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Sometimes I click on Google ads just because I don't like a brand and feel a little bit of joy knowing I just cost them a dollar.
by Puts 5y ago
Sometimes I click on Google ads just because I don't like a brand and feel a little bit of joy knowing I just cost them a dollar.
- drevil-v2 5y agoWay more than a dollar. If you really want to cost a company a pretty penny, click on the ad after searching for an "intent" to do something rather than the exact brand. Some of those Adwords cost many tens of dollars.
- JacobThreeThree 5y agoI haven't seen anyone mention the fact that a big factor that contributes to how the Google Ads "black box" determines how to rank ads is via an Ad Quality measurement. Each ad is given a quality score, and since your own website will be guaranteed to be the most authoritative source for a keyword search with your own branded keyword(s) in it, by default the quality of your own ads will be much higher than your competition. This means in practice that the cost for a brand to be shown first on their own branded keywords is much lower than their average CPC, let alone the cost for their competitors to be there.
- titzer 5y agoThe very fact that you have to bid on clicks for your own damn website by paying Google, because Google has prioritized ads to the point of displaying them higher and making them almost indistinguishable from the "organic" search result proves they have intentionally created a tax on the internet. It will get worse, to the point where to get auto-completed in the omnibox you'll have to pay. TBH I am not even sure if that isn't already the case!
- alphabetting 5y agoI'd rather ignore some ads which are less intrusive than places like Amazon than pay a subscription fee to use search, gmail and docs which are funded by ads.
- titzer 5y agoThere are other options. For example, funding a publicly-owned search engine with $1 billion a year in infrastructure and development costs would be 50x cheaper than what the US spends on foodstamps. It'd be 1/10th the NSF's annual budget. Not that that's the best option, but we could consider some new ideas.
- zaphirplane 5y agoA government owned search engine is 100% bad idea, it will cost a ton, it will cost more than equivalent business developed one, it will be abused by governments and law enforcement, your traffic will be combined with government data to make a last century dictatorship police state weep for joy be a money maker for people you very much don’t admire most of all there is no public value for it when the government can legislate operators
- vkou 5y agoA publicly owned search engine, that will absolutely not be used for propaganda purposes by, say, the Department of State, or by a megalomaniac elected representative. Need to build consent for a war with <Country>? Give me access to the search index, and a few weeks, and it'll be done.
- titzer 5y agoI didn't say it was the best option. But wow, you just trust a billion lines of closed source written to satisfy ad optimization criteria with zero transparency? I mean, we can subject things to public oversight.
- alphabetting 5y agoGoogle is pretty big with open sourcing. Open sourcing search would ruin it though. Spammers would game the system.
- vkou 5y ago> But wow, you just trust a billion lines of closed source written to satisfy ad optimization criteria with zero transparency? I trust that a multi-national serving multiple markets is going to give me less nationally biased information than the government of a superpower (with political ambitions that span the globe.) It's why I generally don't turn to the Voice of America for news.
- dorgo 5y ago>Ad Quality measurement It's called Quality score (soon to be discontinued) and has 3 components. Only one of which is landing page related. And nothing prevents competitors from building "more relevant" landing pages than the original brand.
- arkh 5y agoOr maybe ads could go back to where they were: on some yellow background and on the side. Not looking like the first search results.
- peanut_worm 5y agoYou’re kidding! A single click costs more than a dollar?
- dorgo 5y agoGoogle keyword planner tool shows cpc (cost per click) for keywords. For an online gambling keyword it shows me 14.97€ (for one click). There are other industries with cpc's of 80€ and more.
- ajsnigrutin 5y agoIs it enough just to click on the link? There surely are browser extensions that click on every link, just to make the companies pay, and make advertisers look even shitter.
- dodobirdlord 5y agoNo, it's got to be a real person intentionally clicking the link, and very large teams of skilled people work exclusively on figuring out which clicks fall in this category. Cursor movement patterns, delay time, whether the link was actually rendering on the display when it was clicked, IP address, cookies, signed-in identities, previous click patterns, location, all of these things and more factor in. When people talk about Google hoovering up data, it is in large part for this purpose.
- tekknik 5y agoSounds like a good use of AI, if not one of the best! Let’s train an AI using real humans and have it click these links. Run the client in an P2P network so multiple can contribute to this. If ads are no longer profitable, then this should sink both the online advertising market as well as Google.
- UncleMeat 5y agoClickfraud has been around forever and teams detecting clickfraud have also been around forever. Automation that impersonates human users is not a new idea.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- kbenson 5y agoThat could be the boycott of the 21st century. Don't like how a company is behaving? Get a social media campaign to have people make intentful searched in different search engines, click through, go to a signup form/add stuff to a cart, and then just leave.
- bckr 5y agoIf I can do 10 of these, which would take a few minutes, I could cost a company $100. Which means, with the right tools for spoofing my identity, I could cost them $1000 an hour. If I spend a good work day on this, I could probably cost them $10,000. If I convince 10 people to do this with me for a day, we could cost them $100,000. We might be able to cost them $1M in a week.
- dodobirdlord 5y ago> Which means, with the right tools for spoofing my identity, I could cost them $1000 an hour. Very, very sophisticated systems exist to prevent spoofed identities from counting as ad clicks.
- tomjen3 5y agoSaid systems can probably cope with most of the regular stuff, but what about an army of Twitter followers? Most are going to be signed in, they are going to be spread out geographically, they are going to be real people with real browsers with cookies, etc.
- dodobirdlord 5y agoYes, but those aren’t spoofed identities, they’re actual humans intentionally clicking the link. This is harder for the defender to defend against, but it’s also vastly harder for the attacker to scale. Defenses against this sort of “organic” traffic do exist, because this is something that people committing ad fraud attempt to do using compromised browsers of real people. Edit: I mostly want to stress that there’s a huge body of (largely proprietary) work on this topic. Thousands of skilled people have been full-time employed for decades thinking about exclusively this topic, on both the offensive and defensive side, in a continuously escalating arms race. Anyone just getting started on this topic has a couple of decades of literature review to catch up on before they should imagine that their proposals are novel. I don’t mean to discourage you if it’s a topic you find interesting, but you should bear in mind that the answer to “But has anyone thought of XYZ?” is “Yes” for basically all values of XYZ. There’s a lot of money at stake if the answer is no.
- titzer 5y agoI've done that once in a blue moon, but it doesn't really accomplish anything except transferring that money to Google. Since I used to work for Google, thanks, I guess :-)
- gumby 5y agoMarvelous! I'll do the same. Watch out, Exxon! I mostly click on ads as chaff (mostly I block them but sometimes unblock them just do do some random clicking in the hope of confounding some profiles being compiled on me)
- coredog64 5y agoI used to do that with mesothelioma law firm ads.