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At the end of the day, ads exist to make money, and until the bots have credit cards that means money from humans. Google etc. will notice it in their bottom li

At the end of the day, ads exist to make money, and until the bots have credit cards that means money from humans. Google etc. will notice it in their bottom line if there's suddenly a lot more "engagement" or traffic in some area but none of that converts to humans spending dollars. Google will start dealing with this problem when it starts appearing in their budget in big enough numbers. The tech layoffs we're hearing about from one company after another - google is mentioned in another HN thread today - may be a sign of which way the wind is blowing.

ramesh31 3y ago
>At the end of the day, ads exist to make money, and until the bots have credit cards that means money from humans. Google etc. will notice it in their bottom line if there's suddenly a lot more "engagement" or traffic in some area but none of that converts to humans spending dollars. You seem to have a hilariously over generous opinion of ad tech spending. The biggest players are already doing this themselves.
b112 3y ago
Big tech has always been laying off, firing, even in the best of years. And today, right now, they're all still hiring.
lolinder 3y ago
> Google etc. will notice it in their bottom line if there's suddenly a lot more "engagement" or traffic in some area but none of that converts to humans spending dollars. Google might notice but has no incentive to spend money to stop it because they're not the ones the humans stopped paying. The companies that advertise with Google might notice a drop in ROI on their ads, but it will be a while before they abandon Google because most of them don't see any other option. I dread what the internet will look like if we wait for this this to hit Google's bottom line.
novagameco 3y ago
AI is generating content, not consuming it. If people are easily duped by fake or bad products with advertisements or content generated by AI (which, they are) then this will continue to drive revenue for Google. The only reason Google dislikes SEO manipulation is because it's a way for sites to get top real estate on google without paying for the promoted results; the quality of the product doesn't matter to them It only becomes a problem when it results in a collapse of trust; when people have been burned by too many bad products and decide to no longer trust the sites or search results which they used to. Due to my job, I get a lot of ads for gray market drugs on Instagram. I know, however, that all of these are not tested by the FDA and most are either snake oil or research chemicals masquerading as Amanita Muscaria or Delta-8 THC, and so I ignore these ads.
- lacrimacida 3y ago
  If AI is good at faking content what stops its use for faking consumtion/engagement. In my mind that’s the next logical step in the internet enshitification.
  - novagameco 3y ago
    You don't need AI to commit advertising fraud; publishers already do so. Detecting fraud is usually about checking what IP range does a request come from: one allocated to consumer internet, or one allocated to cloud providers like AWS. All the ad bidder usually sees is a JSON payload with information about the user agent and some demographic information about the user. You can also look up user ID info against a user graph you bought from a data broker and if you've never seen them before decide that they may be fraudulent. Ad fraud isn't particularly sophisticated. I used to run queries against our bidder and would find many hundreds of requests coming from a single AWS IP within a given time frame
burkaman 3y ago
Why wouldn't it result in humans spending dollars? The ads are real and the visitors are real, it doesn't matter if the content is real. In fact people are probably more likely to click on an ad if the page it's on is generic and uninteresting.
- red_admiral 3y ago
  My reasoning is, there's topics where I don't bother to go to google anymore because I know the results will be crap. That way google loses any way to show me ads when I'm searching for these topics, or get paid for click-throughs, or to profile my interests as accurately as they could otherwise. There's categories of products where I spend money regularly, but I go directly to category-specific sites so google again loses out on the ability to take their cut as middleman, which I'd happily let them take - and maybe discover vendors other than the ones I know - if they provided me with higher-quality results than they do now.
mrweasel 3y ago
That's an interesting take, but Google won't suffer before the advertisers decide that they are wasting their money on online advertising. Some topics should already have dried up, but perhaps scams are fueling the advertising machine for now on those. You can't really use Google for things like fitness or weight-loss. When we remodeled it also became clear that building materials and especially paint have become unsearchable. In the end I resulted to just go to the store and ask, it as the only way to get reliable information and recommendation. Google is still working for most areas, but where it's really good is the ads for products. If there's something you want to buy, Googles ads engine will find it for you, you just have to know exactly what you want.

ramesh31 3y ago

>At the end of the day, ads exist to make money, and until the bots have credit cards that means money from humans. Google etc. will notice it in their bottom line if there's suddenly a lot more "engagement" or traffic in some area but none of that converts to humans spending dollars. You seem to have a hilariously over generous opinion of ad tech spending. The biggest players are already doing this themselves.

b112 3y ago

Big tech has always been laying off, firing, even in the best of years. And today, right now, they're all still hiring.

lolinder 3y ago

> Google etc. will notice it in their bottom line if there's suddenly a lot more "engagement" or traffic in some area but none of that converts to humans spending dollars. Google might notice but has no incentive to spend money to stop it because they're not the ones the humans stopped paying. The companies that advertise with Google might notice a drop in ROI on their ads, but it will be a while before they abandon Google because most of them don't see any other option. I dread what the internet will look like if we wait for this this to hit Google's bottom line.

novagameco 3y ago

AI is generating content, not consuming it. If people are easily duped by fake or bad products with advertisements or content generated by AI (which, they are) then this will continue to drive revenue for Google. The only reason Google dislikes SEO manipulation is because it's a way for sites to get top real estate on google without paying for the promoted results; the quality of the product doesn't matter to them It only becomes a problem when it results in a collapse of trust; when people have been burned by too many bad products and decide to no longer trust the sites or search results which they used to. Due to my job, I get a lot of ads for gray market drugs on Instagram. I know, however, that all of these are not tested by the FDA and most are either snake oil or research chemicals masquerading as Amanita Muscaria or Delta-8 THC, and so I ignore these ads.

lacrimacida 3y ago
If AI is good at faking content what stops its use for faking consumtion/engagement. In my mind that’s the next logical step in the internet enshitification.
- novagameco 3y ago
  You don't need AI to commit advertising fraud; publishers already do so. Detecting fraud is usually about checking what IP range does a request come from: one allocated to consumer internet, or one allocated to cloud providers like AWS. All the ad bidder usually sees is a JSON payload with information about the user agent and some demographic information about the user. You can also look up user ID info against a user graph you bought from a data broker and if you've never seen them before decide that they may be fraudulent. Ad fraud isn't particularly sophisticated. I used to run queries against our bidder and would find many hundreds of requests coming from a single AWS IP within a given time frame

burkaman 3y ago

Why wouldn't it result in humans spending dollars? The ads are real and the visitors are real, it doesn't matter if the content is real. In fact people are probably more likely to click on an ad if the page it's on is generic and uninteresting.

red_admiral 3y ago
My reasoning is, there's topics where I don't bother to go to google anymore because I know the results will be crap. That way google loses any way to show me ads when I'm searching for these topics, or get paid for click-throughs, or to profile my interests as accurately as they could otherwise. There's categories of products where I spend money regularly, but I go directly to category-specific sites so google again loses out on the ability to take their cut as middleman, which I'd happily let them take - and maybe discover vendors other than the ones I know - if they provided me with higher-quality results than they do now.

mrweasel 3y ago

That's an interesting take, but Google won't suffer before the advertisers decide that they are wasting their money on online advertising. Some topics should already have dried up, but perhaps scams are fueling the advertising machine for now on those. You can't really use Google for things like fitness or weight-loss. When we remodeled it also became clear that building materials and especially paint have become unsearchable. In the end I resulted to just go to the store and ask, it as the only way to get reliable information and recommendation. Google is still working for most areas, but where it's really good is the ads for products. If there's something you want to buy, Googles ads engine will find it for you, you just have to know exactly what you want.