13 ms·

“35-50% of clicks on Reddit Ads are fraudulent”

483 points by dnlbtlr 6y ago

o_class_star 6y ago
As bad as these numbers sound, they're pretty typical for online and mobile advertising.
dantheman 6y ago
If I'm going to see ads, I'd prefer targeted ones personally. Show me something I might want - product discover is actually hard, if an ad can show me something that solves a need/want I have that's great for me and for the company.
- Larrikin 6y ago
  The ad is targeted by showing you a relevant ad on a relevant site. Looking at a hiking site, they'll have boot ads, looking at vacuum cleaner reviews, there are obviously going to be vacuum cleaner ads. Advertisers collecting every single personal detail they can so they can show you the boots you already bought months ago on an unrelated topic just makes the world a worse place.
- Loughla 6y ago
  I'm the literal opposite. If I have to see the ads, I don't want my data harvested, stored, and shared in an effort to serve them to me. Identify the target audience of the site you're buying ads from, and identify if that is a target audience that you can appeal to. Then buy ad time. Like TV. That way my data is safe, and I'm still exposed to your ads that are relevant to people visiting 'x' site.
  - mFixman 6y ago
    I'm an immigrant, and Facebook shows me a lot of targeted ads for local companies that sell snacks from my native country. The TV constantly shows me ads for cars despite the fact that I don't even have a drivers licence. The first one is useful for me, but the niche of people who would buy it is so small that it wouldn't make sense to target it to everyone. I hate the second ones, but the majority of people love buying cars.
  - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
    You don't need your data harvested. Youtube could serve Sandvik ads beside This Old Tony videos just based on the content being served without knowing anything about the viewer
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- jellicle 6y ago
  You would still see yacht ads on the site for Yachting Magazine. What you wouldn't see is hemorrhoid ads targeted to you because you searched for hemorrhoid cream three days ago on a different computer.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  Targeting as it is currently done collects an insane amount of data which is an ever-growing liability which will inevitably blow up when that data leaks or becomes resold/misused.
  - wtracy 6y ago
    I think there's a world of difference between saying that targeted advertising as it is done now is unacceptable, and saying that targeted advertising is fundamentally unacceptable. The first one I'm actually sympathetic to. The second I vehemently disagree with.
  - GekkePrutser 6y ago
    It's already being misused, consider Cambridge Analytica.
    - Nextgrid 6y ago
      To be fair, Cambridge Analytica was just betting on idiots willingly granting access to their Facebook accounts and the data they ended up gathering was these people's social graph and had nothing to do with ad targeting.
- ryandrake 6y ago
  I'm of the opposite view: If I'm going to see ads, I'd rather they be irrelevant. That way I at least have a little more assurance that my privacy was not violated in order to produce them. I don't care what the content of the ad is, because I will not buy a product from an ad, so a non-privacy-violating ad that I ignore is strictly better to me than a privacy-violating ad that I also ignore.
- cj 6y ago
  I think the average (non-technical) person would agree. I know a lot of very non-technical people, some of who dislike facebook in general, talk about how good facebook is at showing them ads that actually get them to discover and buy new products. The people I've heard this sentiment from don't feel like they were manipulated into buying something that ultimately didn't meet expectations. I commonly hear things like "I can't believe how good the Facebook ads are. I only see ads for really nice Blouses in colors and sizes that I like. I've bought nice things via Facebook ads". Granted, it's usually followed up by "I can't believe Facebook is able to be that good at showing me the right ads" ... but people I've talked to seem to feel neutral about the creepiness of it, I'm guessing because the upside is they get to discover and buy cool new things that they otherwise wouldn't have known about. (Personally I don't like ad targeting on the basis of companies abusing / selling / harvesting data about me... but for the average person I think seeing well targeted ads is positive UX compared with showing non-targeted ads)
  - thrwn_frthr_awy 6y ago
    My non technical friends and family do not like targets ads. Anytime they see specific ads for a store the just visited (online or brick-and-mortar) they think the microphones are on and being used. There’s a difference of an ad for a generic pet product you may like vs an ad for the exact product you viewed on another site. They do not understand how two completely different sites share their information. They do not like when they do a google search for an illness, view a webmd page, and then see ads for their illness on the phone apps. During my time at Apple one of the big things they impressed on new hires is that there are things we can do with technology, that may even be beneficial to the user, but will be perceived as creepy. For instance, Starbucks could use facial recognition to greet you by your name at a location you’ve never been to. They could have already started your drink with a high probability it is what you order based on time and weather. But these things are “creepy” to much of the population and should be avoided. Ad networks do not care because their customer is not the end-user.
- Allower 6y ago
  You are also implicitly agreeing to have this data harvested by governments, political parties and other nefarious groups that only wish to exploit such data to generate dystopian citizen scorecards, suppress dissent and generally destroy a free society.
- libraryatnight 6y ago
  Have you ever had that experience though? For me targeted ads just show me things I've already bought. "Great google, yep, last month I was reading midi controller reviews, and I bought one last month. " Amazon does the same thing after I've bought something from them. Just bought a printer? Amazon's gonna email me shit about other printers I might like for a week, not accessories that go with the machine I purchased, just other printers. So not only am I not really comfortable with tracking, I don't think the experience justifies it.
- Dahoon 6y ago
  Like ads for a TV because you just bought a TV? Target ads are crap. I have never in my life seen an ad that was useful. They miss the target 100% of the time.
- LeifCarrotson 6y ago
  Many of the comments in this thread are talking past each other, by ignoring one side or the other of the cost/benefit balance. It's pointless to shout "But it has benefits, leave it the way it is!" and "But it has costs, eliminate the entire industry!" without engaging with the opposing value set. I don't think that anyone would disagree with you that true product discovery - educating you about a thing you didn't know about that solves a problem you have - is a benefit of good advertising. Lots of advertising isn't about product discovery, for sure, it's about persuading you to buy a thing you don't want and reminding you about a product you already know about and building an image about the product, and many people want to get off the hedonistic, materialistic treadmill that such persuasion pulls towards, but let's ignore that for now and assume that targeted ads lead to a benefit to the consumer of improved product discovery. However, I don't think this is a very big benefit, in the real world. I can count maybe 3 things that I've bought in the past year or so where product discovery was important to me, where I was genuinely surprised that the solution was that easy and available. Heck, one was such a big benefit, I'll share: I changed the faucet hardware in my bathroom vanity, but instead of laying on my back and trying to turn the nuts by hand or squeeze in a pair of channel-locks between the sink and the wall, this time I got a targeted ad in my Amazon search results for the faucet advertising a basin wrench, which I didn't know was a thing. That's genuine product discovery, it saved me a little discomfort and a little time, and cost $6. I like the basin wrench, but if targeted ads didn't exist and I could pay a third party to provide me with the same advice I get from targeted ads, I'd value the service at maybe $2/year. Targeted ads, especially as they're currently implemented, do have a cost to you as a consumer. It's largely invisible to non-technical users, but they do have a significant cost to your privacy. They cost computing cycles and battery life. They cost control of your devices, of your software, and of the websites you browse. Personally, those are pretty significant costs to me. And worst of all, IMO, they have a huge cost in mental fatigue, clamoring for my attention, because for every targeted ad that matches the "has this problem/wants to solve it with this product" combination there are 10,000 that fail one or the other condition. I value these costs pretty high, I bought an SBC just to run PiHole, I pay for Netflix so my TV is ad-free, I buy songs on my phone and wear noise-cancelling headphones in the shop at work so I don't have to listen to the incessant f*ing radio ads. Ugh. And there's little chance I can do anything about the billboards on my commute, though those are contextually targeted to my area rather than invasively targeted. I've probably spent hundreds of dollars avoiding ads, if I could pay someone hundreds more to make the entire industry disappear from my perception I would do so in a heartbeat. That said, it's not possible to put a number on either the cost or the benefit that's true for everyone. Personally, I feel that those advocating targeted ads generally underestimate how much data is being collected, overestimate the benefits of product discovery, and underestimate the benefits available from alternative, less consumer-costly mechanisms for targeting, like content/context-based targeting. How many dollars per year do you think the benefits of product discovery, as provided by non-GPDR, non-CCPA, no-holds-barred targeted advertising is worth to you? What price would you put on its costs?
- smileybarry 6y ago
  This sounded good to me on paper, so years ago I turned ad personalization back on for a while. At the time I was checking Pebble's site on a daily basis because they had short-term sales not announced anywhere. AdSense then proceeded to push just that one "Pebble Smartwatch" ad on me, everywhere. Even a page with multiple ad blocks just had several of them -- sometimes all of them -- the same text ad for Pebble. It became more annoying than helpful because I was already going to buy one, it just tried to push me to buy it for a higher price. I turned ad personalization off again and now any ads I get are mostly just related to the current page's content.
- dekerta 6y ago
  Why can't ads simply be targeted based on the content of the page or type of website? Show ads related to programming on /r/programming, ads for cars on /r/cars, and ads for antidepressants on r/wallstreetbets
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
mountainb 6y ago
That's all? If they did a larger sample on a more fraud heavy vertical (at least 100k clicks) they would get bigger proportional numbers.
ffpip 6y ago
> Facebook lookalike audiences. Upload customer list (with attributes you want in your targeted demographic) and have Facebook create a lookalike audience for it. Incredibly precise What the fuck? Facebook allows people to do these things?
- bishalb 6y ago
  Why not?
  - afwe 6y ago
    Regular users used to be able to search for people using email addresses, not anymore.
- calrueb 6y ago
  I believe this is almost table stakes for an ad platform these days. Marketers expect ever-more precise targeting to get better CPCs/CPAs/ROAS. This is especially true as an ad platform becomes more popular and CPMs naturally rise due to increased competition in the auction. When a company like FB/GOOG innovates in the ad targeting/measurement space every company will follow suit because their customers (advertisers) are going to ask for it. I believe market forces will continue to drive innovation in ads targeting until someone steps in and draws a line in the sand (eg regulation via the governement).
- derivagral 6y ago
  Not just Facebook. As an ex-Hubspot employee this was a feature people cared about (email list uploading/processing). HS would generally try to scan the list and make sure it wasn't a huge pile of spam recipients but I'm not sure how many others in the CRM space take that extra step.
tehwebguy 6y ago
Bummer, one of my reddit ads in 2010 - 2012 outperformed anything I'd done before / since. I was advertising officially licensed Minecraft merch (cardboard steve heads, foam pickaxes) and it did extremely well in MC / Gaming subreddits.
- woadwarrior01 6y ago
  They were using a 3rd party service (Adzerk, IIRC) for ads back then. Now they have their own in house ads engineering dept.
notmine1337 6y ago
Reminds me of https://www.samueljscott.com/2020/09/08/linkedin-ad-fraud/ https://www.samueljscott.com/2020/09/08/linkedin-ad-fraud/ Online advertising is a giant scam.
zokier 6y ago
I find it so weird idea that people really click on ads. I don't know if I've ever done so (intentionally). As such I would have expected more like 90% of clicks to be fraudulent.
- surround 6y ago
  I’ve never bought anything because of an advertisement.
  - jobigoud 6y ago
    Consciously.
  - calcifer 6y ago
    Not consciously, perhaps.
  - speedgoose 6y ago
    Most of the ads in general, like in TVs or newspapers, are there to let you know about the product and the brand. You are not expected to buy immediately after seeing the ad. However, you will more likely prefer a brand or product you already know about when you buy something you are not familiar with.
  - AgentME 6y ago
    I buy popular brands I see on ads often enough (especially if you consider food items). Granted, there was a reasonable chance I was going to buy the products anyway, but seeing the ad probably raised the chances. I think every time I thought about the product, there was a chance that I was going to pull the trigger on buying it, and seeing the ad prompted another thought about the product. Also, when I see ads, I often have a thought like "I see this ad more often than the competitor's ads. Are they doing better? Maybe it really is because their product is better than the competitor's".
  - ricardo81 6y ago
    Not very often, for me. I used to consciously avoid them. Nowadays on search engines knowing that they're likely spending a dollar or two to reach me, I'll click to test the veracity of their targetting. If they're going to bid for people searching from X in country Y, they'll be needing an ROI and providing I'm genuinely interested in whatever X is, the ad is no problem.
dpc_pw 6y ago
We need to get it to 99.99%, and then maybe they will all switch to some honest business model!
- GekkePrutser 6y ago
  Exactly.. I was just thinking about making an adblocker that loads the actual ads in a fake environment, it could really simulate the ad industry to look for other ways because it costs them too much money.
  - dpc_pw 6y ago
    https://adnauseam.io/ https://adnauseam.io/ ?
    - GekkePrutser 6y ago
      Nice thanks!!!
- the8bit 6y ago
  Reddit already has an 'honest' business model (awards) and people rage about that all day too. I think mostly people just want the service but dont want to pay for it in any way.
  - searchableguy 6y ago
    Agreed. Premium is fine. On another note, I dislike the coins and award system because it reminds me of gacha. They provide you free award to make you open the app every week or two and encourage you to buy and award more through various shady methods. Counters, notifications that don't exist, subs you are not subscribed to getting thrown in your feed, etc.
cblconfederate 6y ago
Well don't buy clicks then, i mean it s not like they are expensive. My peeve is that Reddit would be great for some specific kind of ads (cryptocurrency) but sadly they dont allow them
nvr219 6y ago
I completely forgot Reddit even has ads. I was watching a screen share on someone else's computer who was looking at a news article and I was completely shocked at the experience. How do people live without adblock?
- optimalsolver 6y ago
  This is what I think whenever using someone else's computer.
  - Ashanmaril 6y ago
    Blows my mind when I'm watching someone just sit in silence waiting 10 seconds so they can skip an ad on youtube
    - Scoundreller 6y ago
      Was visiting distant family ~10 years ago in a small Yugoslav village. They had ~2mbit fixed wireless (w00t), but when I installed Adblock and dialed up their CRT to 85hz from 60, they didn’t even notice anything changed.
      - skyyler 6y ago
        Adblock is one thing, but why would anyone notice a 15 fps increase?
        temp0826 6y ago
        Refresh rate != frame rate. Maybe you’re too young to have ever used a crt at 60hz.
        leeoniya 6y ago
        CRT at 60hz flickers very noticeably, and often causes eye strain + headaches after a few hours of use.
    - 6y ago
ufmace 6y ago
What I don't get here is - who is doing this? I'm not sure who has the motivation to falsify clicks on Reddit ads. For Google ads, somebody might want to falsify clicks on the ads displayed on their site because they get paid by the click, but who other than Reddit would want to do that here?
- seanalltogether 6y ago
  I see ads in my reddit stream, but when I click them they are blocked by ublock
- et1337 6y ago
  Not sure about ads, but I do know with Facebook likes, people who sell likes have to like a lot of organic-looking random pages to avoid being banned. Something similar could be happening here. Either that, or it’s Ad Nauseam. Edit: someone else mentioned money laundering too.
- advisedwang 6y ago
  Perhaps competitors trying to drain the budget of the advertiser?
- atian 6y ago
  Let’s not first assume intent. There are tons of scrapers running on Reddit. Reddit ads are presented inline rather than iframed/complex load behavior like Google Ads. Also browser extensions, browser behaviors (which smartly preload pages, prefetching) all cannot differentiate a Reddit ad url vs a regular link. Reddit makes it much easier for any web traffic to follow through to ads. The issue is that Reddit doesn’t have a mature ad network infrastructure team to care about filtering traffic to better standards. Given that only 50% are jokingly fraudulent, I’d say they’ve already done an OK job and aren’t booking an order of magnitude more of the web’s typical random traffic.
  - Scoundreller 6y ago
    As long as it’s constant between ads, the scraper effect should all be a wash in the end, no? Ad buyers will pay half as much for double the traffic when half of the traffic is bots.
swader999 6y ago
Does anyone here remember clicking on an add in the last week or month? How about just remembering an add or brand they saw online? I sure don't.
- cementMountain 6y ago
  Ads are there to distract you from noticing the paid product placements
- giarc 6y ago
  90% of the ads I click on are when I Google a brand name and the top ad result is their page. I try to scroll down and click on the top result to avoid them having to pay but I often forget or move too fast.
  - swader999 6y ago
    Yeah fat fingers aside I just don't get how internet advertising is effective and even marketable. It has no effect on me. I avoid it entirely, even without add blocking. I often wonder if this is a bubble that will pop.
- spideymans 6y ago
  There’s one particular YouTube pre-roll ad I’ve seen maybe dozens of times. I literally cannot recall anything about the ad, other than I’m sick of seeing it. I’ve totally tuned it out at this point. But if they wanna waste their money advertising to me, be my guest
grishka 6y ago
How many more of them were misclicks?
not2b 6y ago
The suggestion "Don't charge the same IP address more than once in a certain time period (e.g. 24 hours)" is clearly broken. For people at work in larger companies, there can be thousands of users that all appear to have the same IP address. You can only charge once per day for all of them? As the reddit posting points out, there are plenty of other ways to determine that a click is fake (no css or images loaded, etc).
- rightbyte 6y ago
  What is the chance they are shown and click the same ad? Pretty much bogger all.
saltedonion 6y ago
How does the fraudster make money on reddit ads frauds? Reddit operates the site, so don’t any money go to them?
- shiftpgdn 6y ago
  Setup a script to hammer ads that aren't your own. Advertisers leave and your cost for ads goes down.
  - saltedonion 6y ago
    Wow that’s dirty
- rightbyte 6y ago
  Probably they click other ads to hide which ads they want to click which could be specific competitors?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ffritz 6y ago
I’m getting the same ad on the reddit app over and over again for what feels like a year, and it’s so bad I would never even think of clicking on it. Now that I write this, I notice that’s actually true for most ads I see because they would require a pihole and I haven’t gotten around to setting one up. It really feels like the ad business is inherently flawed these days. Who clicks on ads? How many of those are going through with a purchase? There is just way too many and poorly created ads for any brand to stand out from all that garbage people get shoved in their face all day.
- searchableguy 6y ago
  Average person in developed countries spend hours on online media daily. I see that as a worrying trend. 6-7 hours for Americans so that would be a huge chunk of your life. I wonder if people don't have time to buy other things to spend their day on due to social media being so addictive.
ramenandtrance 6y ago
What ads? I block them all, at home, at work, and do the same for friends and family. The only ads I see are the half second ads during my DVR playbook, and then skip. I pay for the Internet, for email, for the software I use. I'm not suffering through ads. One project I'm working on is sorting out how to get the Pi-hole to block YouTube ads 100%. I don't see them on my Linux latops because of Nano Adblock, but my kids see them on their iPads. For some reason no one (yet) seems to be able to sort out how to block ad content on YouTube 100%. There has to be a way.
jasonmorton 6y ago
Many ads are not clicked on by a real person, but a bot, or someone clicking ads as fast as possible because it is their job. Many comments would be considered "fraudulent" in the same sense, in that they were not authored by a real person, but a bot, or someone writing comments as fast as possible because it is their job.
jariel 6y ago
This is less of a problem for pay-for-action type ads. If you send X number of people to your site with Y conversions, it doesn't really matter that 'bots don't buy' - because the $Z spent on ads for Y conversions is the metric used. It's much more of a problem for impressions or for ads without directly measured value. It's one of the reasons Google makes so much money, the spend is generally optimized for the return, not for 'how many visitors are fake'. Though it's a problem.
nix23 6y ago
Don't tell that to my AdNauseam extension ;)
TheSionnach 6y ago
Reddit is shady as fuck
TheSionnach 6y ago
Reddit is a shady, communist cesspool.
cbsmith 6y ago
I gotta say... this is an incredibly naive analysis. To demonstrate Reddit Ads isn't doing click fraud protection, you should try to generate a fraudulent click yourself. Looking at what is getting through and finding that a lot of it as easily identifiable as fraudulent is NOT a valid signal. It's incredibly likely that there are far more bots that are being blocked and that the bots that are getting through have invested a lot of effort in to fooling Reddit's fraud protection, but really don't care at all about fooling the landing page site (and of course, there are a lot more such sites, so it's a lot more expensive to design & operate a system that would fool all the other sites). Consequently, they're "easily identifiable" (though in truth the author is unfortunately use a very crude model for identifying fraud which will include a ton of false positives) by the landing page, but not by Reddit.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- TwoBit 6y ago
  OK but doesn't OP demostrate that the same IP clicked 15 times in a short period of time and he was charged for all of them? How could that be complicated to handle?
  - cbsmith 6y ago
    Well, for starters, the IP they see might not be the same IP that Reddit sees. If you are a fraudster, obfuscating IPs is something worth investing in to get by the ad network, not the publisher. There's no need to invest in fooling the publisher (in fact, appearing fraudulent to the publisher can be an objective). Secondly, 15 times in a short period of time from the same IP might just be the ad system targeting a particular group of people who all use the same NAT (which does indeed tend to happen). So it might not be fraud at all.
    - tupputuppu 6y ago
      There is no way to obfuscate an IP address on a TCP connection. The TCP sequence numbers are random so if the fraudster spoofs their IP, they won't get the return traffic and will be unable to complete the handshake and even establish a connection. As the original poster noted, 15 requests from a single IP in a short amount of time should be an anomaly. There's no real world scenario where 15 people behind one NAT show interest to a specific ad simultaneously.
malwarebytess 6y ago
I don't see how they can be sure based on their criteria that those are fraudulent clicks. They could be web crawlers, users with various ad blocking tech, and so on. Going straight to fraud is premature.
GhostVII 6y ago
Does this actually matter? If you are doing online advertising, you should be able to attribute a particular visit to a specific ad campaign, so you can calculate your conversion rate. If Reddit has lots of bots, it just means your conversion rate for those ads will be lower, and you can adjust your spending accordingly. There are a lot of things that can significantly affect clicks other than fraudulent clicks (popups people click on by accident, small "close" buttons, mobile vs desktop, etc.), so I think evaluating your success based on just clicks is going to be pretty useless regardless. I'm not in advertising though so I have no idea.
- SuperCuber 6y ago
  The point the poster was making is that they were paying money for clicks that had no chance of generating any conversion - and that it's Reddit's responsibility to detect those and not charge for them. So they're not complaining about lower conversion rate, but lower bang for their buck.
XCSme 6y ago
Most dynamic ad platforms are similar, I also got 100% fake traffic from testing out Facebook ads: https://www.reddit.com/r/marketing/comments/4smisl/facebook_ads_100_fake_clicks/ https://www.reddit.com/r/marketing/comments/4smisl/facebook_... I know it could be improved with better targeting, but by default it should not give you 100% fake clicks.
leoplct 6y ago
I wonder if pay for impression (CPM) is a better to mitigate this cost?
unityByFreedom 6y ago
The post is flaired "Community responded" and all the mods are admins. Yet there is no resolution and no stated plan to address the issue.
commonturtle 6y ago
Does it really matter if they are fraudulent? Most advertisers measure (and are willing to pay for) conversions, not clicks. So even if there are lots of fake clicks, the number of purchases wouldn't change. If advertisers have to pay for more than their conversion rates justify they will stop advertising on reddit which forces reddit to solve the fake clicks problem.
lovehashbrowns 6y ago
I'm pretty surprised the aws bot got through. I used to be responsible for detecting fraud for ads in the past and we had access to a blacklist that likely would include a lot of these ips. If we didn't do things like this, advertisers would actually stop working with us.
dblock 6y ago
I may or may not have participated in click fraud in 1997 with DoubleClick by forging source IP headers and going through a proxy ... that I may or may not have been running. I can only imagine how much more sophisticated click fraud has become today. Even if you raise that bar, I suspect a vast % of clicks are probably fraud anyway.
- rightbyte 6y ago
  Someone mentioned timeslots witch might not be a too bad idea. Then you would have to meassure traffic independently via eg. some panel or something. It is probably less easy to game. It would also kill spam sites since the panel would not stay on those very long.
- titom4 6y ago
  Yea you'd surely be surprised. Our marketing department started using clickguard 6 months ago and we were simply shocked to discover how much of our budget was being wasted on Google ads.
modzu 6y ago
it's more like 99%; for the whole internet
Lorin 6y ago
I don't understand how, even after so much privacy was eroded to give marketers additional data to target ads - I still get such irrelevant ones.
johnadams283475 6y ago
...And that's why I use ad blocker.
stevespang 6y ago
My son is a software engineer by day, a pro-am Texas Hold 'em Poker player on some nights at "legal" card houses. Some criticize his "outlaw" endeavors, but he has over a year of serious winning statistics. Compared to online ad scams - - his pursuit is a solid cake walk. No. of clicks as a metric should be outlawed.
justinbaker84 6y ago
Advertising manager here - The real problem is that not enough companies pay attention to the results they are getting from their ad campaigns. Most big companies just dump money into a lot of different campaigns without putting in place strict measurement procedures. So this puts the ethical ad seller at a major disadvantage. Currently you have companies spending tens of millions of dollars on digital ads each quarter and only looking ad metrics like cost per click or cost per impression. So they are judging the effectiveness of the ad campaign on metrics the ad seller provides. They are not putting in place effective checks and balances. Why you ask? Because if the huge companies buying ads wanted to actually measure everything it would be extremely time consuming and expensive. It is a lot easier to pretend the problem doesn’t exist and just go with the flow. So small companies with small budgets are actually a lot better at measuring results in most cases. Also online only businesses are a lot better at it. Measuring the offline impact of online ads is very hard. But the bulk of ad dollars are spent by huge companies with huge bureaucracies. So game theory says you need to capture those dollars to win. Source – I’ve been doing digital marketing for the last 12 years at a variety of companies.
moltar 6y ago
Could it be just badly coded scrapers?
orange_joe 6y ago
I'd love to see fraud/mis-click adjusted returns for various social networks. I'd wager a significant percentage of ad engagement is non-productive.
- r721 6y ago
  Comment by OP in other thread: >I've compared this method to Twitter (6% click fraud) and Google (-26% click fraud, received more legitimate clicks than I was charged), so Reddit is definitely doing something different. https://old.reddit.com/r/adops/comments/ikskpp/3550_of_clicks_on_reddit_ads_are_fraudulent/g3ou89y/ https://old.reddit.com/r/adops/comments/ikskpp/3550_of_click...
thrownaway954 6y ago
adnauseam.io i don't know how many people actually install this extension, but it is specifically designed to clicks ads so you don't have to :)
- user5994461 6y ago
  Warning to not install this extension if you use google ads in any capacity (work/blog/other), it will get your account banned from google very quick for clickfraud.
  - notatoad 6y ago
    In addition to google, it's likely to get you at least shadowbanned on any site that has ads and does any sort of basic fraud prevention.
    - GekkePrutser 6y ago
      What's Shadowbanning? Never heard of this.
      - notatoad 6y ago
        It's where you're effectively banned without being told about it. You can still use the service, but any action you take is isolated from the rest of the site. The term I think comes from reddit but the concept is by no means unique to them: your upvotes or downvotes wouldn't affect rankings and nobody would ever see your submissions or comments other than you. The idea is to let spammers or fraudsters waste their energies on accounts that have already been flagged, instead of notifying them that they've been banned so they switch to a clean account.
        GekkePrutser 6y ago
        Thanks, I had no idea! Never heard of this. Really good explanation.
  - 6y ago
rednerrus 6y ago
Reddit's ads are terrible. It should come as no surprise that no one clicks on them.
splitrocket 6y ago
How is this not actionable? I'd get in touch with my state AG's office as well as the FBI.
- fareesh 6y ago
  If it's a conspiracy, the number of people involved would be quite high, so it would probably be difficult to keep it a secret.
- parliament32 6y ago
  Assuming this isn't Reddit, but just a bunch of users with AdNauseum installed, what do you expect them to do? Present a captcha before letting a user click through an ad?
  - 24gttghh 6y ago
    That's one way to kill the ad industry, and I'm all for it!
    - kikki 6y ago
      And what should replace the ad industry - to keep websites running?
      - thatguy0900 6y ago
        Maybe nothing. If it's a valuable service, a small subscription or micro transaction. If Noone is willing to pay for it, even the site owner themselves, maybe it doesn't actually need to be around. I think alot of labor of love sites would remain.
      - spideymans 6y ago
        Spitballing here, so excuse me if this is a horrendous idea: The reason we have aggressive web advertising is because the web has no revenue model to pay website owners for their content costs. So I’ve wondered if the web would be better off with a Spotify-like model, where ISPs pay web hosts per page view (or how long time is spent on a page). If websites want to be eligible to receive these payments, they’d have to commit to having no ads, or at least very unobtrusive ads without any tracking. And line Spotify, consumers would continue to pay a flat rate, regardless of how many pages they visit (within their data cap) I think the major web players are far too mature and entrenched to make such a major shift in the web’s revenue model. But if this had been implemented decades earlier, it might’ve had a shot at success.
danpalmer 6y ago
I get the impression that Reddit's ad network is just immature. We're finding that Reddit ads perform well and are cheap, suggesting that there isn't much competition for clicks. More mature ad networks such as Google's and Facebook's are better at reducing spam clicks. Google bought a company focused on this about 10 years ago, I'm sure Facebook put similar effort in. I'm sure this is something they'll work to improve over time as their ad network gains traction.
- ruined 6y ago
  Reddit has been running ads for over a decade. If they are this far in and not doing basic fraud mitigation, something is wrong.
  - danpalmer 6y ago
    That depends on the scale though right? Reddit ads were for a long time very poor. They've become a lot more feasible for many companies in the last few years, as Reddit has also become a lot more mainstream. Also we don't know if they are doing basic fraud mitigation. It's possible they are doing plenty of fraud mitigation, but that it's just not advanced enough.
    - ruined 6y ago
      Did you look at the link? The detection methods used, and the discussion of mitigation in the thread, make it clear that if they are doing any mitigation at all they are neglecting obvious red flags. Every business is obliged to be ethical, vigilant against deception, and not blatantly lie, no matter what size they are. Even if you could make an argument like this, reddit was already pretty big ten years ago. That's why they started running ads.
    - merkul204 6y ago
      I wish they would actually address this issue in the OP's link. None of the reddit ad reps have responded to this and it's quite a shame they haven't yet...
  - 6y ago
earthboundkid 6y ago
Every newspaper in America has obvious scam ads on its homepage. The whole online ad market is diseased and needs to be uprooted. Common sense fixes: - Never allow dynamic ad content! Ads should be individually approved by publishers and not subject to change after approval. - Ban user tracking and targeting. It's a red queen's race and no one benefits. Everyone is better off once it's illegal. - Pay for ad time slots, not user impressions. Instead of selling by CPM, publishers should say "independent analyst X says we have traffic Y on an average Sunday. You can buy placement for next Sunday for $Z." This is how all offline ads are sold, and it's much healthier for everyone than CPM. It essentially kills the motivation for the Reddit fraud discussed here. - Use anti-trust to prevent link aggregators from being advertisers. This is a bigger issue, but putting ads on the aggregators creates perverse incentives to promote bad content and not actually pay for it. Why would you pay to put an ad on publisher A which may or may not have traffic when you can put the ad on aggregator B which will definitely have traffic? The problem is this means A cannot pay writers and the whole system breaks down.
- shajznnckfke 6y ago
  How are you going to tell which traffic is fraud if you ban tracking?
  - ForHackernews 6y ago
    If you're not paying for clicks, there's no such thing as "fraud" traffic -- there's just users who convert and buy your product and those who don't.
  - Nextgrid 6y ago
    If the ads are billed per period of time and not per-click or per-view then "fraud" doesn't matter; all that matters is the overall ROI; if the advertiser gets more business than what it cost them to run the ad they will consider it a worthwhile investment, otherwise they will stop advertising there forcing the publisher to adjust their prices and eventually those prices will reflect the true value (as in how much ROI it brings) of the ad spot regardless of any "fraud".

483 points by dnlbtlr 6y ago

As bad as these numbers sound, they're pretty typical for online and mobile advertising.

If I'm going to see ads, I'd prefer targeted ones personally. Show me something I might want - product discover is actually hard, if an ad can show me something that solves a need/want I have that's great for me and for the company.

Larrikin 6y ago
The ad is targeted by showing you a relevant ad on a relevant site. Looking at a hiking site, they'll have boot ads, looking at vacuum cleaner reviews, there are obviously going to be vacuum cleaner ads. Advertisers collecting every single personal detail they can so they can show you the boots you already bought months ago on an unrelated topic just makes the world a worse place.
Loughla 6y ago
I'm the literal opposite. If I have to see the ads, I don't want my data harvested, stored, and shared in an effort to serve them to me. Identify the target audience of the site you're buying ads from, and identify if that is a target audience that you can appeal to. Then buy ad time. Like TV. That way my data is safe, and I'm still exposed to your ads that are relevant to people visiting 'x' site.
- mFixman 6y ago
  I'm an immigrant, and Facebook shows me a lot of targeted ads for local companies that sell snacks from my native country. The TV constantly shows me ads for cars despite the fact that I don't even have a drivers licence. The first one is useful for me, but the niche of people who would buy it is so small that it wouldn't make sense to target it to everyone. I hate the second ones, but the majority of people love buying cars.
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago
  You don't need your data harvested. Youtube could serve Sandvik ads beside This Old Tony videos just based on the content being served without knowing anything about the viewer
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jellicle 6y ago
You would still see yacht ads on the site for Yachting Magazine. What you wouldn't see is hemorrhoid ads targeted to you because you searched for hemorrhoid cream three days ago on a different computer.
Nextgrid 6y ago
Targeting as it is currently done collects an insane amount of data which is an ever-growing liability which will inevitably blow up when that data leaks or becomes resold/misused.
- wtracy 6y ago
  I think there's a world of difference between saying that targeted advertising as it is done now is unacceptable, and saying that targeted advertising is fundamentally unacceptable. The first one I'm actually sympathetic to. The second I vehemently disagree with.
- GekkePrutser 6y ago
  It's already being misused, consider Cambridge Analytica.
  - Nextgrid 6y ago
    To be fair, Cambridge Analytica was just betting on idiots willingly granting access to their Facebook accounts and the data they ended up gathering was these people's social graph and had nothing to do with ad targeting.
ryandrake 6y ago
I'm of the opposite view: If I'm going to see ads, I'd rather they be irrelevant. That way I at least have a little more assurance that my privacy was not violated in order to produce them. I don't care what the content of the ad is, because I will not buy a product from an ad, so a non-privacy-violating ad that I ignore is strictly better to me than a privacy-violating ad that I also ignore.
cj 6y ago
I think the average (non-technical) person would agree. I know a lot of very non-technical people, some of who dislike facebook in general, talk about how good facebook is at showing them ads that actually get them to discover and buy new products. The people I've heard this sentiment from don't feel like they were manipulated into buying something that ultimately didn't meet expectations. I commonly hear things like "I can't believe how good the Facebook ads are. I only see ads for really nice Blouses in colors and sizes that I like. I've bought nice things via Facebook ads". Granted, it's usually followed up by "I can't believe Facebook is able to be that good at showing me the right ads" ... but people I've talked to seem to feel neutral about the creepiness of it, I'm guessing because the upside is they get to discover and buy cool new things that they otherwise wouldn't have known about. (Personally I don't like ad targeting on the basis of companies abusing / selling / harvesting data about me... but for the average person I think seeing well targeted ads is positive UX compared with showing non-targeted ads)
- thrwn_frthr_awy 6y ago
  My non technical friends and family do not like targets ads. Anytime they see specific ads for a store the just visited (online or brick-and-mortar) they think the microphones are on and being used. There’s a difference of an ad for a generic pet product you may like vs an ad for the exact product you viewed on another site. They do not understand how two completely different sites share their information. They do not like when they do a google search for an illness, view a webmd page, and then see ads for their illness on the phone apps. During my time at Apple one of the big things they impressed on new hires is that there are things we can do with technology, that may even be beneficial to the user, but will be perceived as creepy. For instance, Starbucks could use facial recognition to greet you by your name at a location you’ve never been to. They could have already started your drink with a high probability it is what you order based on time and weather. But these things are “creepy” to much of the population and should be avoided. Ad networks do not care because their customer is not the end-user.
Allower 6y ago
You are also implicitly agreeing to have this data harvested by governments, political parties and other nefarious groups that only wish to exploit such data to generate dystopian citizen scorecards, suppress dissent and generally destroy a free society.
libraryatnight 6y ago
Have you ever had that experience though? For me targeted ads just show me things I've already bought. "Great google, yep, last month I was reading midi controller reviews, and I bought one last month. " Amazon does the same thing after I've bought something from them. Just bought a printer? Amazon's gonna email me shit about other printers I might like for a week, not accessories that go with the machine I purchased, just other printers. So not only am I not really comfortable with tracking, I don't think the experience justifies it.
Dahoon 6y ago
Like ads for a TV because you just bought a TV? Target ads are crap. I have never in my life seen an ad that was useful. They miss the target 100% of the time.
LeifCarrotson 6y ago
Many of the comments in this thread are talking past each other, by ignoring one side or the other of the cost/benefit balance. It's pointless to shout "But it has benefits, leave it the way it is!" and "But it has costs, eliminate the entire industry!" without engaging with the opposing value set. I don't think that anyone would disagree with you that true product discovery - educating you about a thing you didn't know about that solves a problem you have - is a benefit of good advertising. Lots of advertising isn't about product discovery, for sure, it's about persuading you to buy a thing you don't want and reminding you about a product you already know about and building an image about the product, and many people want to get off the hedonistic, materialistic treadmill that such persuasion pulls towards, but let's ignore that for now and assume that targeted ads lead to a benefit to the consumer of improved product discovery. However, I don't think this is a very big benefit, in the real world. I can count maybe 3 things that I've bought in the past year or so where product discovery was important to me, where I was genuinely surprised that the solution was that easy and available. Heck, one was such a big benefit, I'll share: I changed the faucet hardware in my bathroom vanity, but instead of laying on my back and trying to turn the nuts by hand or squeeze in a pair of channel-locks between the sink and the wall, this time I got a targeted ad in my Amazon search results for the faucet advertising a basin wrench, which I didn't know was a thing. That's genuine product discovery, it saved me a little discomfort and a little time, and cost $6. I like the basin wrench, but if targeted ads didn't exist and I could pay a third party to provide me with the same advice I get from targeted ads, I'd value the service at maybe $2/year. Targeted ads, especially as they're currently implemented, do have a cost to you as a consumer. It's largely invisible to non-technical users, but they do have a significant cost to your privacy. They cost computing cycles and battery life. They cost control of your devices, of your software, and of the websites you browse. Personally, those are pretty significant costs to me. And worst of all, IMO, they have a huge cost in mental fatigue, clamoring for my attention, because for every targeted ad that matches the "has this problem/wants to solve it with this product" combination there are 10,000 that fail one or the other condition. I value these costs pretty high, I bought an SBC just to run PiHole, I pay for Netflix so my TV is ad-free, I buy songs on my phone and wear noise-cancelling headphones in the shop at work so I don't have to listen to the incessant f*ing radio ads. Ugh. And there's little chance I can do anything about the billboards on my commute, though those are contextually targeted to my area rather than invasively targeted. I've probably spent hundreds of dollars avoiding ads, if I could pay someone hundreds more to make the entire industry disappear from my perception I would do so in a heartbeat. That said, it's not possible to put a number on either the cost or the benefit that's true for everyone. Personally, I feel that those advocating targeted ads generally underestimate how much data is being collected, overestimate the benefits of product discovery, and underestimate the benefits available from alternative, less consumer-costly mechanisms for targeting, like content/context-based targeting. How many dollars per year do you think the benefits of product discovery, as provided by non-GPDR, non-CCPA, no-holds-barred targeted advertising is worth to you? What price would you put on its costs?
smileybarry 6y ago
This sounded good to me on paper, so years ago I turned ad personalization back on for a while. At the time I was checking Pebble's site on a daily basis because they had short-term sales not announced anywhere. AdSense then proceeded to push just that one "Pebble Smartwatch" ad on me, everywhere. Even a page with multiple ad blocks just had several of them -- sometimes all of them -- the same text ad for Pebble. It became more annoying than helpful because I was already going to buy one, it just tried to push me to buy it for a higher price. I turned ad personalization off again and now any ads I get are mostly just related to the current page's content.
dekerta 6y ago
Why can't ads simply be targeted based on the content of the page or type of website? Show ads related to programming on /r/programming, ads for cars on /r/cars, and ads for antidepressants on r/wallstreetbets

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

mountainb 6y ago

That's all? If they did a larger sample on a more fraud heavy vertical (at least 100k clicks) they would get bigger proportional numbers.

ffpip 6y ago

> Facebook lookalike audiences. Upload customer list (with attributes you want in your targeted demographic) and have Facebook create a lookalike audience for it. Incredibly precise What the fuck? Facebook allows people to do these things?

bishalb 6y ago
Why not?
- afwe 6y ago
  Regular users used to be able to search for people using email addresses, not anymore.
calrueb 6y ago
I believe this is almost table stakes for an ad platform these days. Marketers expect ever-more precise targeting to get better CPCs/CPAs/ROAS. This is especially true as an ad platform becomes more popular and CPMs naturally rise due to increased competition in the auction. When a company like FB/GOOG innovates in the ad targeting/measurement space every company will follow suit because their customers (advertisers) are going to ask for it. I believe market forces will continue to drive innovation in ads targeting until someone steps in and draws a line in the sand (eg regulation via the governement).
derivagral 6y ago
Not just Facebook. As an ex-Hubspot employee this was a feature people cared about (email list uploading/processing). HS would generally try to scan the list and make sure it wasn't a huge pile of spam recipients but I'm not sure how many others in the CRM space take that extra step.

tehwebguy 6y ago

Bummer, one of my reddit ads in 2010 - 2012 outperformed anything I'd done before / since. I was advertising officially licensed Minecraft merch (cardboard steve heads, foam pickaxes) and it did extremely well in MC / Gaming subreddits.

woadwarrior01 6y ago
They were using a 3rd party service (Adzerk, IIRC) for ads back then. Now they have their own in house ads engineering dept.

notmine1337 6y ago

Reminds me of https://www.samueljscott.com/2020/09/08/linkedin-ad-fraud/ https://www.samueljscott.com/2020/09/08/linkedin-ad-fraud/ Online advertising is a giant scam.

zokier 6y ago

I find it so weird idea that people really click on ads. I don't know if I've ever done so (intentionally). As such I would have expected more like 90% of clicks to be fraudulent.

surround 6y ago
I’ve never bought anything because of an advertisement.
- jobigoud 6y ago
  Consciously.
- calcifer 6y ago
  Not consciously, perhaps.
- speedgoose 6y ago
  Most of the ads in general, like in TVs or newspapers, are there to let you know about the product and the brand. You are not expected to buy immediately after seeing the ad. However, you will more likely prefer a brand or product you already know about when you buy something you are not familiar with.
- AgentME 6y ago
  I buy popular brands I see on ads often enough (especially if you consider food items). Granted, there was a reasonable chance I was going to buy the products anyway, but seeing the ad probably raised the chances. I think every time I thought about the product, there was a chance that I was going to pull the trigger on buying it, and seeing the ad prompted another thought about the product. Also, when I see ads, I often have a thought like "I see this ad more often than the competitor's ads. Are they doing better? Maybe it really is because their product is better than the competitor's".
- ricardo81 6y ago
  Not very often, for me. I used to consciously avoid them. Nowadays on search engines knowing that they're likely spending a dollar or two to reach me, I'll click to test the veracity of their targetting. If they're going to bid for people searching from X in country Y, they'll be needing an ROI and providing I'm genuinely interested in whatever X is, the ad is no problem.

dpc_pw 6y ago

We need to get it to 99.99%, and then maybe they will all switch to some honest business model!

GekkePrutser 6y ago
Exactly.. I was just thinking about making an adblocker that loads the actual ads in a fake environment, it could really simulate the ad industry to look for other ways because it costs them too much money.
- dpc_pw 6y ago
  https://adnauseam.io/ https://adnauseam.io/ ?
  - GekkePrutser 6y ago
    Nice thanks!!!
the8bit 6y ago
Reddit already has an 'honest' business model (awards) and people rage about that all day too. I think mostly people just want the service but dont want to pay for it in any way.
- searchableguy 6y ago
  Agreed. Premium is fine. On another note, I dislike the coins and award system because it reminds me of gacha. They provide you free award to make you open the app every week or two and encourage you to buy and award more through various shady methods. Counters, notifications that don't exist, subs you are not subscribed to getting thrown in your feed, etc.

cblconfederate 6y ago

Well don't buy clicks then, i mean it s not like they are expensive. My peeve is that Reddit would be great for some specific kind of ads (cryptocurrency) but sadly they dont allow them

nvr219 6y ago

I completely forgot Reddit even has ads. I was watching a screen share on someone else's computer who was looking at a news article and I was completely shocked at the experience. How do people live without adblock?

optimalsolver 6y ago
This is what I think whenever using someone else's computer.
- Ashanmaril 6y ago
  Blows my mind when I'm watching someone just sit in silence waiting 10 seconds so they can skip an ad on youtube
  - Scoundreller 6y ago
    Was visiting distant family ~10 years ago in a small Yugoslav village. They had ~2mbit fixed wireless (w00t), but when I installed Adblock and dialed up their CRT to 85hz from 60, they didn’t even notice anything changed.
    - skyyler 6y ago
      Adblock is one thing, but why would anyone notice a 15 fps increase?
      - temp0826 6y ago
        Refresh rate != frame rate. Maybe you’re too young to have ever used a crt at 60hz.
      - leeoniya 6y ago
        CRT at 60hz flickers very noticeably, and often causes eye strain + headaches after a few hours of use.
  - 6y ago

ufmace 6y ago

What I don't get here is - who is doing this? I'm not sure who has the motivation to falsify clicks on Reddit ads. For Google ads, somebody might want to falsify clicks on the ads displayed on their site because they get paid by the click, but who other than Reddit would want to do that here?

seanalltogether 6y ago
I see ads in my reddit stream, but when I click them they are blocked by ublock
et1337 6y ago
Not sure about ads, but I do know with Facebook likes, people who sell likes have to like a lot of organic-looking random pages to avoid being banned. Something similar could be happening here. Either that, or it’s Ad Nauseam. Edit: someone else mentioned money laundering too.
advisedwang 6y ago
Perhaps competitors trying to drain the budget of the advertiser?
atian 6y ago
Let’s not first assume intent. There are tons of scrapers running on Reddit. Reddit ads are presented inline rather than iframed/complex load behavior like Google Ads. Also browser extensions, browser behaviors (which smartly preload pages, prefetching) all cannot differentiate a Reddit ad url vs a regular link. Reddit makes it much easier for any web traffic to follow through to ads. The issue is that Reddit doesn’t have a mature ad network infrastructure team to care about filtering traffic to better standards. Given that only 50% are jokingly fraudulent, I’d say they’ve already done an OK job and aren’t booking an order of magnitude more of the web’s typical random traffic.
- Scoundreller 6y ago
  As long as it’s constant between ads, the scraper effect should all be a wash in the end, no? Ad buyers will pay half as much for double the traffic when half of the traffic is bots.

swader999 6y ago

Does anyone here remember clicking on an add in the last week or month? How about just remembering an add or brand they saw online? I sure don't.

cementMountain 6y ago
Ads are there to distract you from noticing the paid product placements
giarc 6y ago
90% of the ads I click on are when I Google a brand name and the top ad result is their page. I try to scroll down and click on the top result to avoid them having to pay but I often forget or move too fast.
- swader999 6y ago
  Yeah fat fingers aside I just don't get how internet advertising is effective and even marketable. It has no effect on me. I avoid it entirely, even without add blocking. I often wonder if this is a bubble that will pop.
spideymans 6y ago
There’s one particular YouTube pre-roll ad I’ve seen maybe dozens of times. I literally cannot recall anything about the ad, other than I’m sick of seeing it. I’ve totally tuned it out at this point. But if they wanna waste their money advertising to me, be my guest

grishka 6y ago

How many more of them were misclicks?

not2b 6y ago

The suggestion "Don't charge the same IP address more than once in a certain time period (e.g. 24 hours)" is clearly broken. For people at work in larger companies, there can be thousands of users that all appear to have the same IP address. You can only charge once per day for all of them? As the reddit posting points out, there are plenty of other ways to determine that a click is fake (no css or images loaded, etc).

rightbyte 6y ago
What is the chance they are shown and click the same ad? Pretty much bogger all.

saltedonion 6y ago

How does the fraudster make money on reddit ads frauds? Reddit operates the site, so don’t any money go to them?

shiftpgdn 6y ago
Setup a script to hammer ads that aren't your own. Advertisers leave and your cost for ads goes down.
- saltedonion 6y ago
  Wow that’s dirty
rightbyte 6y ago
Probably they click other ads to hide which ads they want to click which could be specific competitors?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

ffritz 6y ago

I’m getting the same ad on the reddit app over and over again for what feels like a year, and it’s so bad I would never even think of clicking on it. Now that I write this, I notice that’s actually true for most ads I see because they would require a pihole and I haven’t gotten around to setting one up. It really feels like the ad business is inherently flawed these days. Who clicks on ads? How many of those are going through with a purchase? There is just way too many and poorly created ads for any brand to stand out from all that garbage people get shoved in their face all day.

searchableguy 6y ago
Average person in developed countries spend hours on online media daily. I see that as a worrying trend. 6-7 hours for Americans so that would be a huge chunk of your life. I wonder if people don't have time to buy other things to spend their day on due to social media being so addictive.

ramenandtrance 6y ago

What ads? I block them all, at home, at work, and do the same for friends and family. The only ads I see are the half second ads during my DVR playbook, and then skip. I pay for the Internet, for email, for the software I use. I'm not suffering through ads. One project I'm working on is sorting out how to get the Pi-hole to block YouTube ads 100%. I don't see them on my Linux latops because of Nano Adblock, but my kids see them on their iPads. For some reason no one (yet) seems to be able to sort out how to block ad content on YouTube 100%. There has to be a way.

jasonmorton 6y ago

Many ads are not clicked on by a real person, but a bot, or someone clicking ads as fast as possible because it is their job. Many comments would be considered "fraudulent" in the same sense, in that they were not authored by a real person, but a bot, or someone writing comments as fast as possible because it is their job.

jariel 6y ago

This is less of a problem for pay-for-action type ads. If you send X number of people to your site with Y conversions, it doesn't really matter that 'bots don't buy' - because the $Z spent on ads for Y conversions is the metric used. It's much more of a problem for impressions or for ads without directly measured value. It's one of the reasons Google makes so much money, the spend is generally optimized for the return, not for 'how many visitors are fake'. Though it's a problem.

nix23 6y ago

Don't tell that to my AdNauseam extension ;)

TheSionnach 6y ago

Reddit is shady as fuck

TheSionnach 6y ago

Reddit is a shady, communist cesspool.

cbsmith 6y ago

I gotta say... this is an incredibly naive analysis. To demonstrate Reddit Ads isn't doing click fraud protection, you should try to generate a fraudulent click yourself. Looking at what is getting through and finding that a lot of it as easily identifiable as fraudulent is NOT a valid signal. It's incredibly likely that there are far more bots that are being blocked and that the bots that are getting through have invested a lot of effort in to fooling Reddit's fraud protection, but really don't care at all about fooling the landing page site (and of course, there are a lot more such sites, so it's a lot more expensive to design & operate a system that would fool all the other sites). Consequently, they're "easily identifiable" (though in truth the author is unfortunately use a very crude model for identifying fraud which will include a ton of false positives) by the landing page, but not by Reddit.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
TwoBit 6y ago
OK but doesn't OP demostrate that the same IP clicked 15 times in a short period of time and he was charged for all of them? How could that be complicated to handle?
- cbsmith 6y ago
  Well, for starters, the IP they see might not be the same IP that Reddit sees. If you are a fraudster, obfuscating IPs is something worth investing in to get by the ad network, not the publisher. There's no need to invest in fooling the publisher (in fact, appearing fraudulent to the publisher can be an objective). Secondly, 15 times in a short period of time from the same IP might just be the ad system targeting a particular group of people who all use the same NAT (which does indeed tend to happen). So it might not be fraud at all.
  - tupputuppu 6y ago
    There is no way to obfuscate an IP address on a TCP connection. The TCP sequence numbers are random so if the fraudster spoofs their IP, they won't get the return traffic and will be unable to complete the handshake and even establish a connection. As the original poster noted, 15 requests from a single IP in a short amount of time should be an anomaly. There's no real world scenario where 15 people behind one NAT show interest to a specific ad simultaneously.

malwarebytess 6y ago

I don't see how they can be sure based on their criteria that those are fraudulent clicks. They could be web crawlers, users with various ad blocking tech, and so on. Going straight to fraud is premature.

GhostVII 6y ago

Does this actually matter? If you are doing online advertising, you should be able to attribute a particular visit to a specific ad campaign, so you can calculate your conversion rate. If Reddit has lots of bots, it just means your conversion rate for those ads will be lower, and you can adjust your spending accordingly. There are a lot of things that can significantly affect clicks other than fraudulent clicks (popups people click on by accident, small "close" buttons, mobile vs desktop, etc.), so I think evaluating your success based on just clicks is going to be pretty useless regardless. I'm not in advertising though so I have no idea.

SuperCuber 6y ago
The point the poster was making is that they were paying money for clicks that had no chance of generating any conversion - and that it's Reddit's responsibility to detect those and not charge for them. So they're not complaining about lower conversion rate, but lower bang for their buck.

XCSme 6y ago

Most dynamic ad platforms are similar, I also got 100% fake traffic from testing out Facebook ads: https://www.reddit.com/r/marketing/comments/4smisl/facebook_ads_100_fake_clicks/ https://www.reddit.com/r/marketing/comments/4smisl/facebook_... I know it could be improved with better targeting, but by default it should not give you 100% fake clicks.

leoplct 6y ago

I wonder if pay for impression (CPM) is a better to mitigate this cost?

unityByFreedom 6y ago

The post is flaired "Community responded" and all the mods are admins. Yet there is no resolution and no stated plan to address the issue.

commonturtle 6y ago

Does it really matter if they are fraudulent? Most advertisers measure (and are willing to pay for) conversions, not clicks. So even if there are lots of fake clicks, the number of purchases wouldn't change. If advertisers have to pay for more than their conversion rates justify they will stop advertising on reddit which forces reddit to solve the fake clicks problem.

lovehashbrowns 6y ago

I'm pretty surprised the aws bot got through. I used to be responsible for detecting fraud for ads in the past and we had access to a blacklist that likely would include a lot of these ips. If we didn't do things like this, advertisers would actually stop working with us.

dblock 6y ago

I may or may not have participated in click fraud in 1997 with DoubleClick by forging source IP headers and going through a proxy ... that I may or may not have been running. I can only imagine how much more sophisticated click fraud has become today. Even if you raise that bar, I suspect a vast % of clicks are probably fraud anyway.

rightbyte 6y ago
Someone mentioned timeslots witch might not be a too bad idea. Then you would have to meassure traffic independently via eg. some panel or something. It is probably less easy to game. It would also kill spam sites since the panel would not stay on those very long.
titom4 6y ago
Yea you'd surely be surprised. Our marketing department started using clickguard 6 months ago and we were simply shocked to discover how much of our budget was being wasted on Google ads.

modzu 6y ago

it's more like 99%; for the whole internet

Lorin 6y ago

I don't understand how, even after so much privacy was eroded to give marketers additional data to target ads - I still get such irrelevant ones.

johnadams283475 6y ago

...And that's why I use ad blocker.

stevespang 6y ago

My son is a software engineer by day, a pro-am Texas Hold 'em Poker player on some nights at "legal" card houses. Some criticize his "outlaw" endeavors, but he has over a year of serious winning statistics. Compared to online ad scams - - his pursuit is a solid cake walk. No. of clicks as a metric should be outlawed.

justinbaker84 6y ago

Advertising manager here - The real problem is that not enough companies pay attention to the results they are getting from their ad campaigns. Most big companies just dump money into a lot of different campaigns without putting in place strict measurement procedures. So this puts the ethical ad seller at a major disadvantage. Currently you have companies spending tens of millions of dollars on digital ads each quarter and only looking ad metrics like cost per click or cost per impression. So they are judging the effectiveness of the ad campaign on metrics the ad seller provides. They are not putting in place effective checks and balances. Why you ask? Because if the huge companies buying ads wanted to actually measure everything it would be extremely time consuming and expensive. It is a lot easier to pretend the problem doesn’t exist and just go with the flow. So small companies with small budgets are actually a lot better at measuring results in most cases. Also online only businesses are a lot better at it. Measuring the offline impact of online ads is very hard. But the bulk of ad dollars are spent by huge companies with huge bureaucracies. So game theory says you need to capture those dollars to win. Source – I’ve been doing digital marketing for the last 12 years at a variety of companies.

moltar 6y ago

Could it be just badly coded scrapers?

orange_joe 6y ago

I'd love to see fraud/mis-click adjusted returns for various social networks. I'd wager a significant percentage of ad engagement is non-productive.

r721 6y ago
Comment by OP in other thread: >I've compared this method to Twitter (6% click fraud) and Google (-26% click fraud, received more legitimate clicks than I was charged), so Reddit is definitely doing something different. https://old.reddit.com/r/adops/comments/ikskpp/3550_of_clicks_on_reddit_ads_are_fraudulent/g3ou89y/ https://old.reddit.com/r/adops/comments/ikskpp/3550_of_click...

thrownaway954 6y ago

adnauseam.io i don't know how many people actually install this extension, but it is specifically designed to clicks ads so you don't have to :)

user5994461 6y ago
Warning to not install this extension if you use google ads in any capacity (work/blog/other), it will get your account banned from google very quick for clickfraud.
- notatoad 6y ago
  In addition to google, it's likely to get you at least shadowbanned on any site that has ads and does any sort of basic fraud prevention.
  - GekkePrutser 6y ago
    What's Shadowbanning? Never heard of this.
    - notatoad 6y ago
      It's where you're effectively banned without being told about it. You can still use the service, but any action you take is isolated from the rest of the site. The term I think comes from reddit but the concept is by no means unique to them: your upvotes or downvotes wouldn't affect rankings and nobody would ever see your submissions or comments other than you. The idea is to let spammers or fraudsters waste their energies on accounts that have already been flagged, instead of notifying them that they've been banned so they switch to a clean account.
      - GekkePrutser 6y ago
        Thanks, I had no idea! Never heard of this. Really good explanation.
- 6y ago

rednerrus 6y ago

Reddit's ads are terrible. It should come as no surprise that no one clicks on them.

splitrocket 6y ago

How is this not actionable? I'd get in touch with my state AG's office as well as the FBI.

fareesh 6y ago
If it's a conspiracy, the number of people involved would be quite high, so it would probably be difficult to keep it a secret.
parliament32 6y ago
Assuming this isn't Reddit, but just a bunch of users with AdNauseum installed, what do you expect them to do? Present a captcha before letting a user click through an ad?
- 24gttghh 6y ago
  That's one way to kill the ad industry, and I'm all for it!
  - kikki 6y ago
    And what should replace the ad industry - to keep websites running?
    - thatguy0900 6y ago
      Maybe nothing. If it's a valuable service, a small subscription or micro transaction. If Noone is willing to pay for it, even the site owner themselves, maybe it doesn't actually need to be around. I think alot of labor of love sites would remain.
    - spideymans 6y ago
      Spitballing here, so excuse me if this is a horrendous idea: The reason we have aggressive web advertising is because the web has no revenue model to pay website owners for their content costs. So I’ve wondered if the web would be better off with a Spotify-like model, where ISPs pay web hosts per page view (or how long time is spent on a page). If websites want to be eligible to receive these payments, they’d have to commit to having no ads, or at least very unobtrusive ads without any tracking. And line Spotify, consumers would continue to pay a flat rate, regardless of how many pages they visit (within their data cap) I think the major web players are far too mature and entrenched to make such a major shift in the web’s revenue model. But if this had been implemented decades earlier, it might’ve had a shot at success.

danpalmer 6y ago

I get the impression that Reddit's ad network is just immature. We're finding that Reddit ads perform well and are cheap, suggesting that there isn't much competition for clicks. More mature ad networks such as Google's and Facebook's are better at reducing spam clicks. Google bought a company focused on this about 10 years ago, I'm sure Facebook put similar effort in. I'm sure this is something they'll work to improve over time as their ad network gains traction.

ruined 6y ago
Reddit has been running ads for over a decade. If they are this far in and not doing basic fraud mitigation, something is wrong.
- danpalmer 6y ago
  That depends on the scale though right? Reddit ads were for a long time very poor. They've become a lot more feasible for many companies in the last few years, as Reddit has also become a lot more mainstream. Also we don't know if they are doing basic fraud mitigation. It's possible they are doing plenty of fraud mitigation, but that it's just not advanced enough.
  - ruined 6y ago
    Did you look at the link? The detection methods used, and the discussion of mitigation in the thread, make it clear that if they are doing any mitigation at all they are neglecting obvious red flags. Every business is obliged to be ethical, vigilant against deception, and not blatantly lie, no matter what size they are. Even if you could make an argument like this, reddit was already pretty big ten years ago. That's why they started running ads.
  - merkul204 6y ago
    I wish they would actually address this issue in the OP's link. None of the reddit ad reps have responded to this and it's quite a shame they haven't yet...
- 6y ago

earthboundkid 6y ago

Every newspaper in America has obvious scam ads on its homepage. The whole online ad market is diseased and needs to be uprooted. Common sense fixes: - Never allow dynamic ad content! Ads should be individually approved by publishers and not subject to change after approval. - Ban user tracking and targeting. It's a red queen's race and no one benefits. Everyone is better off once it's illegal. - Pay for ad time slots, not user impressions. Instead of selling by CPM, publishers should say "independent analyst X says we have traffic Y on an average Sunday. You can buy placement for next Sunday for $Z." This is how all offline ads are sold, and it's much healthier for everyone than CPM. It essentially kills the motivation for the Reddit fraud discussed here. - Use anti-trust to prevent link aggregators from being advertisers. This is a bigger issue, but putting ads on the aggregators creates perverse incentives to promote bad content and not actually pay for it. Why would you pay to put an ad on publisher A which may or may not have traffic when you can put the ad on aggregator B which will definitely have traffic? The problem is this means A cannot pay writers and the whole system breaks down.

shajznnckfke 6y ago
How are you going to tell which traffic is fraud if you ban tracking?
- ForHackernews 6y ago
  If you're not paying for clicks, there's no such thing as "fraud" traffic -- there's just users who convert and buy your product and those who don't.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  If the ads are billed per period of time and not per-click or per-view then "fraud" doesn't matter; all that matters is the overall ROI; if the advertiser gets more business than what it cost them to run the ad they will consider it a worthwhile investment, otherwise they will stop advertising there forcing the publisher to adjust their prices and eventually those prices will reflect the true value (as in how much ROI it brings) of the ad spot regardless of any "fraud".