4 ms·

Advertisers Could Soon Demand 'Verified Clicks'

37 points by thm 1mo ago

colesantiago 1mo ago
Analogue hole. This 'Verified Clicks' doesn't make sense. What makes a click 'verified', bots can still click links with browser use anyway and you will not be able to tell.
- bitwize 1mo ago
  Presumably a verified click is a click traceable to an attested human identity through your government's soon-to-be-implemented "KYC to use a computer or smartphone" policy.
  - VladVladikoff 1mo ago
    The ad fraud could still come from malware running on KYC’d computers, while the owner of that computer is blissfully unaware.
    - wongarsu 1mo ago
      Just lock down the OS so we can send a reliable signal whether the click originated from a real hardware input device or was software-driven Oh, you programmed your Arduino to present itself as a mouse via USB, so you can do automated click-fraud that way? No problem, only certified hardware allowed as input devices from now on I'm not sure what we are going to do about robot arms using touchscreens, or little devices that trick mouse sensors into thinking it's moving. Maybe continuous fingerprint reading?
      - blooalien 1mo ago
        > I'm not sure what we are going to do about robot arms using touchscreens, or little devices that trick mouse sensors into thinking it's moving. Maybe continuous fingerprint reading? Heartbeat monitor paired to your mouse's fingerprint readers under the mouse buttons while your webcam verifies your Face ID? "Approved live human detected: Please spit in DNA analyzer to verify."
        pixl97 1mo ago
        >Please spit in DNA analyzer to verify." Ah, so this is why Anthropic is banning all biological work on it's LLM, it doesn't want you to make an automatic spitting machine to defeat its future ads.
- pjc50 1mo ago
  "Please drink verification can" (Black Mirror)
  - mananaysiempre 1mo ago
    Not Black Mirror, 2013 vintage 4chan.
    - pjc50 1mo ago
      I stand corrected. It seems like the inspiration was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits , but that doesn't have the same link to advertising. Although it still looks alarmingly prescient.
- garciasn 1mo ago
  https://archive.ph/PIrQi https://archive.ph/PIrQi The article is about email marketing. Some company has a proprietary algorithm that purportedly detects whether a click is legitimate based on 8y of development and data collection. It’s definitely a race against the growing capabilities of the models in use and one that will be very difficult to win which is why there has been a significant push toward verification across the Internet—not because of the children, but because of the revenue.
  - Retr0id 1mo ago
    And I have a proprietary algorithm that can identify whether Brooklyn Bridge is up for sale or not.
    - garciasn 1mo ago
      I mean it’s a marketing PR piece that’s likely targeted toward CMOs who are in love with email marketing. Email marketing is inexpensive, easier to measure, relies on the ridiculous CDPs and ESPs they’ve been tricked into investing in, and the measured numbers are larger than other digital channels. The problem isn’t that bots are clicking, it’s that those big numbers aren’t going up and to the right in a reliable way any longer and those CMOs need to change how they’re measuring media. At the end of the day, CMOs need to be measuring contribution to revenue, not meaningless marketing metrics the rest of the C-suite doesn’t give the slightest of fucks about. But that’s super hard for most organizations without competent Marketing Science or capable agencies, and it’s seemingly expensive because their budgets are already tight from all of the fly-by-night shit they’re over invested in. So; they continue to push what they know as well as chip away at their budgets with silly providers who provide little value instead of biting the bullet and doing the right thing.
    - blooalien 1mo ago
      > ... whether Brooklyn Bridge is up for sale or not. My "Magic 8-Ball" says: "Signs point to yes."
deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]
mikeaskew4 1mo ago
They won’t.
jrm4 1mo ago
Big picture, it kind of blew my mind a few years ago when I realized this: If one concern is the surveillance panopticon thing, it's mitigated by the fact that online advertising itself is a business "fraught" with the fact that there is just as much of an incentive for the seller of ads to be loose with the truth and to use those sorts of tactics as it is for anyone else.
- pooploop64 1mo ago
  That's probably why Google tolerates all the blatant fraud against them by the avalanche of spam sites ruining the service. They're frauding google but google is frauding advertisers and they wouldn't be able to commit fraud to such a high degree if they couldn't tell advertisers that their ads got 10 gorillion fake impressions.
toss1 1mo ago
Surprising it is taking advertisers this long to wake up, considering the decades I've been reading articles on HN about the massive fraud rates from entire fraud ecosystems. The saying in marketing used to be: "Half of all marketing dollars are wasted, but we never know which half". In the internet, it seems to be more like "90% are wasted" and literally never even get a human impression, nevermind a human click-thru and sale. What was always surprising to me was how the advertisers just went along with the scam. Perhaps as if the marketers' bonuses depended more on advertisement budget spent instead of sales increased. If that's the case, what is making them catch on now?
- pjc50 1mo ago
  It was generally believed that "pivot to video" was entirely fraudulent. What's happening now is the retreat from the open internet; users are either taking the Google AI search summary as gospel and not clicking through, or just going to chatgpt by themselves. Traffic from actual humans to non-FAANG pages is falling.
  - malfist 1mo ago
    Theres a good cause for that. These marketers have spammed the entire internet with ai slop or blogspam to make search results useless.
- blooalien 1mo ago
  > If that's the case, what is making them catch on now? Perhaps the threat that "AI" will soon be the only "eyes" that see (and subsequently ignore) their online adverts?
- kijin 1mo ago
  Back when 90% of ad spending was wasted, they still made money from the 10% that resulted in sales. That expectation was built into the CPM/CPC, and hence the ad budget. With the amount of bot traffic I'm seeing these days, I would guess that the waste ratio is more like 99% now. That means a 90% reduction in conversions for the same ad budget. Surely someone is feeling the difference.
- 1mo ago
ashleyn 1mo ago
Seems like important context behind the push for things like Web Environment Integrity (similar in concept to "trusted computing" if you were around for that controversy in the early 2000s): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Environment_Integrity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Environment_Integrity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Computing If your service providers are funded by ads, and ads begin demanding "verified clicks", your service providers are greatly incentivised to begin pushing for locking down your ability to run what you want on your own hardware. Through manipulation of web standards, or through lobbying.
- CodesInChaos 1mo ago
  BTW Google had another go at forcing Treacherous Computing on people. This time it's a reCAPTCHA successor, which requires the user to scan a QR code using a Google/Apple owned phone.
  - WarmWash 1mo ago
    People need to just take responsibility and pay for shit. Like if you don't want to be kicked around, you need to be the one kicking. People interpret business as hostility because they cannot conceive of the idea that they themselves should pay for a service.
    - mrguyorama 1mo ago
      There is nothing in US consumer rights law that prevents any of this being done to someone who pays. As such, companies do all this to consumers who pay.
    - jabroni_salad 1mo ago
      I feel like it is actually payment pages where I see these kinds of bouncers the most, though. click fraud is inefficient, but payment fraud can actually ruin a business.
    - CodesInChaos 1mo ago
jabroni_salad 1mo ago
Advertisers should be grateful I even skimmed the subject line
wolvoleo 1mo ago
Tbh I'm all in favour of ad fraud because it undermines the whole industry which I'd love to see disappear. I love running ad nauseam which instead of hiding ads clicks them all in an invisible browser, making advertisers pay for ads I didn't even see. And devaluing the entire concept. I wish ublock origin did this too, it's so common that it would totally screw up entire ecosystems. The number of people running ad nauseam is unfortunately minimal. And no, I'm not doing anything illegal. I can do whatever I want with the content on my computer. Ad fraud is a term invented for websites creating artificial clicks so they get paid, the end user doesn't benefit from it.
- abc123abc123 1mo ago
  I often wondered if this strategy could work with email/phone scammers as well? Have an LLM write positive email responses, stringing them along as long as possible. Imagine the Nigerian prince of scams... instead of getting 0.1% response rates that he can work on, he gets 99% responses of encouraging replies stringing him along. He would drown in false positives. On the other hand, the Nigerian prince of scams would probably just use his LLM:s to take care of the answers, and we'll have email storms of LLM:s stringing along LLM:s.
  - wolvoleo 1mo ago
    > On the other hand, the Nigerian prince of scams would probably just use his LLM:s to take care of the answers, and we'll have email storms of LLM:s stringing along LLM:s. I already see that happening in other ways. On a forum I frequent there's been a user who instantly replies to new articles with a long irrelevant blahblah with a bunch of bulletpoints and emoji. And a while later another user started insta-replying to everyone with the same kind of crap. Both were banned after a while and the forum now has a stricter "No AI" policy but even that caused some uproar, some users say they want it so they can be more elaborate without having the linguistic skills. But personally I'd love to see it go because most of these replies added nothing to the conversation. You can do nice things with AI, yes. But it needs a human to tell it what to do. If you just put in a generic prompt "Write something insightful about this article" it's going to provide nothing but slop.
  - 1mo ago
marcelo_pr 1mo ago
I think the end user will benefit from any of this happening. As a user myself, I'm so tired of "forced ads", which makes me think a high percentage of ads revenue is fake/generated, not genuine.
high_5 1mo ago
The HTTP protocol and HTML fromat that Tim Berners Lee created, were meant for sharing documentation and information which foster collaboration via internet. It wasn't really meant for doing business in trusted environments. The WWW acronym should stand for Worldwide Wild West.
swader999 1mo ago
No, they should demand 'Verified Purchases'. We know this is technically possible.
spiderfarmer 1mo ago
AI scraper traffic from residential bots is skewing all statistics. That's why I created my own advertising platform for my niche. Loaded server side, only geo and context targeted. No cookies, no focus on views. Only click tracking (minimal bot noise). I do have to find advertisers myself, but I rather go after advertisers with a good name than display scam ads for toe fungi remedies.
donmcronald 1mo ago
I can't read the whole article, but beyond verified clicks in email I worry that tech like Passkeys is going to get used against us. As soon as you take away the friction of entering passwords, and let passkeys authenticate automatically, why not have authentication / authorization for every action? I get prompted to add Passkeys constantly. It makes me wonder if vendors will start doing it automatically "for your own good", like DoH in browser.
_fat_santa 1mo ago
A little off topic but for anyone using Thunderbird, I highly recommend BetterUnsubscribe[1] to help combat spam. Since installing I've basically eliminated marketing emails from my inbox. I've used tools like unroll.me in the past but I found that a one-time review doesn't really help much since every signup and every form entry always risks you getting more marketing emails and having to go to another service all the time creates alot of friction. That extension lets you unsubscribe the moment you see a marketing email hit your inbox. [1]: https://github.com/LucBennett/BetterUnsubscribe https://github.com/LucBennett/BetterUnsubscribe

37 points by thm 1mo ago

Analogue hole. This 'Verified Clicks' doesn't make sense. What makes a click 'verified', bots can still click links with browser use anyway and you will not be able to tell.

bitwize 1mo ago
Presumably a verified click is a click traceable to an attested human identity through your government's soon-to-be-implemented "KYC to use a computer or smartphone" policy.
- VladVladikoff 1mo ago
  The ad fraud could still come from malware running on KYC’d computers, while the owner of that computer is blissfully unaware.
  - wongarsu 1mo ago
    Just lock down the OS so we can send a reliable signal whether the click originated from a real hardware input device or was software-driven Oh, you programmed your Arduino to present itself as a mouse via USB, so you can do automated click-fraud that way? No problem, only certified hardware allowed as input devices from now on I'm not sure what we are going to do about robot arms using touchscreens, or little devices that trick mouse sensors into thinking it's moving. Maybe continuous fingerprint reading?
    - blooalien 1mo ago
      > I'm not sure what we are going to do about robot arms using touchscreens, or little devices that trick mouse sensors into thinking it's moving. Maybe continuous fingerprint reading? Heartbeat monitor paired to your mouse's fingerprint readers under the mouse buttons while your webcam verifies your Face ID? "Approved live human detected: Please spit in DNA analyzer to verify."
      - pixl97 1mo ago
        >Please spit in DNA analyzer to verify." Ah, so this is why Anthropic is banning all biological work on it's LLM, it doesn't want you to make an automatic spitting machine to defeat its future ads.
pjc50 1mo ago
"Please drink verification can" (Black Mirror)
- mananaysiempre 1mo ago
  Not Black Mirror, 2013 vintage 4chan.
  - pjc50 1mo ago
    I stand corrected. It seems like the inspiration was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits , but that doesn't have the same link to advertising. Although it still looks alarmingly prescient.
garciasn 1mo ago
https://archive.ph/PIrQi https://archive.ph/PIrQi The article is about email marketing. Some company has a proprietary algorithm that purportedly detects whether a click is legitimate based on 8y of development and data collection. It’s definitely a race against the growing capabilities of the models in use and one that will be very difficult to win which is why there has been a significant push toward verification across the Internet—not because of the children, but because of the revenue.
- Retr0id 1mo ago
  And I have a proprietary algorithm that can identify whether Brooklyn Bridge is up for sale or not.
  - garciasn 1mo ago
    I mean it’s a marketing PR piece that’s likely targeted toward CMOs who are in love with email marketing. Email marketing is inexpensive, easier to measure, relies on the ridiculous CDPs and ESPs they’ve been tricked into investing in, and the measured numbers are larger than other digital channels. The problem isn’t that bots are clicking, it’s that those big numbers aren’t going up and to the right in a reliable way any longer and those CMOs need to change how they’re measuring media. At the end of the day, CMOs need to be measuring contribution to revenue, not meaningless marketing metrics the rest of the C-suite doesn’t give the slightest of fucks about. But that’s super hard for most organizations without competent Marketing Science or capable agencies, and it’s seemingly expensive because their budgets are already tight from all of the fly-by-night shit they’re over invested in. So; they continue to push what they know as well as chip away at their budgets with silly providers who provide little value instead of biting the bullet and doing the right thing.
  - blooalien 1mo ago
    > ... whether Brooklyn Bridge is up for sale or not. My "Magic 8-Ball" says: "Signs point to yes."

deleted 1mo ago

[deleted]

mikeaskew4 1mo ago

They won’t.

jrm4 1mo ago

Big picture, it kind of blew my mind a few years ago when I realized this: If one concern is the surveillance panopticon thing, it's mitigated by the fact that online advertising itself is a business "fraught" with the fact that there is just as much of an incentive for the seller of ads to be loose with the truth and to use those sorts of tactics as it is for anyone else.

pooploop64 1mo ago
That's probably why Google tolerates all the blatant fraud against them by the avalanche of spam sites ruining the service. They're frauding google but google is frauding advertisers and they wouldn't be able to commit fraud to such a high degree if they couldn't tell advertisers that their ads got 10 gorillion fake impressions.

toss1 1mo ago

Surprising it is taking advertisers this long to wake up, considering the decades I've been reading articles on HN about the massive fraud rates from entire fraud ecosystems. The saying in marketing used to be: "Half of all marketing dollars are wasted, but we never know which half". In the internet, it seems to be more like "90% are wasted" and literally never even get a human impression, nevermind a human click-thru and sale. What was always surprising to me was how the advertisers just went along with the scam. Perhaps as if the marketers' bonuses depended more on advertisement budget spent instead of sales increased. If that's the case, what is making them catch on now?

pjc50 1mo ago
It was generally believed that "pivot to video" was entirely fraudulent. What's happening now is the retreat from the open internet; users are either taking the Google AI search summary as gospel and not clicking through, or just going to chatgpt by themselves. Traffic from actual humans to non-FAANG pages is falling.
- malfist 1mo ago
  Theres a good cause for that. These marketers have spammed the entire internet with ai slop or blogspam to make search results useless.
blooalien 1mo ago
> If that's the case, what is making them catch on now? Perhaps the threat that "AI" will soon be the only "eyes" that see (and subsequently ignore) their online adverts?
kijin 1mo ago
Back when 90% of ad spending was wasted, they still made money from the 10% that resulted in sales. That expectation was built into the CPM/CPC, and hence the ad budget. With the amount of bot traffic I'm seeing these days, I would guess that the waste ratio is more like 99% now. That means a 90% reduction in conversions for the same ad budget. Surely someone is feeling the difference.
1mo ago

ashleyn 1mo ago

Seems like important context behind the push for things like Web Environment Integrity (similar in concept to "trusted computing" if you were around for that controversy in the early 2000s): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Environment_Integrity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Environment_Integrity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Computing If your service providers are funded by ads, and ads begin demanding "verified clicks", your service providers are greatly incentivised to begin pushing for locking down your ability to run what you want on your own hardware. Through manipulation of web standards, or through lobbying.

CodesInChaos 1mo ago
BTW Google had another go at forcing Treacherous Computing on people. This time it's a reCAPTCHA successor, which requires the user to scan a QR code using a Google/Apple owned phone.
- WarmWash 1mo ago
  People need to just take responsibility and pay for shit. Like if you don't want to be kicked around, you need to be the one kicking. People interpret business as hostility because they cannot conceive of the idea that they themselves should pay for a service.
  - mrguyorama 1mo ago
    There is nothing in US consumer rights law that prevents any of this being done to someone who pays. As such, companies do all this to consumers who pay.
  - jabroni_salad 1mo ago
    I feel like it is actually payment pages where I see these kinds of bouncers the most, though. click fraud is inefficient, but payment fraud can actually ruin a business.
  - CodesInChaos 1mo ago

jabroni_salad 1mo ago

Advertisers should be grateful I even skimmed the subject line

wolvoleo 1mo ago

Tbh I'm all in favour of ad fraud because it undermines the whole industry which I'd love to see disappear. I love running ad nauseam which instead of hiding ads clicks them all in an invisible browser, making advertisers pay for ads I didn't even see. And devaluing the entire concept. I wish ublock origin did this too, it's so common that it would totally screw up entire ecosystems. The number of people running ad nauseam is unfortunately minimal. And no, I'm not doing anything illegal. I can do whatever I want with the content on my computer. Ad fraud is a term invented for websites creating artificial clicks so they get paid, the end user doesn't benefit from it.

abc123abc123 1mo ago
I often wondered if this strategy could work with email/phone scammers as well? Have an LLM write positive email responses, stringing them along as long as possible. Imagine the Nigerian prince of scams... instead of getting 0.1% response rates that he can work on, he gets 99% responses of encouraging replies stringing him along. He would drown in false positives. On the other hand, the Nigerian prince of scams would probably just use his LLM:s to take care of the answers, and we'll have email storms of LLM:s stringing along LLM:s.
- wolvoleo 1mo ago
  > On the other hand, the Nigerian prince of scams would probably just use his LLM:s to take care of the answers, and we'll have email storms of LLM:s stringing along LLM:s. I already see that happening in other ways. On a forum I frequent there's been a user who instantly replies to new articles with a long irrelevant blahblah with a bunch of bulletpoints and emoji. And a while later another user started insta-replying to everyone with the same kind of crap. Both were banned after a while and the forum now has a stricter "No AI" policy but even that caused some uproar, some users say they want it so they can be more elaborate without having the linguistic skills. But personally I'd love to see it go because most of these replies added nothing to the conversation. You can do nice things with AI, yes. But it needs a human to tell it what to do. If you just put in a generic prompt "Write something insightful about this article" it's going to provide nothing but slop.
- 1mo ago

marcelo_pr 1mo ago

I think the end user will benefit from any of this happening. As a user myself, I'm so tired of "forced ads", which makes me think a high percentage of ads revenue is fake/generated, not genuine.

high_5 1mo ago

The HTTP protocol and HTML fromat that Tim Berners Lee created, were meant for sharing documentation and information which foster collaboration via internet. It wasn't really meant for doing business in trusted environments. The WWW acronym should stand for Worldwide Wild West.

swader999 1mo ago

No, they should demand 'Verified Purchases'. We know this is technically possible.

spiderfarmer 1mo ago

AI scraper traffic from residential bots is skewing all statistics. That's why I created my own advertising platform for my niche. Loaded server side, only geo and context targeted. No cookies, no focus on views. Only click tracking (minimal bot noise). I do have to find advertisers myself, but I rather go after advertisers with a good name than display scam ads for toe fungi remedies.

donmcronald 1mo ago

I can't read the whole article, but beyond verified clicks in email I worry that tech like Passkeys is going to get used against us. As soon as you take away the friction of entering passwords, and let passkeys authenticate automatically, why not have authentication / authorization for every action? I get prompted to add Passkeys constantly. It makes me wonder if vendors will start doing it automatically "for your own good", like DoH in browser.

_fat_santa 1mo ago

A little off topic but for anyone using Thunderbird, I highly recommend BetterUnsubscribe[1] to help combat spam. Since installing I've basically eliminated marketing emails from my inbox. I've used tools like unroll.me in the past but I found that a one-time review doesn't really help much since every signup and every form entry always risks you getting more marketing emails and having to go to another service all the time creates alot of friction. That extension lets you unsubscribe the moment you see a marketing email hit your inbox. [1]: https://github.com/LucBennett/BetterUnsubscribe https://github.com/LucBennett/BetterUnsubscribe