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AdNauseam – clicking ads so you don't have to

276 points by JoachimS 8y ago

supergilbert 8y ago
Amazing idea and clever name.
cr3ative 8y ago
So worse than just not supporting sites you visit (via blocking or not clicking), you actively harm their conversion rate on ads, making their slots worth less to networks. Super.
- elcomet 8y ago
  So maybe that's good if you want to encourage sites to find other business models that don't rely on advertisement.
  - manigandham 8y ago
    How many sites would you actually pay for?
    - lostjohnny 8y ago
      I don't know But I know I will keep blocking ads because they slow down the website and consume a lot of bandwidth
    - elcomet 8y ago
      Well, maybe a subscription for every site is not the right business model, we could imagine a lot of different ones. For example, automatic tipping when you spend more than x minutes on a website (something similar to what brave is trying to do), or pay by article (a few cents) on news sites. Eventually people won't be able to subscribe to every site they want content from obviously. Look at netflix / hulu / amazon videos / youtube red ... It adds up very quickly.
      - r3bl 8y ago
        Trying to convince me to set up a subscription upon any visit (and especially upon the first visit) isn't gonna be very effective. It requires thought and some calculations. "Liked it? Pay me $2" is a way more simple decision to make. If I make it to the end of your content and see a PayPal.me (or Ko-fi) link, there's a reasonable chance I'm going to click on it. I can't say the same for links to Patreon.
        MarHoff 8y ago
        There could actually be a sweet spot for ApplePay (and similar service) there. Quick anonymous and secure tips for website.
    - hyperbovine 8y ago
      The ones I would actually use.
    - DoctorPenguin 8y ago
      None
    - ionised 8y ago
      Most of them. And the ones I wouldn't pay for I wouldn't miss.
    - trqx 8y ago
      I look at it this way: some sites might be worth paying for, none are worth being tracked for or being eye-raped by ads. I don't know why anyone would think it is a good idea to try and make money on something no one is willing to pay for. About the adnauseam topic: while paywalled sites makes it clear that you need to pay for their content or services, the one with ads don't. You are candidly browsing the web and suddenly they just shove tons of trackers and ads down your browser, no question asked. This is read by some people as an act of war, who are then motivated to retaliate using weapons like adnauseam. Of course they should just ignore or block the whole websites in questions, but no one can pretend they drew first blood.
    - ilovetux 8y ago
      I wouldn't really like to manage multiple subscriptions, but what I would be willing to do is pay for membership to a service which offers me access to a wide variety of ad-free websites. Kind of like how a cable subscription gets me access to a large number of channels (but without the commercials).
      - web007 8y ago
        Shameless plug for Blendle, they provide access to a bunch of news sites with a pay-per-article system. It's a handy way to get around many paywalls without subscribing to many sites individually.
    - asnrk 8y ago
      The most useful ones are already free. So, probably none that I don't already. Development resources (free, hosted by companies with incentive to spread the info). Wikipedia. Rarely I still manage to stumble on some non-monetized hobbyist sites, despite their being hard to find under current search algos (infrequent updates, no attention to SEO, no padding things to look like "more unique content per page" to Google), and that's nice. The rest I already pay for (Netflix, which just barely skates by being so cheap), are essentially utility things (bank sites, government), or are so low-value I'd probably be better off not using them, frankly. Or are simply piracy sites (library genesis / scihub), for that matter. Any topic I scratch the surface of in online research I end up at excellent, totally free (not ad supported) resources or finding that I need to track down some books, or some combination of the two.
  - dennisy 8y ago
    It is not as simple as your one line comment suggests.
  - baddox 8y ago
    Or, more practically, maybe conversion rate just isn’t a good metric for determining the “value of a slot to the network.”
    - elcomet 8y ago
      I think it would make the "pay per click" option disappear, leaving only the "pay per view". And you would determine conversion rate from the view, not the click.
      - ilikehurdles 8y ago
        This has already happened mostly. CPC ain’t what it used to be.
  - beobab 8y ago
    I think this is an argument you could reasonably make if you give your money to web-sites that you find valuable. Otherwise, the argument seems to be a case of "I don't like the way you got money/attention out of me", or "I want someone else to pay for the content I consume".
    - pixl97 8y ago
      This would be great if sites you could pay for actually exited. Ad ran sites monopolized the internet.
    - alkonaut 8y ago
      The argument for me is "I can pay for content with money. It can be zero money or nonzero money but I want to pay with money."
    - TelmoMenezes 8y ago
      > Otherwise, the argument seems to be a case of "I don't like the way you got money/attention out of me", or "I want someone else to pay for the content I consume". You are consuming content from me this very moment, I charge you zero dollars for it. Believe it or not, the web actually was like that at some point: not connecting producers to consumers but connecting human beings, who could produce or consume as they pleased. This was before the people with things to sell arrived.
      - 99052882514569 8y ago
        This kind of shooting-the-shit content is a small subset of what makes the web useful. You are not spending time and money investigating anything of consequence and then reporting it for free, are you? Few people are. We all need to make a living, and a lot of things cannot be done by amateurs alone.
    - thecatspaw 8y ago
      Sure, and thats fair enough. I support a youtuber on patreon for quite a bit more than my share of ad-revenue. His patreons may be a very low percentage of his overall viewers, but even that low-percentage pays more than ad-revenue of all of them
  - 99052882514569 8y ago
    Other than sabotage, you can also "encourage" sites to find other business models by visiting other sites instead. You know, the ones that don't rely on advertisement. You might need to pay for those, but that's okay because you support alternative business models.
    - mg794613 8y ago
      "Pay money up front, or take all these ads, and no there is NO other way, nu-uh. NO other way. So it is really your choice, but only these 2" Yeah that is not really a good argument is it?
      - 99052882514569 8y ago
        No, the straw man argument you constructed and I in no way implied is not really a good argument.
- tsukurimashou 8y ago
  Most websites use ads (which contain malware or redirect to scam websites a lot of times), tracking, and sell user data to third party. The point of this addon is to harm these ad networks. I know websites need money to run but most don't even give you the choice. Following a trend is no excuse for doing that in my opinion.
  - matt4077 8y ago
    Seriously: when was the last time you were infected with malware from ads? This is a talking point from a different millennium. Almost the same for redirects, at least for reputable publishers that will be most harmed by this. This attitude has already resulted in almost all professional, reliable news sources to implement (metered) paywalls. So instead of being informed by dozens of sources, citizens now get their news from just reading the headlines on Facebook, or sometimes the single site they are willing to pay for. You can't make decisions at the voting booth without being informed. This is such an obvious harm to the fabric of democracy. Populism, corruption, and authoritarianism is on the rise worldwide. But at least you're not being annoyed by some ads.
    - anoncake 8y ago
      > This is such an obvious harm to the fabric of democracy. Ads are an obvious harm to the fabric of democracy. If a news organization depends on ads, advertisers have power over it. Ads make the press less independent.
    - davb 8y ago
      > Seriously: when was the last time you were infected with malware from ads? This is a talking point from a different millennium. I still see this very frequently. I work in tech, so broadly speaking, I'm less likely to find my machine infected by malware from ads because I know enough not to fall for their tricks. Smart, but less technical, friends and family end up with malware infected devices all the time due to malvertising. > This attitude has already resulted in almost all professional, reliable news sources to implement (metered) paywalls. So instead of being informed by dozens of sources, citizens now get their news from just reading the headlines on Facebook, or sometimes the single site they are willing to pay for. I'd actually posit that the reverse is true. Because advertising pays publishers for reader's eyeballs regardless of the quality of content on their websites, fake news and clickbait are rampant. Harmful news outlets flourish because they don't need to convince anyone to pay for their bullshit stories - just get enough people to click or share. If they relied on users paying to read their stories, I reckon a lot of ad-supported extremist sites would die overnight. There shouldn't be a financial incentive to drive clicks and shares regardless of content quality.
- phponpcp 8y ago
  Awesome, advertising is terrible.
TicklishTiger 8y ago
"Install AdNauseam 3.7" 3rd party ads are bad for privacy. But browser extensions are even worse. They can see everything you do on any website. They can change what you see. Redirect you. Send data wherever they want. Without you noticing any of this. Besides, using this thing result in sending even more data to the advertisers. I can understand the hate about how user hostile the web is. But this is not a solution. A solution would be to use bloated websites less. On HN, we could downrank pages that send data to 3rd parties like this: Tell the submitter of a page "The page loads sends data to 75 different servers. Please be aware that we will not show it on the front page until it has at least 75 upvotes". This would make an impact. Imagine Reddit or Twitter follwing this practice. The web would become better fast.
- sametmax 8y ago
  Except it's way easier to trust a bunch of extensions that the entire community vets, with a code you can inspect, instead of the thousands of ever changing 3rd party code executing in ads every day.
  - TicklishTiger 8y ago
    First of all, it's the other way round. This extension will execute the ads and send data to advertisers. If you don't want that, you need to use an ad blocker, not an ad clicker. And second, you trust them with totally different things. Ads run in the context of a website. Which is heavily sandboxed. Extensions run outside of it and can do anything they want to your browsing.
  - A2017U1 8y ago
    > the entire community vets Pardon my ignorance, but not every extension is open source? Recently been a few stories of popular extension maintainers offered money to either include coffee or hand over all control to shady people. Personally I wouldn't count thousands getting auto-updated malware installed in their browser before the world notices as vetting.
    - anoncake 8y ago
r-u-serious 8y ago
This is genius! Use people's resources to click on ads without them knowing, brand it as "obfuscation", profit!
manigandham 8y ago
This doesn’t work. Its very easily caught and actually makes you more trackable because of the extra interaction signals. Stick with the normal ad blockers.
- rippeltippel 8y ago
  Can you elaborate more on how it can be caught and make users more trackable? Even if there are more "signals", individual advertisers won't necessarily be able to know that the same user clicked on all other advertisers' links.
  - varelaz 8y ago
    As more web pages you visit, as more tracking markers you've get. Yes, your tracking history will be skewed because of random clicking, it's kind of GIGO effect, but such kind of junk data is very easy to filter out. When you clicking on everything you provide too much events, which become suspicious and irrelevant. Also all clicks are made in background, which means that there is no rendering, no view tracking, which is obviously easy to catch. Check how vCPM and viewability work.
    - sanxiyn 8y ago
      Note that AdNauseam allows you to configure probabilistic clicking so that it's harder to filter out.
      - varelaz 8y ago
        Once your IP is detected as fraud it's trivial. There are various ways to do this. For example invisible links that you cannot click unless you're bot.
        mg794613 8y ago
        Perfect, mission accomplished ;)
    - 8y ago
xan_ps007 8y ago
Amazing concept. My only problem is the permissions it's asking while I tried to install it on firefox. - Access your data for all websites [You could take away my passwords] - Download files and read and modify the browser’s download history [Why?] - Access browser activity during navigation [Why?]
sametmax 8y ago
I used it for a time, but it gets you blocked by plenty of filters and makes captchas extra suspicious.
- Tsubasachan 8y ago
  I have hardened my browser for privacy and now CAPTCHA hates me. Its an arms race and I think the advertising industry knows that eventually people will give up.
  - gabriel34 8y ago
    I don't believe users will lose this arms race. I don't have hard data, but from what I observe in various circles is that the Zeitgeist is that the user/consumer attention is valuable, content is cheap, so put up barriers and the user will bounce The sad part is that this commoditization of content ends up affecting the quality content, that will probably end up becoming a niche market. Charge per content and the user will bounce, charge per month and you have to be the biggest because of network effects (try recommending a series from Amazon Prime to someone who subscribes to Netflix) There is a trend to use ads disguised as content ("People are using this secret trick to earn mad $$ in [oddly specific location, close to you]"), or intertwined with content that is yet immune to ad blocking(like ads in the middle of youtube videos/podcasts), but that has a higher production and negotiation cost, it will probably not be a market as big as ad networks. EDIT: Just remembered about ads on smartphone apps which are a viable option due to the lack of user control over hardware and software. There are some solutions, but these are much harder than installing a browser extension and thus not as widely adopted.
    - BentFranklin 8y ago
      Which is one reason why they are pushing lusers toward phones and away from desktops.
leowoo91 8y ago
Next up for anti-ad-block: if user clicks an irrelevant ad, block services.
Spare_account 8y ago
Not sure if this is useful or not but this has been discussed on HN a few times before, here are some of the most popular occasions: "AdNauseam: Fight Back Against Advertising Networks and Privacy Abuse" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13222733 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13222733 "AdNauseam – Clicking Ads So You Don't Have To" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15109251 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15109251 "AdNauseam Banned from the Google Web Store" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13327228 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13327228 "Pale Moon blocks AdNauseam extension" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15112524 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15112524
- SCdF 8y ago
  You might even say it has been discussed here ad nauseam…
  - openloop 8y ago
    Russia. Best dolls.
  - mg794613 8y ago
    What sparked this repost is probably: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19278643 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19278643 So every once in a while it get's reposted. Not bad perse.
Kaveren 8y ago
What is a "visit"? Is it executing JavaScript on the page it visits, and acting completely like a normal browser? If not, trivial to detect?
dennisy 8y ago
This is not the right way to go about making anything better about the internet.
- sanxiyn 8y ago
  Why isn't it?
fabiandesimone 8y ago
I'm in advertising and I'm not sure I get the hate towards ads. I mean, anyone here does not have a business? Do you really expect to build a company based on product quality and the ocasional blog post? I guarantee you that 99% of postmorten posts posted in HN are because said startup couldn't figure out their marketing strategy. Anyways, isn't this click fraud?
- hkai 8y ago
  Judging by the writing style on the ad nauseam website, it is written by a college kid who probably never tried selling anything. Tracking by government is dangerous, tracking of your interests to get you better, more relevant advertising is good. I keep finding very useful stuff via ads served to me by Facebook, and my own little side business would not survive if I couldn't target my ads properly.
  - anoncake 8y ago
    > tracking of your interests to get you better, more relevant advertising is good. Tracking of my interest so advertisers can manipulate me better is not good. It also means that advertising is more profitable, so it occurs more often, and websites get less usable as a result.
  - malka 8y ago
    >Tracking by government is dangerous, tracking of your interests to get you better, more relevant advertising is good. No.
  - pixl97 8y ago
    Companies, by proxy, are agents of the government. Anything a company collects and saves can come to be held by the government. Some companies even require a warrant before they give the government said information.
    - captainredbeard 8y ago
      That's ridiculous and it's not a stretch to take what you're saying and turn it into: "People, by proxy, are agents of the government. Anything a person collects and saves can come to be held by the government" While the government can strong-arm entities (fictitious or natural), it doesn't make its victims "agents".
varelaz 8y ago
Most of the ad networks already fight with ad fraud and validate clicks and redirects. Their technologies are very sophisticated. So I don't think that it does more harm to ad companies than to plugin users, who marked suspicious and fraud. There are already plenty of bots who scrape ads and click on them. By different estimates around 20-30% of web traffic is already caused by bots. As for me plugin is a kind of way to say how you hate ad market and web in general, nothing more.
- _ak 8y ago
  I worked in adtech a few years ago, and AdNauseam-style click fraud is a relatively trivial to detect and ignore. It does nothing, and adtech companies don't care about your hate of online advertising the least because that's what brings in the cash.
  - diplocorp 8y ago
    Do you mind shedding light on how such click fraud is detected?
    - rvnx 8y ago
      The most usual technique is to setup click baits/traps, once you click on a trap link you (= IP or UID via cookie) are added to an ignore list, where all your actions are not invoiced to advertisers. Simple and works,
      - ttty 8y ago
        How do you put an ad trap? A selenium bot only clicks on what a user can see... I doubt you could notice the difference
        mpeg 8y ago
        This extension doesn't use selenium, plus that's not entirely true, selenium sees HTML and DOM while a user sees the final render; there's ways you can hide content from a user while showing it to Selenium-style bots.
Tade0 8y ago
This extension made me switch to Firefox after Chrome banned it from their store. I have it set to "don't click on non-tracking Ads" and "don't hide non-tracking Ads". Ads are fine. Tracking is not.
- varelaz 8y ago
  I switched to Safari, after Chrome started automatically login you to Chrome account if you login to gmail. They become too aggressive on tracking.
  - nielsbot 8y ago
    I am thankful for Safari. Opinion: Safari is underrated.
- nielsbot 8y ago
  Chrome banned it, but you can still install it. They link to https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam/wiki/Install-AdNauseam-on-Chrome-Without-Google's-Permission https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam/wiki/Install-AdNauseam-on...
- dejaime 8y ago
  Good thing they have such settings for non-tracking ads.
bronzeage 8y ago
so what if they can mark you as a bot. I'd love to be marked as bot so nobody wants to serve ads to me. that's mission accomplished.
- techslave 8y ago
  welcome to captcha
eitland 8y ago
One kind of fraud that I suspect exist but I hear less talk about here is fraud against advertisers; Last time I clicked and bought something from an ad was 5 years ago. It costed me about USD 30. Either I'm totally extraordinary (not likely) or this is true for huge parts of the rest of ad viewers as well. I also suspect that there is a connection between disposable income and resistance against ads. More specifically I suspect ad networks fleece dumb and inexperienced ad buyers buy selling ads they know cannot work.
- adambyrtek 8y ago
  Measuring conversion, customer acquisition cost (CAC), and comparing that to their life-time value (LTV) is standard practice, so a business naive enough not to measure the performance of their campaigns is not going to last long.
- linuxftw 8y ago
  I view online advertising similar to advertising in a print magazine. Brand/product awareness. Occasionally ads are quite relevant to me, such as travel savings.
kgwxd 8y ago
Any traffic you give them is just another datapoint to sell.
- anoncake 8y ago
  So they can target you as someone who hates ads?
ericsilver 8y ago
Perhaps instead they could build a central store of potential ad clicks and their base rate likelihood of being clicked. Then, instead of clicking everything, they could click ads at the same rates an average user would, across the network.
jordigh 8y ago
I can't believe we've accepted the term "ad fraud" for this, as if we were being any more deceptive than the ad industry is, or as if we had signed a contract that we violated. As if not truthfully clicking on ads were a crime. We don't owe advertisers anything, least of all the truth.
- minikites 8y ago
  To some people, nothing is a greater sin than disrupting market capitalism.
  - Tsubasachan 8y ago
    I think the general public doesn't really shed a tear for the advertising industry. Those who cry over this probably have a financial stake in ads&marketing.
    - Nasrudith 8y ago
      They did say some. It is also what is sarcastically referred to as felony interference with a business model but that is a pretty niche term.
      - zentiggr 8y ago
        I had not heard that term, but oh my, wouldn't it be hilarious if some congress critters tried to get that written up as an actual law?
    - dwild 8y ago
      > have a financial stake in ads&marketing. Don't we all have a stake in ads? You made me realize this because "cry over this" but I'm not in that industry at all and your sentence seemed to me like just an over-generalization made to justify your point of view. I then remembered all the time that I couldn't have read/watch/learned something if I didn't have ads in the past, simply because I couldn't convince my parents to use their credit card (for valid reason though). I remember all the time right I wouldn't have read/watch/learned simply because the risk of it being not worth it was too high even nowadays. I remember all the time that I currently have to simply trust the comments over an article because it's behind a paywall and I just can't subscribe to every news website. Actually I have a pretty big stake in this industry. I wouldn't have been the software engineer I am right now if it wasn't from the content that was subsidized by ads. The ones that made that content were also underage and were able to build a pretty big company out of it (Site du Zéro, they are now called OpenClassroom) that now employ an hundred employees (luckily they no longer depends on ads, but still it was what made them being able to breakthrough).
edwhitesell 8y ago
It seems the approach here is to reduce the click-data value to zero, because every ad is clicked. How about just removing clicks all together? Maybe about a browser extension that loads every ad, but there are no clicks. Preferably the browser makes the ad un-clickable (if it's visible at all). Now you've got advertisers spending money on creatives, building campaigns, bandwidth, monitoring/management, etc. but there's an almost zero chance of generating revenue. Would that be more effective?
- Erlich_Bachman 8y ago
  There is already adblock and ublock. This is preventing the ad campaigns from building a database about your personal preferences, building a profile on you. Also this way the advertisers are spending even more money, by paying for those clicks. If the goal is to make advertisement cost more or provide some sort of political statement, then this is surely more effective. (Regardless of whether the goal is really that great.)
  - edwhitesell 8y ago
    Increasing cost was the thought, yes. I admit I'm not totally up-to-speed on what adblock and ublock do, but I was under the impression that they don't load the ads. So while you wouldn't see them, there's also no cost to serving them. Edit: But are the advertisers really paying for those clicks? Reading through the thread, it seems like these get flagged as fraud pretty easily. So while there's still a cost to create/serve the ads, to the point of my question, it would seem they don't pay the websites for the clicks.
Dotnaught 8y ago
The trouble is this helps sustain the ad delivery ecosystem. Simply blocking ads does more to effect change.
- mhfs 8y ago
  Yeah, unless the extension is used by a significant portion of the users, this a probably pushing numbers up a bit for networks.
exabrial 8y ago
I'm okay with not running an ad blocker but what I really wish somebody would do is block the obnoxious clickbait "<insert your town here> guy in his thirties found this one weird way to make < insert the last thing you bought on Amazon>!!!" and it has a picture of some some heavily photoshopped model.
- plink 8y ago
  I agree that obnoxious, vile-quality ads deserve to be combated by the recipient as though on a war footing.
ReedJessen 8y ago
This is one of those times I just sit down and think: "Damn... such an obviously good/bad idea". I am really proud of humanities ability to be creative.

276 points by JoachimS 8y ago

Amazing idea and clever name.

So worse than just not supporting sites you visit (via blocking or not clicking), you actively harm their conversion rate on ads, making their slots worth less to networks. Super.

elcomet 8y ago
So maybe that's good if you want to encourage sites to find other business models that don't rely on advertisement.
- manigandham 8y ago
  How many sites would you actually pay for?
  - lostjohnny 8y ago
    I don't know But I know I will keep blocking ads because they slow down the website and consume a lot of bandwidth
  - elcomet 8y ago
    Well, maybe a subscription for every site is not the right business model, we could imagine a lot of different ones. For example, automatic tipping when you spend more than x minutes on a website (something similar to what brave is trying to do), or pay by article (a few cents) on news sites. Eventually people won't be able to subscribe to every site they want content from obviously. Look at netflix / hulu / amazon videos / youtube red ... It adds up very quickly.
    - r3bl 8y ago
      Trying to convince me to set up a subscription upon any visit (and especially upon the first visit) isn't gonna be very effective. It requires thought and some calculations. "Liked it? Pay me $2" is a way more simple decision to make. If I make it to the end of your content and see a PayPal.me (or Ko-fi) link, there's a reasonable chance I'm going to click on it. I can't say the same for links to Patreon.
      - MarHoff 8y ago
        There could actually be a sweet spot for ApplePay (and similar service) there. Quick anonymous and secure tips for website.
  - hyperbovine 8y ago
    The ones I would actually use.
  - DoctorPenguin 8y ago
    None
  - ionised 8y ago
    Most of them. And the ones I wouldn't pay for I wouldn't miss.
  - trqx 8y ago
    I look at it this way: some sites might be worth paying for, none are worth being tracked for or being eye-raped by ads. I don't know why anyone would think it is a good idea to try and make money on something no one is willing to pay for. About the adnauseam topic: while paywalled sites makes it clear that you need to pay for their content or services, the one with ads don't. You are candidly browsing the web and suddenly they just shove tons of trackers and ads down your browser, no question asked. This is read by some people as an act of war, who are then motivated to retaliate using weapons like adnauseam. Of course they should just ignore or block the whole websites in questions, but no one can pretend they drew first blood.
  - ilovetux 8y ago
    I wouldn't really like to manage multiple subscriptions, but what I would be willing to do is pay for membership to a service which offers me access to a wide variety of ad-free websites. Kind of like how a cable subscription gets me access to a large number of channels (but without the commercials).
    - web007 8y ago
      Shameless plug for Blendle, they provide access to a bunch of news sites with a pay-per-article system. It's a handy way to get around many paywalls without subscribing to many sites individually.
  - asnrk 8y ago
    The most useful ones are already free. So, probably none that I don't already. Development resources (free, hosted by companies with incentive to spread the info). Wikipedia. Rarely I still manage to stumble on some non-monetized hobbyist sites, despite their being hard to find under current search algos (infrequent updates, no attention to SEO, no padding things to look like "more unique content per page" to Google), and that's nice. The rest I already pay for (Netflix, which just barely skates by being so cheap), are essentially utility things (bank sites, government), or are so low-value I'd probably be better off not using them, frankly. Or are simply piracy sites (library genesis / scihub), for that matter. Any topic I scratch the surface of in online research I end up at excellent, totally free (not ad supported) resources or finding that I need to track down some books, or some combination of the two.
- dennisy 8y ago
  It is not as simple as your one line comment suggests.
- baddox 8y ago
  Or, more practically, maybe conversion rate just isn’t a good metric for determining the “value of a slot to the network.”
  - elcomet 8y ago
    I think it would make the "pay per click" option disappear, leaving only the "pay per view". And you would determine conversion rate from the view, not the click.
    - ilikehurdles 8y ago
      This has already happened mostly. CPC ain’t what it used to be.
- beobab 8y ago
  I think this is an argument you could reasonably make if you give your money to web-sites that you find valuable. Otherwise, the argument seems to be a case of "I don't like the way you got money/attention out of me", or "I want someone else to pay for the content I consume".
  - pixl97 8y ago
    This would be great if sites you could pay for actually exited. Ad ran sites monopolized the internet.
  - alkonaut 8y ago
    The argument for me is "I can pay for content with money. It can be zero money or nonzero money but I want to pay with money."
  - TelmoMenezes 8y ago
    > Otherwise, the argument seems to be a case of "I don't like the way you got money/attention out of me", or "I want someone else to pay for the content I consume". You are consuming content from me this very moment, I charge you zero dollars for it. Believe it or not, the web actually was like that at some point: not connecting producers to consumers but connecting human beings, who could produce or consume as they pleased. This was before the people with things to sell arrived.
    - 99052882514569 8y ago
      This kind of shooting-the-shit content is a small subset of what makes the web useful. You are not spending time and money investigating anything of consequence and then reporting it for free, are you? Few people are. We all need to make a living, and a lot of things cannot be done by amateurs alone.
  - thecatspaw 8y ago
    Sure, and thats fair enough. I support a youtuber on patreon for quite a bit more than my share of ad-revenue. His patreons may be a very low percentage of his overall viewers, but even that low-percentage pays more than ad-revenue of all of them
- 99052882514569 8y ago
  Other than sabotage, you can also "encourage" sites to find other business models by visiting other sites instead. You know, the ones that don't rely on advertisement. You might need to pay for those, but that's okay because you support alternative business models.
  - mg794613 8y ago
    "Pay money up front, or take all these ads, and no there is NO other way, nu-uh. NO other way. So it is really your choice, but only these 2" Yeah that is not really a good argument is it?
    - 99052882514569 8y ago
      No, the straw man argument you constructed and I in no way implied is not really a good argument.
tsukurimashou 8y ago
Most websites use ads (which contain malware or redirect to scam websites a lot of times), tracking, and sell user data to third party. The point of this addon is to harm these ad networks. I know websites need money to run but most don't even give you the choice. Following a trend is no excuse for doing that in my opinion.
- matt4077 8y ago
  Seriously: when was the last time you were infected with malware from ads? This is a talking point from a different millennium. Almost the same for redirects, at least for reputable publishers that will be most harmed by this. This attitude has already resulted in almost all professional, reliable news sources to implement (metered) paywalls. So instead of being informed by dozens of sources, citizens now get their news from just reading the headlines on Facebook, or sometimes the single site they are willing to pay for. You can't make decisions at the voting booth without being informed. This is such an obvious harm to the fabric of democracy. Populism, corruption, and authoritarianism is on the rise worldwide. But at least you're not being annoyed by some ads.
  - anoncake 8y ago
    > This is such an obvious harm to the fabric of democracy. Ads are an obvious harm to the fabric of democracy. If a news organization depends on ads, advertisers have power over it. Ads make the press less independent.
  - davb 8y ago
    > Seriously: when was the last time you were infected with malware from ads? This is a talking point from a different millennium. I still see this very frequently. I work in tech, so broadly speaking, I'm less likely to find my machine infected by malware from ads because I know enough not to fall for their tricks. Smart, but less technical, friends and family end up with malware infected devices all the time due to malvertising. > This attitude has already resulted in almost all professional, reliable news sources to implement (metered) paywalls. So instead of being informed by dozens of sources, citizens now get their news from just reading the headlines on Facebook, or sometimes the single site they are willing to pay for. I'd actually posit that the reverse is true. Because advertising pays publishers for reader's eyeballs regardless of the quality of content on their websites, fake news and clickbait are rampant. Harmful news outlets flourish because they don't need to convince anyone to pay for their bullshit stories - just get enough people to click or share. If they relied on users paying to read their stories, I reckon a lot of ad-supported extremist sites would die overnight. There shouldn't be a financial incentive to drive clicks and shares regardless of content quality.
phponpcp 8y ago
Awesome, advertising is terrible.

TicklishTiger 8y ago

"Install AdNauseam 3.7" 3rd party ads are bad for privacy. But browser extensions are even worse. They can see everything you do on any website. They can change what you see. Redirect you. Send data wherever they want. Without you noticing any of this. Besides, using this thing result in sending even more data to the advertisers. I can understand the hate about how user hostile the web is. But this is not a solution. A solution would be to use bloated websites less. On HN, we could downrank pages that send data to 3rd parties like this: Tell the submitter of a page "The page loads sends data to 75 different servers. Please be aware that we will not show it on the front page until it has at least 75 upvotes". This would make an impact. Imagine Reddit or Twitter follwing this practice. The web would become better fast.

sametmax 8y ago
Except it's way easier to trust a bunch of extensions that the entire community vets, with a code you can inspect, instead of the thousands of ever changing 3rd party code executing in ads every day.
- TicklishTiger 8y ago
  First of all, it's the other way round. This extension will execute the ads and send data to advertisers. If you don't want that, you need to use an ad blocker, not an ad clicker. And second, you trust them with totally different things. Ads run in the context of a website. Which is heavily sandboxed. Extensions run outside of it and can do anything they want to your browsing.
- A2017U1 8y ago
  > the entire community vets Pardon my ignorance, but not every extension is open source? Recently been a few stories of popular extension maintainers offered money to either include coffee or hand over all control to shady people. Personally I wouldn't count thousands getting auto-updated malware installed in their browser before the world notices as vetting.
  - anoncake 8y ago

r-u-serious 8y ago

This is genius! Use people's resources to click on ads without them knowing, brand it as "obfuscation", profit!

manigandham 8y ago

This doesn’t work. Its very easily caught and actually makes you more trackable because of the extra interaction signals. Stick with the normal ad blockers.

rippeltippel 8y ago
Can you elaborate more on how it can be caught and make users more trackable? Even if there are more "signals", individual advertisers won't necessarily be able to know that the same user clicked on all other advertisers' links.
- varelaz 8y ago
  As more web pages you visit, as more tracking markers you've get. Yes, your tracking history will be skewed because of random clicking, it's kind of GIGO effect, but such kind of junk data is very easy to filter out. When you clicking on everything you provide too much events, which become suspicious and irrelevant. Also all clicks are made in background, which means that there is no rendering, no view tracking, which is obviously easy to catch. Check how vCPM and viewability work.
  - sanxiyn 8y ago
    Note that AdNauseam allows you to configure probabilistic clicking so that it's harder to filter out.
    - varelaz 8y ago
      Once your IP is detected as fraud it's trivial. There are various ways to do this. For example invisible links that you cannot click unless you're bot.
      - mg794613 8y ago
        Perfect, mission accomplished ;)
  - 8y ago

xan_ps007 8y ago

Amazing concept. My only problem is the permissions it's asking while I tried to install it on firefox. - Access your data for all websites [You could take away my passwords] - Download files and read and modify the browser’s download history [Why?] - Access browser activity during navigation [Why?]

sametmax 8y ago

I used it for a time, but it gets you blocked by plenty of filters and makes captchas extra suspicious.

Tsubasachan 8y ago
I have hardened my browser for privacy and now CAPTCHA hates me. Its an arms race and I think the advertising industry knows that eventually people will give up.
- gabriel34 8y ago
  I don't believe users will lose this arms race. I don't have hard data, but from what I observe in various circles is that the Zeitgeist is that the user/consumer attention is valuable, content is cheap, so put up barriers and the user will bounce The sad part is that this commoditization of content ends up affecting the quality content, that will probably end up becoming a niche market. Charge per content and the user will bounce, charge per month and you have to be the biggest because of network effects (try recommending a series from Amazon Prime to someone who subscribes to Netflix) There is a trend to use ads disguised as content ("People are using this secret trick to earn mad $$ in [oddly specific location, close to you]"), or intertwined with content that is yet immune to ad blocking(like ads in the middle of youtube videos/podcasts), but that has a higher production and negotiation cost, it will probably not be a market as big as ad networks. EDIT: Just remembered about ads on smartphone apps which are a viable option due to the lack of user control over hardware and software. There are some solutions, but these are much harder than installing a browser extension and thus not as widely adopted.
  - BentFranklin 8y ago
    Which is one reason why they are pushing lusers toward phones and away from desktops.

leowoo91 8y ago

Next up for anti-ad-block: if user clicks an irrelevant ad, block services.

Spare_account 8y ago

Not sure if this is useful or not but this has been discussed on HN a few times before, here are some of the most popular occasions: "AdNauseam: Fight Back Against Advertising Networks and Privacy Abuse" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13222733 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13222733 "AdNauseam – Clicking Ads So You Don't Have To" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15109251 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15109251 "AdNauseam Banned from the Google Web Store" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13327228 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13327228 "Pale Moon blocks AdNauseam extension" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15112524 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15112524

SCdF 8y ago
You might even say it has been discussed here ad nauseam…
- openloop 8y ago
  Russia. Best dolls.
- mg794613 8y ago
  What sparked this repost is probably: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19278643 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19278643 So every once in a while it get's reposted. Not bad perse.

Kaveren 8y ago

What is a "visit"? Is it executing JavaScript on the page it visits, and acting completely like a normal browser? If not, trivial to detect?

dennisy 8y ago

This is not the right way to go about making anything better about the internet.

sanxiyn 8y ago
Why isn't it?

fabiandesimone 8y ago

I'm in advertising and I'm not sure I get the hate towards ads. I mean, anyone here does not have a business? Do you really expect to build a company based on product quality and the ocasional blog post? I guarantee you that 99% of postmorten posts posted in HN are because said startup couldn't figure out their marketing strategy. Anyways, isn't this click fraud?

hkai 8y ago
Judging by the writing style on the ad nauseam website, it is written by a college kid who probably never tried selling anything. Tracking by government is dangerous, tracking of your interests to get you better, more relevant advertising is good. I keep finding very useful stuff via ads served to me by Facebook, and my own little side business would not survive if I couldn't target my ads properly.
- anoncake 8y ago
  > tracking of your interests to get you better, more relevant advertising is good. Tracking of my interest so advertisers can manipulate me better is not good. It also means that advertising is more profitable, so it occurs more often, and websites get less usable as a result.
- malka 8y ago
  >Tracking by government is dangerous, tracking of your interests to get you better, more relevant advertising is good. No.
- pixl97 8y ago
  Companies, by proxy, are agents of the government. Anything a company collects and saves can come to be held by the government. Some companies even require a warrant before they give the government said information.
  - captainredbeard 8y ago
    That's ridiculous and it's not a stretch to take what you're saying and turn it into: "People, by proxy, are agents of the government. Anything a person collects and saves can come to be held by the government" While the government can strong-arm entities (fictitious or natural), it doesn't make its victims "agents".

varelaz 8y ago

Most of the ad networks already fight with ad fraud and validate clicks and redirects. Their technologies are very sophisticated. So I don't think that it does more harm to ad companies than to plugin users, who marked suspicious and fraud. There are already plenty of bots who scrape ads and click on them. By different estimates around 20-30% of web traffic is already caused by bots. As for me plugin is a kind of way to say how you hate ad market and web in general, nothing more.

_ak 8y ago
I worked in adtech a few years ago, and AdNauseam-style click fraud is a relatively trivial to detect and ignore. It does nothing, and adtech companies don't care about your hate of online advertising the least because that's what brings in the cash.
- diplocorp 8y ago
  Do you mind shedding light on how such click fraud is detected?
  - rvnx 8y ago
    The most usual technique is to setup click baits/traps, once you click on a trap link you (= IP or UID via cookie) are added to an ignore list, where all your actions are not invoiced to advertisers. Simple and works,
    - ttty 8y ago
      How do you put an ad trap? A selenium bot only clicks on what a user can see... I doubt you could notice the difference
      - mpeg 8y ago
        This extension doesn't use selenium, plus that's not entirely true, selenium sees HTML and DOM while a user sees the final render; there's ways you can hide content from a user while showing it to Selenium-style bots.

Tade0 8y ago

This extension made me switch to Firefox after Chrome banned it from their store. I have it set to "don't click on non-tracking Ads" and "don't hide non-tracking Ads". Ads are fine. Tracking is not.

varelaz 8y ago
I switched to Safari, after Chrome started automatically login you to Chrome account if you login to gmail. They become too aggressive on tracking.
- nielsbot 8y ago
  I am thankful for Safari. Opinion: Safari is underrated.
nielsbot 8y ago
Chrome banned it, but you can still install it. They link to https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam/wiki/Install-AdNauseam-on-Chrome-Without-Google's-Permission https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam/wiki/Install-AdNauseam-on...
dejaime 8y ago
Good thing they have such settings for non-tracking ads.

bronzeage 8y ago

so what if they can mark you as a bot. I'd love to be marked as bot so nobody wants to serve ads to me. that's mission accomplished.

techslave 8y ago
welcome to captcha

eitland 8y ago

One kind of fraud that I suspect exist but I hear less talk about here is fraud against advertisers; Last time I clicked and bought something from an ad was 5 years ago. It costed me about USD 30. Either I'm totally extraordinary (not likely) or this is true for huge parts of the rest of ad viewers as well. I also suspect that there is a connection between disposable income and resistance against ads. More specifically I suspect ad networks fleece dumb and inexperienced ad buyers buy selling ads they know cannot work.

adambyrtek 8y ago
Measuring conversion, customer acquisition cost (CAC), and comparing that to their life-time value (LTV) is standard practice, so a business naive enough not to measure the performance of their campaigns is not going to last long.
linuxftw 8y ago
I view online advertising similar to advertising in a print magazine. Brand/product awareness. Occasionally ads are quite relevant to me, such as travel savings.

kgwxd 8y ago

Any traffic you give them is just another datapoint to sell.

anoncake 8y ago
So they can target you as someone who hates ads?

ericsilver 8y ago

Perhaps instead they could build a central store of potential ad clicks and their base rate likelihood of being clicked. Then, instead of clicking everything, they could click ads at the same rates an average user would, across the network.

jordigh 8y ago

I can't believe we've accepted the term "ad fraud" for this, as if we were being any more deceptive than the ad industry is, or as if we had signed a contract that we violated. As if not truthfully clicking on ads were a crime. We don't owe advertisers anything, least of all the truth.

minikites 8y ago
To some people, nothing is a greater sin than disrupting market capitalism.
- Tsubasachan 8y ago
  I think the general public doesn't really shed a tear for the advertising industry. Those who cry over this probably have a financial stake in ads&marketing.
  - Nasrudith 8y ago
    They did say some. It is also what is sarcastically referred to as felony interference with a business model but that is a pretty niche term.
    - zentiggr 8y ago
      I had not heard that term, but oh my, wouldn't it be hilarious if some congress critters tried to get that written up as an actual law?
  - dwild 8y ago
    > have a financial stake in ads&marketing. Don't we all have a stake in ads? You made me realize this because "cry over this" but I'm not in that industry at all and your sentence seemed to me like just an over-generalization made to justify your point of view. I then remembered all the time that I couldn't have read/watch/learned something if I didn't have ads in the past, simply because I couldn't convince my parents to use their credit card (for valid reason though). I remember all the time right I wouldn't have read/watch/learned simply because the risk of it being not worth it was too high even nowadays. I remember all the time that I currently have to simply trust the comments over an article because it's behind a paywall and I just can't subscribe to every news website. Actually I have a pretty big stake in this industry. I wouldn't have been the software engineer I am right now if it wasn't from the content that was subsidized by ads. The ones that made that content were also underage and were able to build a pretty big company out of it (Site du Zéro, they are now called OpenClassroom) that now employ an hundred employees (luckily they no longer depends on ads, but still it was what made them being able to breakthrough).

edwhitesell 8y ago

It seems the approach here is to reduce the click-data value to zero, because every ad is clicked. How about just removing clicks all together? Maybe about a browser extension that loads every ad, but there are no clicks. Preferably the browser makes the ad un-clickable (if it's visible at all). Now you've got advertisers spending money on creatives, building campaigns, bandwidth, monitoring/management, etc. but there's an almost zero chance of generating revenue. Would that be more effective?

Erlich_Bachman 8y ago
There is already adblock and ublock. This is preventing the ad campaigns from building a database about your personal preferences, building a profile on you. Also this way the advertisers are spending even more money, by paying for those clicks. If the goal is to make advertisement cost more or provide some sort of political statement, then this is surely more effective. (Regardless of whether the goal is really that great.)
- edwhitesell 8y ago
  Increasing cost was the thought, yes. I admit I'm not totally up-to-speed on what adblock and ublock do, but I was under the impression that they don't load the ads. So while you wouldn't see them, there's also no cost to serving them. Edit: But are the advertisers really paying for those clicks? Reading through the thread, it seems like these get flagged as fraud pretty easily. So while there's still a cost to create/serve the ads, to the point of my question, it would seem they don't pay the websites for the clicks.

Dotnaught 8y ago

The trouble is this helps sustain the ad delivery ecosystem. Simply blocking ads does more to effect change.

mhfs 8y ago
Yeah, unless the extension is used by a significant portion of the users, this a probably pushing numbers up a bit for networks.

exabrial 8y ago

I'm okay with not running an ad blocker but what I really wish somebody would do is block the obnoxious clickbait "<insert your town here> guy in his thirties found this one weird way to make < insert the last thing you bought on Amazon>!!!" and it has a picture of some some heavily photoshopped model.

plink 8y ago
I agree that obnoxious, vile-quality ads deserve to be combated by the recipient as though on a war footing.

ReedJessen 8y ago

This is one of those times I just sit down and think: "Damn... such an obviously good/bad idea". I am really proud of humanities ability to be creative.