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> in production traffic only very few (<1%) ads are actually clickbait That's a fascinating claim, and it does not align with my anecdotal experience using the

by ericyd 1y ago

> in production traffic only very few (<1%) ads are actually clickbait That's a fascinating claim, and it does not align with my anecdotal experience using the web for many years.

ajb 1y ago
I had that reaction as well, but consider: clickbait is such because it takes more work (emotional or logical) to reject it than an ad which is merely not relevant to you. Thus, your (and my) recall of ads is probably biased towards clickbait, and we overestimate its prevalence.
vajrabum 1y ago
Not quite the same thing but some non-negligable percentage of ads I see on Facebook are outright scams which purport to be selling musical instruments at a 'markdown'. First guitars supposedly from the Sam Ash bankruptcy sales linking to an obvious fake site and more lately 'free' giveaways of high end Gibson acoustic guitars. When I've reported them I got the feedback that it didn't violate community standards, but my insta account got perma-banned when I posted the original of a song on youtube from 1928 on a thread which started with a cover from 30 years ago. That was considered spam.
- galaxyLogic 1y ago
  Smart scammers should know that peopel know if something is too good to be true ("free Gibson} etc), it is probabaly fake. But people keep clicking, for what it's worth.
  - adgjlsfhk1 1y ago
    it's the opposite. scammers want the people that are gullible enough to go for "free"
    - throwaway1004 1y ago
      This is a narrative I've heard many times, with very little evidence to back it up. An alternative and more accurate view is that, as the world came online, people became exposed to the very low-effort scams, representative of criminal elements from around the world, which befuddled most due to their child-like naivety. None of those confused individuals would fall for it but they require an explanation. Someone came up with a theory that it's actually a stroke of 4D genius and it stuck. edit: ok, I bothered to look this up: Microsoft had a guy do a study on nigerian scams, the guys who wrote Freakonomics did a sequel referencing that study and drew absurb unfounded conclusions, which have been repeated over and over. Business as usual for the fig-leaf salesmen.
andrewmcwatters 1y ago
Ad company says ads are good, water is wet, news at 11.
vFunct 1y ago
That usually means you tend to visit trash sites. Higher quality sites have higher quality ads. In fact, for the highest quality media, people actually PAY for ads. See things like Vogue September issue or technical shopping magazines, which earn value for being 90% ads. People used to buy local newspapers because of the ads as well.
- andrewflnr 1y ago
  Specifically the September issue? Is that one special?
  - vFunct 1y ago
    Yes, as Fall/Winter clothing is sold starting around September, and fall/winter apparel are generally the more expensive than spring/summer clothes, and so more advertising dollars go into it.
- ericyd 1y ago
  Lol I always love a good "slap in the face" reply
aaron695 1y ago
> it does not align with my anecdotal experience Given I'll often see the same fraudulent ad repeated I think anecdotal experience is there are not many of them. I can even talk to friends about the most boring fraudulent ads and they know them. i.e. Elon doubling your bitcoin scams. For normal ads unless they are viral, there are millions out there that are never repeated or not even seen. Because fraud ads have short lifetimes pulled out of 'production traffic' you can collect many for the training data I assume 'clickbait' is the safety word for 'fraud'
woolion 1y ago
In the last 6 months, I've had to buy a few things that 'normal people' tend to buy (a coffee machine, fuel, ...), for which we didn't already have trusted sellers, and so checked Google. For fuel, Google results were 90% scams, for coffee machines closer to 75% The scams are fairly elaborate: they clone some legitimate looking sites, then offer prices that are very competitive -- between 50% and 75% of market prices -- that put them on top of SEO. It's only by looking in details at contact information that there are some things that look off (one common thing is that they may encourage bank transfers since there's no buyer protection there, but it's not always the case). A 75% market rate is not crazy "too good to be true" thing, it's in the realm of what a legitimate business can do, and with the prices of the items being in the 1000s, that means any hooked victim is a good catch. A particular example was a website copying the one for a massive discount appliance store chain in the Netherlands. They had a close domain name, even though the website looked different, so any Google search linked it towards the legitimate business. You really have to apply a high level of scrutiny, or understand that Google is basically a scam registry.
- jacquesm 1y ago
  Scammers can outbid real stores on the same products for the advertising space simply because they have much better margins. And google really doesn't care about whether it is a scammer that pays them or a legit business, they do zero due diligence on the targets of the advertising.
- NooneAtAll3 1y ago
  didn't parent comment cited sentence about clickbait? why did you change subject to scams?
  - woolion 1y ago
    Parent says it's an outlandish claim that they can reliably tell whether ads are clickbait. I believe that detecting whether an ad is clickbait is a similar problem -- not exactly the same, but it suffers from the same issues: - it's not well defined at all. - any heuristic is constantly gamed by bad actors - it requires a deeper, contextual analysis of the content that is served - content analysis requires a notion of what is reputable or reasonable If I take an LLM's definition of "clickbait", I get "sensationalized, misleading, or exaggerated headlines"; so scams would be a subset of it (it is misleading content that you need to click through). They do not provide their definition though. So you have Google products (both the Products search and the general search) that recommend scams with an incredible rate, where the stakes are much higher. Is it reasonable that they're able to solve the general problem? How can anyone verify such a claim, or trust it?
wazoox 1y ago
In my (fortunately uncommon) experience, all ads served by Google are clickbait, or even blatant scam (like fake interviews of celebrities that explain how they earn lots of money without working, magical health enhancers, etc).

by ericyd 1y ago

> in production traffic only very few (<1%) ads are actually clickbait That's a fascinating claim, and it does not align with my anecdotal experience using the web for many years.

ajb 1y ago

I had that reaction as well, but consider: clickbait is such because it takes more work (emotional or logical) to reject it than an ad which is merely not relevant to you. Thus, your (and my) recall of ads is probably biased towards clickbait, and we overestimate its prevalence.

vajrabum 1y ago

Not quite the same thing but some non-negligable percentage of ads I see on Facebook are outright scams which purport to be selling musical instruments at a 'markdown'. First guitars supposedly from the Sam Ash bankruptcy sales linking to an obvious fake site and more lately 'free' giveaways of high end Gibson acoustic guitars. When I've reported them I got the feedback that it didn't violate community standards, but my insta account got perma-banned when I posted the original of a song on youtube from 1928 on a thread which started with a cover from 30 years ago. That was considered spam.

galaxyLogic 1y ago
Smart scammers should know that peopel know if something is too good to be true ("free Gibson} etc), it is probabaly fake. But people keep clicking, for what it's worth.
- adgjlsfhk1 1y ago
  it's the opposite. scammers want the people that are gullible enough to go for "free"
  - throwaway1004 1y ago
    This is a narrative I've heard many times, with very little evidence to back it up. An alternative and more accurate view is that, as the world came online, people became exposed to the very low-effort scams, representative of criminal elements from around the world, which befuddled most due to their child-like naivety. None of those confused individuals would fall for it but they require an explanation. Someone came up with a theory that it's actually a stroke of 4D genius and it stuck. edit: ok, I bothered to look this up: Microsoft had a guy do a study on nigerian scams, the guys who wrote Freakonomics did a sequel referencing that study and drew absurb unfounded conclusions, which have been repeated over and over. Business as usual for the fig-leaf salesmen.

andrewmcwatters 1y ago

Ad company says ads are good, water is wet, news at 11.

vFunct 1y ago

That usually means you tend to visit trash sites. Higher quality sites have higher quality ads. In fact, for the highest quality media, people actually PAY for ads. See things like Vogue September issue or technical shopping magazines, which earn value for being 90% ads. People used to buy local newspapers because of the ads as well.

andrewflnr 1y ago
Specifically the September issue? Is that one special?
- vFunct 1y ago
  Yes, as Fall/Winter clothing is sold starting around September, and fall/winter apparel are generally the more expensive than spring/summer clothes, and so more advertising dollars go into it.
ericyd 1y ago
Lol I always love a good "slap in the face" reply

aaron695 1y ago

> it does not align with my anecdotal experience Given I'll often see the same fraudulent ad repeated I think anecdotal experience is there are not many of them. I can even talk to friends about the most boring fraudulent ads and they know them. i.e. Elon doubling your bitcoin scams. For normal ads unless they are viral, there are millions out there that are never repeated or not even seen. Because fraud ads have short lifetimes pulled out of 'production traffic' you can collect many for the training data I assume 'clickbait' is the safety word for 'fraud'

woolion 1y ago

In the last 6 months, I've had to buy a few things that 'normal people' tend to buy (a coffee machine, fuel, ...), for which we didn't already have trusted sellers, and so checked Google. For fuel, Google results were 90% scams, for coffee machines closer to 75% The scams are fairly elaborate: they clone some legitimate looking sites, then offer prices that are very competitive -- between 50% and 75% of market prices -- that put them on top of SEO. It's only by looking in details at contact information that there are some things that look off (one common thing is that they may encourage bank transfers since there's no buyer protection there, but it's not always the case). A 75% market rate is not crazy "too good to be true" thing, it's in the realm of what a legitimate business can do, and with the prices of the items being in the 1000s, that means any hooked victim is a good catch. A particular example was a website copying the one for a massive discount appliance store chain in the Netherlands. They had a close domain name, even though the website looked different, so any Google search linked it towards the legitimate business. You really have to apply a high level of scrutiny, or understand that Google is basically a scam registry.

jacquesm 1y ago
Scammers can outbid real stores on the same products for the advertising space simply because they have much better margins. And google really doesn't care about whether it is a scammer that pays them or a legit business, they do zero due diligence on the targets of the advertising.
NooneAtAll3 1y ago
didn't parent comment cited sentence about clickbait? why did you change subject to scams?
- woolion 1y ago
  Parent says it's an outlandish claim that they can reliably tell whether ads are clickbait. I believe that detecting whether an ad is clickbait is a similar problem -- not exactly the same, but it suffers from the same issues: - it's not well defined at all. - any heuristic is constantly gamed by bad actors - it requires a deeper, contextual analysis of the content that is served - content analysis requires a notion of what is reputable or reasonable If I take an LLM's definition of "clickbait", I get "sensationalized, misleading, or exaggerated headlines"; so scams would be a subset of it (it is misleading content that you need to click through). They do not provide their definition though. So you have Google products (both the Products search and the general search) that recommend scams with an incredible rate, where the stakes are much higher. Is it reasonable that they're able to solve the general problem? How can anyone verify such a claim, or trust it?

wazoox 1y ago

In my (fortunately uncommon) experience, all ads served by Google are clickbait, or even blatant scam (like fake interviews of celebrities that explain how they earn lots of money without working, magical health enhancers, etc).