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I personally suspect that’s why Twitter has failed to deal with their bot problem, fixing it would make their usage metrics plumit.

m_ke 8y ago
Also the reason why reddit went through the redesign. It lets them hide ads in the infinite scroll and pretend that people looked at them.
- village-idiot 8y ago
  I really can’t help but wonder if our entire online ecosystem is built entirely on fraudulent ad sales.
  - dragonsky67 8y ago
    Shhh, don't say that out loud. I love the fact that I get internet content for nothing as it's paid for by big advertisers who are to stupid to realise that I never purchase anything that they advertise.
    - village-idiot 8y ago
      Thankfully nobody important cares about my opinion.
    - tartoran 8y ago
      I think the same and stay quiet about it
  - Deimorz 8y ago
    This was a good article from a while back that shows how every dollar spent on online advertising seems to only result in about 3 cents worth of actual ad views: https://adcontrarian.blogspot.com/2017/01/display-ads-my-3-worth.html https://adcontrarian.blogspot.com/2017/01/display-ads-my-3-w...
  - munchbunny 8y ago
    Yes and no. Conventional wisdom inside ad tech is that fraud rates are about 30% on average. Typically lower for video. So there's real value in there (in terms of ROI for the advertiser) but there's effectively an entire margin of fraud where advertisers are bearing much of that cost.
    - thrower123 8y ago
      Video ads are intolerable. Whenever they exist, they spawn an arms war of dark patterns to get and stop them from auto-playing, without warning, at maximum volume. The Facebook Android app is gawdawful for this; I just discovered that you can put it into some sort of a data-saving mode, which seems to stop auto-play for the moment... but time will tell. And though we're supposed to be bagging on Facebook here, YouTube is really bad with some of their in-the-middle of content ad spots that I've been noticing lately. I'll be watching a peaceful little Timeline documentary, and right in the middle of an interview the TV starts blaring pop music for something I am never going to buy. Especially galling when it's something produced for cable TV, so it has commercial breaks built into it naturally, where the ads could be inserted unobtrusively.
      - village-idiot 8y ago
        I think what’s shocking is how awful a lot of the targeting is. Even before I started getting super aggressive about blocking all trackers, I regularly got fed ads for products and services I didn’t need, and in languages I couldn’t understand. The most confusing is that I keep getting ads from the same company I bought my wedding ring at. Like, I’m not divorced, and I don’t need a second. Why would they re-target me?
        lmm 8y ago
        Weddings are a high-margin business, they can afford to spend a lot on advertising and not be too careful about their targeting. The advertising service is happy to take their money. It's not that we can't do better, it's that there isn't enough incentive to do better at any level.
        8y ago
code4tee 8y ago
My previous company stopped advertising on Twitter for precisely this reason. Our own analytics showed that the majority of the clicks we were getting and being charged for were obviously either bits or other spam accounts. It was actually crazy what we were being charged for.
wild_preference 8y ago
Watching Twitter attempt to deal with the cryptocurrency spammers that chain on to every half-popular tweet leads me to believe that it really is just incompetence (+ being a hard problem in general). For example, their latest solution is to prevent you from having the exact same name as a famous person. Notice all the bots now have the name "Elon" or "Elon Mu5k" when responding to Elon Musk.

m_ke 8y ago

Also the reason why reddit went through the redesign. It lets them hide ads in the infinite scroll and pretend that people looked at them.

village-idiot 8y ago
I really can’t help but wonder if our entire online ecosystem is built entirely on fraudulent ad sales.
- dragonsky67 8y ago
  Shhh, don't say that out loud. I love the fact that I get internet content for nothing as it's paid for by big advertisers who are to stupid to realise that I never purchase anything that they advertise.
  - village-idiot 8y ago
    Thankfully nobody important cares about my opinion.
  - tartoran 8y ago
    I think the same and stay quiet about it
- Deimorz 8y ago
  This was a good article from a while back that shows how every dollar spent on online advertising seems to only result in about 3 cents worth of actual ad views: https://adcontrarian.blogspot.com/2017/01/display-ads-my-3-worth.html https://adcontrarian.blogspot.com/2017/01/display-ads-my-3-w...
- munchbunny 8y ago
  Yes and no. Conventional wisdom inside ad tech is that fraud rates are about 30% on average. Typically lower for video. So there's real value in there (in terms of ROI for the advertiser) but there's effectively an entire margin of fraud where advertisers are bearing much of that cost.
  - thrower123 8y ago
    Video ads are intolerable. Whenever they exist, they spawn an arms war of dark patterns to get and stop them from auto-playing, without warning, at maximum volume. The Facebook Android app is gawdawful for this; I just discovered that you can put it into some sort of a data-saving mode, which seems to stop auto-play for the moment... but time will tell. And though we're supposed to be bagging on Facebook here, YouTube is really bad with some of their in-the-middle of content ad spots that I've been noticing lately. I'll be watching a peaceful little Timeline documentary, and right in the middle of an interview the TV starts blaring pop music for something I am never going to buy. Especially galling when it's something produced for cable TV, so it has commercial breaks built into it naturally, where the ads could be inserted unobtrusively.
    - village-idiot 8y ago
      I think what’s shocking is how awful a lot of the targeting is. Even before I started getting super aggressive about blocking all trackers, I regularly got fed ads for products and services I didn’t need, and in languages I couldn’t understand. The most confusing is that I keep getting ads from the same company I bought my wedding ring at. Like, I’m not divorced, and I don’t need a second. Why would they re-target me?
      - lmm 8y ago
        Weddings are a high-margin business, they can afford to spend a lot on advertising and not be too careful about their targeting. The advertising service is happy to take their money. It's not that we can't do better, it's that there isn't enough incentive to do better at any level.
      - 8y ago

code4tee 8y ago

My previous company stopped advertising on Twitter for precisely this reason. Our own analytics showed that the majority of the clicks we were getting and being charged for were obviously either bits or other spam accounts. It was actually crazy what we were being charged for.

wild_preference 8y ago

Watching Twitter attempt to deal with the cryptocurrency spammers that chain on to every half-popular tweet leads me to believe that it really is just incompetence (+ being a hard problem in general). For example, their latest solution is to prevent you from having the exact same name as a famous person. Notice all the bots now have the name "Elon" or "Elon Mu5k" when responding to Elon Musk.