing, superior technologies start appearing, it becomes their downfall. And the worse the user (advertisers, in case of Google) experience, the greater the incentive for competing technologies to appear.
  - birken 9y ago
    What alternatives? The key product here is Google search which is what attracts the consumers. The advertisers are dealing with Adwords not because Adwords is the greatest platform in history, but because Adwords is the platform where the consumers are. Ad fraud, no matter how massive, has no effect on the consumer side of Google search. Google has a strong incentive to fix this because any money going to scammers is theoretically coming out of their own pockets as advertisers lower their CPCs to adjust for lower conversion rates, but it isn't an existential threat to the marketplace. Cut out the scammers and the CPCs adjust back upwards as conversion rates increase. And again, Google has the tools to find the scammers. It's a game of whack-a-mole for sure, but at the end of the day the higher the level of fraud on the marketplace the easier it is to catch, so the scammers are somewhat limited in how much damage they do.
tonyedgecombe 9y ago
If that worked then advertisers would just switch to cost per acquisition.
- cat199 9y ago
  quantified by? measured by? "oh hey google, trust us, noone converted, we promise"
  - tonyedgecombe 9y ago
    https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/6268632?hl=en-GB https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/6268632?hl=en-GB
    - cat199 9y ago
      my understanding was this (sub)thread pertained to actual conversion - e.g. someone bought something.
shubhamjain 9y ago
It's hard to understand the level of _schadenfreude_ that warrants use of AdNauseam. Ads can be hated. That's all right. But, why would anyone be so hell bent on depleting advertisers budget. What if the advertiser is not a rich company but a small business. How acceptable it's to destroy the potential value of her budget? Of course, Google might already be detecting it, but the intent of AdNeuseam seems nothing but despicable.
- convery 9y ago
  Or for the contentcreators, think Youtube, their CPM going from 2$ to 0.5$ just because people dislike Google seems a little cruel.
  - ko27 9y ago
    If you are talking about the obfuscation, and not the ad-block part, then they never had those 2$ to begin with.
  - _pmf_ 9y ago
    The cynic in me: Oh, no, my daughter will have less 2h videos of people unwrapping Kinder surprise eggs to watch; a cultural loss.
    - radicalbyte 9y ago
      Killer feature! Does Adnauseum work on iPad? :)
  - cyphar 9y ago
    YouTube already ruined the CPM of creators several months ago, through a bunch of hair-brained schemes to try to appeal to advertisers that were scared by flat-out lies by WSJ. AdNauseum was created long after the "adpocalypse". I would not be surprised if some people are using it in protest of YouTube's attempts to ruin the ability for independent media to fund themselves.
  - wyager 9y ago
cyphar 9y ago
4chan has been shilling it quite heavily as well, and (of course) they've been championing articles like TFA as proof that their technique is working. I personally think that there is a fair point to make that Google has already been sabotaging people who were trying to make a living off advertising (see the YouTube "adpocalypse"), so I can see where the anger might be coming from.
- paulgb 9y ago
  I used to work in ad fraud detection (eg. publishers buying fake clicks) about five years ago and fake clicks were a bigger problem than people talk about. I would be surprised if 4chan is more than a drop in the bucket.
user5994461 9y ago
Warning: Don't use that plugin if you have web sites and use any of google adsense/adword/analytics. Your account would get banned for fake clicks.
ThePhysicist 9y ago
This might be quite dangerous if used without a solution to anonymize your IP and block all third party cookies, as it will expose your browsing habits and could even let advertisers de-anonymize you. Knowing that you regularly visit e.g. 5-10 specific domains can be enough to uniquely identify you in a dataset containing millions of people depending on the relative popularity rank of these domains. I would therefore be very cautious with this as it might do serious harm to your privacy. Not interacting with ads and not sending any data about you to the ad provider is still the best option for that. Also, most fake clicks can be easily detected (because you e.g. do not interact with the ad content after clicking on the ad), so it might not even do much harm to the ad providers (if that's the reason why you use the system, which I do not endorse personally).
- ThePhysicist 9y ago
  From their website: > As the collected data gathered shows an omnivorous click-stream, user tracking, targeting and surveillance become futile. This is (IMHO) a flawed and dangerous view, as by clicking on the ad you provide valuable information to the provider (I.e. that you visited the website on which the ad was embedded) and this information can be used to build a pretty detailed view of your browsing habits. As the largest ad networks have very high coverage on many domains (Google e.g is present on more than 80 % of the top 100k most popular domains) you will give them a wealth of data about you, which IMHO is a privacy nightmare.
  - jakobdabo 9y ago
    If you are not running an ad blocker they already know you are visiting those sites from the trackers accompanying the ads, now they will also see a click from you which will make their database about your interests become less accurate.
    - ThePhysicist 9y ago
      Yes, but one of the points of running an ad blocker is to avoid sending any information about you to third-party trackers, clicking on every ad nullifies this, even when blocking the third-party cookies. And as I said I don't think that it will make their databases less accurate, as it's often easy to separate false clicks from real ones (due to different engagement rates and requests).
swills 9y ago
I'm not sure this actually IS related. I think bot traffic is a bigger problem. Are you saying there's as much fake ad click traffic from AdNauseam as there is from bot traffic?

by madars 9y ago

cft 9y ago

This could be a coordinated 4chan attack https://files.catbox.moe/6ueduv.png https://files.catbox.moe/6ueduv.png

MichaelGG 9y ago
Yes, it's seen as, probably correctly, the only way to do anything that'll affect Google. Outside of getting laws changed, that is. It probably won't be effective - the people handling ad fraud are probably not the ones pushing their censorious politics. But hey, unlike most slacktivism, this causes them real damage. I imagine the response will be to ban people's Google accounts, for those dumb enough to sign in while using AdNauseum. (Anything more forensic might be a target for trolls.) We'll see if Firefox caves to pressure like Pale Moon did.
- cat199 9y ago
  which, aside from being ironic, could create network effects to move people out of gapps and back towards more federated solutions.. things could get interesting.. or, more likely, they could not.
tanilama 9y ago
There is no proof it does. Even before it Google has estimated the fraud traffic compositing of 20% to 30% of all its inventory. I think 4chan bros are too caught up with themselves to think that a bunch of ideologists can cause tens of billions of damage. http://www.businessinsider.com/thepartnership-msix-and-adloox-ad-fraud-2017-2017-3 http://www.businessinsider.com/thepartnership-msix-and-adloo...
Drdrdrq 9y ago
Give me a break. It is laughably easy, even trivial for Google to filter out such traffic.
- ManlyBread 9y ago
  How? If the clicks are random, how does one filter them out and separate them from actual traffic?
  - lugg 9y ago
    People don't click random ads at random times. Google has more than enough training data to pick up on this traffic with a high degree of accuracy using rudimentary machine learning.

birken 9y ago

You think Google can't detect this? Enough advertisers have conversion tracking that Google can detect if a person is clicking a zillion ads and never actually converting, in addition to the other multitude of ways they detect fraud. I'm sure in the battle between fake traffic producers and Google there are probably tricky ways you can fool Google, but a person clicking every ad is not one of them. Also... this doesn't actually hurt Google. If the percentage of fake traffic goes up, the cost per click will just go down over the long term. And what, advertisers are going to lose faith? Give me a break. It doesn't matter if the traffic is 0% fake or 90% fake, all that matters is if the traffic is making you a profit or not.

bitJericho 9y ago
looks like they just need to start clicking a lower random percentage.
runeks 9y ago
> It doesn't matter if the traffic is 0% fake or 90% fake, all that matters is if the traffic is making you a profit or not. Only under the assumption that no competing, superior technologies exists. The worse the efficiency of the ad-model, the more attractive the alternatives will be. Criticizing Microsoft over delivering an inferior user experience twenty years ago is in the same category as the critique against Google: as long as they have complete control over the market, it doesn’t matter at all. But when competing, superior technologies start appearing, it becomes their downfall. And the worse the user (advertisers, in case of Google) experience, the greater the incentive for competing technologies to appear.
- birken 9y ago
  What alternatives? The key product here is Google search which is what attracts the consumers. The advertisers are dealing with Adwords not because Adwords is the greatest platform in history, but because Adwords is the platform where the consumers are. Ad fraud, no matter how massive, has no effect on the consumer side of Google search. Google has a strong incentive to fix this because any money going to scammers is theoretically coming out of their own pockets as advertisers lower their CPCs to adjust for lower conversion rates, but it isn't an existential threat to the marketplace. Cut out the scammers and the CPCs adjust back upwards as conversion rates increase. And again, Google has the tools to find the scammers. It's a game of whack-a-mole for sure, but at the end of the day the higher the level of fraud on the marketplace the easier it is to catch, so the scammers are somewhat limited in how much damage they do.

tonyedgecombe 9y ago

If that worked then advertisers would just switch to cost per acquisition.

cat199 9y ago
quantified by? measured by? "oh hey google, trust us, noone converted, we promise"
- tonyedgecombe 9y ago
  https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/6268632?hl=en-GB https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/6268632?hl=en-GB
  - cat199 9y ago
    my understanding was this (sub)thread pertained to actual conversion - e.g. someone bought something.

shubhamjain 9y ago

It's hard to understand the level of _schadenfreude_ that warrants use of AdNauseam. Ads can be hated. That's all right. But, why would anyone be so hell bent on depleting advertisers budget. What if the advertiser is not a rich company but a small business. How acceptable it's to destroy the potential value of her budget? Of course, Google might already be detecting it, but the intent of AdNeuseam seems nothing but despicable.

convery 9y ago
Or for the contentcreators, think Youtube, their CPM going from 2$ to 0.5$ just because people dislike Google seems a little cruel.
- ko27 9y ago
  If you are talking about the obfuscation, and not the ad-block part, then they never had those 2$ to begin with.
- _pmf_ 9y ago
  The cynic in me: Oh, no, my daughter will have less 2h videos of people unwrapping Kinder surprise eggs to watch; a cultural loss.
  - radicalbyte 9y ago
    Killer feature! Does Adnauseum work on iPad? :)
- cyphar 9y ago
  YouTube already ruined the CPM of creators several months ago, through a bunch of hair-brained schemes to try to appeal to advertisers that were scared by flat-out lies by WSJ. AdNauseum was created long after the "adpocalypse". I would not be surprised if some people are using it in protest of YouTube's attempts to ruin the ability for independent media to fund themselves.
- wyager 9y ago

cyphar 9y ago

4chan has been shilling it quite heavily as well, and (of course) they've been championing articles like TFA as proof that their technique is working. I personally think that there is a fair point to make that Google has already been sabotaging people who were trying to make a living off advertising (see the YouTube "adpocalypse"), so I can see where the anger might be coming from.

paulgb 9y ago
I used to work in ad fraud detection (eg. publishers buying fake clicks) about five years ago and fake clicks were a bigger problem than people talk about. I would be surprised if 4chan is more than a drop in the bucket.

user5994461 9y ago

Warning: Don't use that plugin if you have web sites and use any of google adsense/adword/analytics. Your account would get banned for fake clicks.

ThePhysicist 9y ago

This might be quite dangerous if used without a solution to anonymize your IP and block all third party cookies, as it will expose your browsing habits and could even let advertisers de-anonymize you. Knowing that you regularly visit e.g. 5-10 specific domains can be enough to uniquely identify you in a dataset containing millions of people depending on the relative popularity rank of these domains. I would therefore be very cautious with this as it might do serious harm to your privacy. Not interacting with ads and not sending any data about you to the ad provider is still the best option for that. Also, most fake clicks can be easily detected (because you e.g. do not interact with the ad content after clicking on the ad), so it might not even do much harm to the ad providers (if that's the reason why you use the system, which I do not endorse personally).

ThePhysicist 9y ago
From their website: > As the collected data gathered shows an omnivorous click-stream, user tracking, targeting and surveillance become futile. This is (IMHO) a flawed and dangerous view, as by clicking on the ad you provide valuable information to the provider (I.e. that you visited the website on which the ad was embedded) and this information can be used to build a pretty detailed view of your browsing habits. As the largest ad networks have very high coverage on many domains (Google e.g is present on more than 80 % of the top 100k most popular domains) you will give them a wealth of data about you, which IMHO is a privacy nightmare.
- jakobdabo 9y ago
  If you are not running an ad blocker they already know you are visiting those sites from the trackers accompanying the ads, now they will also see a click from you which will make their database about your interests become less accurate.
  - ThePhysicist 9y ago
    Yes, but one of the points of running an ad blocker is to avoid sending any information about you to third-party trackers, clicking on every ad nullifies this, even when blocking the third-party cookies. And as I said I don't think that it will make their databases less accurate, as it's often easy to separate false clicks from real ones (due to different engagement rates and requests).

swills 9y ago

I'm not sure this actually IS related. I think bot traffic is a bigger problem. Are you saying there's as much fake ad click traffic from AdNauseam as there is from bot traffic?