5 ms·

Best part is it tells you how much ad spend you have caused. It’s crazy how quickly the number reaches 4 figures.

abc-xyz 7y ago
Before anyone feels bad about this: the extension will, by default, not click on non-tracking ads. I've used it for over a year (also on $XXXX estimated cost figures on 3 different devices) with several thousands of ads clicked. My ad vault contains everything from porn, electronics, job boards, ads in languages I do not understand, gambling, gaming, and all sorts of crap I have zero interest in. I pretty much never see ads while surfing the net, and when I do then it's the ads that would also slip through uBlock Origin and other ad blocking extensions.
- pizzazzaro 7y ago
  When an ad slips through? You might wanna update/augment those filter lists. That was the best thing about some of the addons to the old adblock plus addon - you could keep your own list, and the average user was entirely unaware of the extent that they were doing so.
  - Yetanfou 7y ago
    Adding new blocking rules to uBlock (et al) is part and parcel of how to use these extensions, I don't see any difference here compared to adblock+. If you see something you wish to avoid you either right-click it and select 'block element' or you launch the element picker from the toolbar or through a key combination. Use ctrl-click in the picker to create more generic rules on specific class or ID names.
    - locknumber110 7y ago
      uBO-style element pickers are a brilliantly user-friendly alternative to manually writing filters. Every content-filter extension on every browser should have one. Even my 80-year-old grandfather is now able to excise ads that slip through the usual filters with precision.
dymk 7y ago
The fake clicks that this generates is one of the most trivial to filter out for even the most simple ad systems. It’s costing ad companies and advertisers approximately zero dollars. It’s a nice additional data point to identify and track the users running it, though.
- abc-xyz 7y ago
  1. If it's so trivial and costs ad companies nothing, then why would Google go out of their way to ban the extension when it's essentially just an ad blocker that clicks on the ads in the background? 2. How would you filter out AdNauseam ad clicks with genuine ad clicks?
  - dymk 7y ago
    It’s banned because it’s made by people intentionally trying to not just subvert, but inject fake data into Google’s core business model. It’s like asking “why doesn’t Apple allow Cydia in the App Store?” AdNauseam clicks occur far more often than normal ad clicks, aren’t associated with other ad load events, timing is all similar, ads are clicked regardless of predicted relevancy. There’s dozens of obvious, and hundreds of non obvious, ways to detect if a particular user is a bot or not. Literally legions is PhDs study this attack vector and work at Google and Facebook.
    - llukas 7y ago
      PhD time doesnt cost "nothing" like you said in grandparent post.
      - dymk 7y ago
        They’re working on actual hard problems, like combating click fraud attempted by organized crime and actual sophisticated actors, and they’re working regardless of the existence of this extension. This extension just isn’t effective, and any time working in the ad industry makes that overwhelmingly obvious.
munchbunny 7y ago
I like everything else about AdNauseam but that number is kind of like the percent daily value number on food packaging. It requires making so many assumptions that you can be pretty sure that number is not useful for any meaningful decisionmaking. It's probably within 1-2 orders of magnitude of the truth, depending on where the ads were, how they were bought, what middleware was involved, etc.

Before anyone feels bad about this: the extension will, by default, not click on non-tracking ads. I've used it for over a year (also on $XXXX estimated cost figures on 3 different devices) with several thousands of ads clicked. My ad vault contains everything from porn, electronics, job boards, ads in languages I do not understand, gambling, gaming, and all sorts of crap I have zero interest in. I pretty much never see ads while surfing the net, and when I do then it's the ads that would also slip through uBlock Origin and other ad blocking extensions.

pizzazzaro 7y ago
When an ad slips through? You might wanna update/augment those filter lists. That was the best thing about some of the addons to the old adblock plus addon - you could keep your own list, and the average user was entirely unaware of the extent that they were doing so.
- Yetanfou 7y ago
  Adding new blocking rules to uBlock (et al) is part and parcel of how to use these extensions, I don't see any difference here compared to adblock+. If you see something you wish to avoid you either right-click it and select 'block element' or you launch the element picker from the toolbar or through a key combination. Use ctrl-click in the picker to create more generic rules on specific class or ID names.
  - locknumber110 7y ago
    uBO-style element pickers are a brilliantly user-friendly alternative to manually writing filters. Every content-filter extension on every browser should have one. Even my 80-year-old grandfather is now able to excise ads that slip through the usual filters with precision.

dymk 7y ago

The fake clicks that this generates is one of the most trivial to filter out for even the most simple ad systems. It’s costing ad companies and advertisers approximately zero dollars. It’s a nice additional data point to identify and track the users running it, though.

abc-xyz 7y ago
1. If it's so trivial and costs ad companies nothing, then why would Google go out of their way to ban the extension when it's essentially just an ad blocker that clicks on the ads in the background? 2. How would you filter out AdNauseam ad clicks with genuine ad clicks?
- dymk 7y ago
  It’s banned because it’s made by people intentionally trying to not just subvert, but inject fake data into Google’s core business model. It’s like asking “why doesn’t Apple allow Cydia in the App Store?” AdNauseam clicks occur far more often than normal ad clicks, aren’t associated with other ad load events, timing is all similar, ads are clicked regardless of predicted relevancy. There’s dozens of obvious, and hundreds of non obvious, ways to detect if a particular user is a bot or not. Literally legions is PhDs study this attack vector and work at Google and Facebook.
  - llukas 7y ago
    PhD time doesnt cost "nothing" like you said in grandparent post.
    - dymk 7y ago
      They’re working on actual hard problems, like combating click fraud attempted by organized crime and actual sophisticated actors, and they’re working regardless of the existence of this extension. This extension just isn’t effective, and any time working in the ad industry makes that overwhelmingly obvious.

munchbunny 7y ago

I like everything else about AdNauseam but that number is kind of like the percent daily value number on food packaging. It requires making so many assumptions that you can be pretty sure that number is not useful for any meaningful decisionmaking. It's probably within 1-2 orders of magnitude of the truth, depending on where the ads were, how they were bought, what middleware was involved, etc.