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You don't actually need to click on an ad or purchase something from an ad site in order for Facebook to make money selling ad space. The moment these ads are

You don't actually need to click on an ad or purchase something from an ad site in order for Facebook to make money selling ad space. The moment these ads are loaded on the page, real time auction occurs, where advertisers place bids algorithmically and automatically, based on your profile. Facebook makes it's money by selling this ad space. It doesn't particularly care whether you click on them or not. But if they don't load in the first place, there's nothing for Facebook to sell. The real insideous part is that advertisers don't need to actually bid on the auction to participate, and anyone participating gets to havest your ad profile. This is one of the big ways data brokers are able to build profiles on you. They can then do whatever they want with this info, and you'd probably never know.

tristor 2mo ago
This is correct, and the extra insidious part is that folks who are tech-savvy and privacy-conscious are more valuable profiles than normies, because we generally work in higher income jobs/industries. So whether we click or not is irrelevant, Facebook gets paid more for showing us ads than they do for typical normies.
globalnode 2mo ago
and thats why you lock down your privacy, so they get nothing other than "generic privacy enthusiast #1000101010101"
- gh02t 2mo ago
  Good luck. I'd wager that most methods to protect your privacy aren't nearly as effective as we think they are. While I don't think it means that you shouldn't try to protect your information, I typically assume that anything short of very extreme measures is only mildly effective.
  - gopher_space 2mo ago
    One of the biggest problems in software development is that our graph of authoritative personal data is cyclical. You might have heard about how difficult it was for someone erroneously declared dead to change the record, and I'm sure most of us have experienced problems with changing an address. A friend recently went through two name changes and one phone number change, and it took like eight months for the bottom-feeders to realign. We are now in an adversarial situation regarding our personal information, but our adversaries depend on sources we have a modicum of control over. If I signed my dog up for a physical mailer, I wonder how long would it take for a portion of the internet to consider Doctor-Professor Kensington a legal individual.
    - deleted 2mo ago
      [deleted]
    - inigyou 2mo ago
      I've tried signing up for bank accounts with deliberate typoes in my name. It worked. Name didn't match the ID they had me scan. The Revolut sign-up form randomly ignores keypresses so that's my plausible deniability. I just intentionally didn't correct them.
  - globalnode 2mo ago
    im constanty being asked to fill out captchas (which i close) and am accused of being a bot by many of the sites i visit, so i guess im doing something right?
dewey 2mo ago
That's not true. If your ad placements don't perform, people are not going to book them. If ads are loaded or not is also often verified by independent third party trackers that you have to embed on your page next to the ad. There's whole industries built on this stuff and it's not as simple as "we sell the slot and don't care if people see it or click on it".
- jpleger 2mo ago
  I mean you are both right, it's been a few years since I have been in adtech, and it isn't black and white. There are few places that will pay for stuff that isn't clicked through, but there are places that are willing to pay on an impression basis for things like video or images. It's just like not worth it to most places to throw those ads on their property since it's fairly low quality advertisers. More to the point though, if there isn't ads rendered, you can't even get accidental clicks.
  - tomnipotent 2mo ago
    The teams spending the kind of money these ad networks care about are doing a lot of upper funnel brand marketing where exposure is more important than clicks and where conversions are expected to be much lower for this segment of spend.
    - rented_mule 2mo ago
      The largest brands (Walmart, McDonald's, Coca-Cola, etc.) put a lot of analytics into their ad spend. I worked on an ad platform with a large audience that these kinds of brands wanted to get their name in front of, but the audience was exceedingly unlikely to click on big-brand ads on our platform. The brands figured this out quickly and pushed hard for cost-per-click rather than cost-per-impression because cost-per-click was essentially free brand marketing for them, even if they were paying $100 per click. The next tier down was kind of the opposite. They weren't big enough to surface things like this, and they hired agencies for most of their ad spend. When focusing on the top of the funnel, there's this strange incentive with agencies where they often get more budget to spend if they can connect that directly to eye balls. Agencies are incentivized to throw the ads up everywhere and pay well to do so. They love cost-per-impression because we could deliver a large, predictable number of eye balls in a hurry. All that said, we put no effort into getting around ad blockers as we were serving these ads on our own site/app and we viewed fighting ad blockers as fighting our users. Our ads were served inline in HTML, but clearly identified in the HTML of the page. It took blockers a while to catch on and block them, but they eventually did.
kazinator 2mo ago
I would say, then, that Facebook is perpetrating fraud. They are knowingly defeating ad blockers to sell ad space that they know will not lead to any click-throughs and conversions.
- inigyou 2mo ago
  They don't know that, and it probably isn't true.

tristor 2mo ago

This is correct, and the extra insidious part is that folks who are tech-savvy and privacy-conscious are more valuable profiles than normies, because we generally work in higher income jobs/industries. So whether we click or not is irrelevant, Facebook gets paid more for showing us ads than they do for typical normies.

globalnode 2mo ago

and thats why you lock down your privacy, so they get nothing other than "generic privacy enthusiast #1000101010101"

gh02t 2mo ago
Good luck. I'd wager that most methods to protect your privacy aren't nearly as effective as we think they are. While I don't think it means that you shouldn't try to protect your information, I typically assume that anything short of very extreme measures is only mildly effective.
- gopher_space 2mo ago
  One of the biggest problems in software development is that our graph of authoritative personal data is cyclical. You might have heard about how difficult it was for someone erroneously declared dead to change the record, and I'm sure most of us have experienced problems with changing an address. A friend recently went through two name changes and one phone number change, and it took like eight months for the bottom-feeders to realign. We are now in an adversarial situation regarding our personal information, but our adversaries depend on sources we have a modicum of control over. If I signed my dog up for a physical mailer, I wonder how long would it take for a portion of the internet to consider Doctor-Professor Kensington a legal individual.
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
  - inigyou 2mo ago
    I've tried signing up for bank accounts with deliberate typoes in my name. It worked. Name didn't match the ID they had me scan. The Revolut sign-up form randomly ignores keypresses so that's my plausible deniability. I just intentionally didn't correct them.
- globalnode 2mo ago
  im constanty being asked to fill out captchas (which i close) and am accused of being a bot by many of the sites i visit, so i guess im doing something right?

dewey 2mo ago

That's not true. If your ad placements don't perform, people are not going to book them. If ads are loaded or not is also often verified by independent third party trackers that you have to embed on your page next to the ad. There's whole industries built on this stuff and it's not as simple as "we sell the slot and don't care if people see it or click on it".

jpleger 2mo ago
I mean you are both right, it's been a few years since I have been in adtech, and it isn't black and white. There are few places that will pay for stuff that isn't clicked through, but there are places that are willing to pay on an impression basis for things like video or images. It's just like not worth it to most places to throw those ads on their property since it's fairly low quality advertisers. More to the point though, if there isn't ads rendered, you can't even get accidental clicks.
- tomnipotent 2mo ago
  The teams spending the kind of money these ad networks care about are doing a lot of upper funnel brand marketing where exposure is more important than clicks and where conversions are expected to be much lower for this segment of spend.
  - rented_mule 2mo ago
    The largest brands (Walmart, McDonald's, Coca-Cola, etc.) put a lot of analytics into their ad spend. I worked on an ad platform with a large audience that these kinds of brands wanted to get their name in front of, but the audience was exceedingly unlikely to click on big-brand ads on our platform. The brands figured this out quickly and pushed hard for cost-per-click rather than cost-per-impression because cost-per-click was essentially free brand marketing for them, even if they were paying $100 per click. The next tier down was kind of the opposite. They weren't big enough to surface things like this, and they hired agencies for most of their ad spend. When focusing on the top of the funnel, there's this strange incentive with agencies where they often get more budget to spend if they can connect that directly to eye balls. Agencies are incentivized to throw the ads up everywhere and pay well to do so. They love cost-per-impression because we could deliver a large, predictable number of eye balls in a hurry. All that said, we put no effort into getting around ad blockers as we were serving these ads on our own site/app and we viewed fighting ad blockers as fighting our users. Our ads were served inline in HTML, but clearly identified in the HTML of the page. It took blockers a while to catch on and block them, but they eventually did.

kazinator 2mo ago

I would say, then, that Facebook is perpetrating fraud. They are knowingly defeating ad blockers to sell ad space that they know will not lead to any click-throughs and conversions.

inigyou 2mo ago
They don't know that, and it probably isn't true.