10 ms·

How 'One Weird Trick' Conquered The Internet

294 points by weston 13y ago

junto 13y ago
This is the same as the 'Nigerian 419' fraud concept. They fill the email with spelling and grammar mistakes and in doing so, they filter out the marginally intelligent, resulting in a pre-filter to attract the most gullible. The crappy, hand drawn ads, the dire videos, and the bad production have the same effect. The punter needs to be a gullible fool, since a fool and his money are soon parted.
- grimtrigger 13y ago
  Makes sense, but Occams razor is more than enough to explain the bad grammar and production effects. Any evidence its a conscious decision?
  - mmanfrin 13y ago
    PlentyOfFish did a small test: http://blog.ads.pof.com/2012/04/03/throw-everything-you-know-about-ads-out-the-window-pics-inside/ http://blog.ads.pof.com/2012/04/03/throw-everything-you-know...
    - swamp40 13y ago
      Great resource - thanks!
    - atondwal 13y ago
      Hmm, I didn't even notice the first ad, because I subconsciously scanned over it as an ad. The second one looked liked content to me, so I saw that one, and even felt an impulse to click and see what kinda game someone built with such a campy art style
  - wutbrodo 13y ago
    Microsoft Research wrote a paper about the intentional use of bad grammar/spelling in 419 scams. Keeping the ostensible source as the email Nigerian is another tactic along these lines, since anyone even slightly savvy will see that as an immediate red flag after all these years. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/tzink/archive/2012/06/24/bad-spelling-in-419s-is-a-screening-tool.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/tzink/archive/2012/06/24/bad-spellin...
    - grimtrigger 13y ago
      I skimmed the actual paper and wasn't very impressed. It uses theoretical models without any actual data to support its claim. The claim the paper actually proves is: If there is a technique that successfully weeds out false positives, then such a technique can be used profitably. Which is a far cry from their supposed claims, that the spammers are using bad grammar and "Nigeria" to weed out false positives. They basically proved a molehill and claimed a mountain.
- sc00ter 13y ago
  Just like it says in the article. (You did read the article, right?)
  - corin_ 13y ago
    Although the article only made that connection with the video (unless I was skim-reading too much), not with the crappy advert drawings (which they assigned other, perhaps equally relevant logic to) or moronic messaging.
    - recycleme 13y ago
      It also mentioned the badly drawn ads.
- brazzy 13y ago
  I heard it different: all that stuff is intended to make the mark feel superior and less likely to suspect that they're being scammed. Makes a lot more sense to me.
  - JonnieCache 13y ago
    That's pretty much the same thing.
Havoc 13y ago
I like how one of the stories in slate's sidebar is "The Secret Ingredient [...] will blow your mind"
- MartinCron 13y ago
  Spoiler: It's Mint in your iced coffee. I'm eager to try it now.
  - jmduke 13y ago
    Mint and salt in a cold brew is incredibly good.
  - graue 13y ago
    Interesting! I tried mint with black tea and wasn't a fan. To me, they were two great tastes that did not go great together. But I love mint with green tea or yerba mate. I'm surprised it mixes with coffee.
    - surement 13y ago
      One interesting thing I found was mint and coca tea. It's readily available in grocery stores in Peru, and it's an incredible cure for a hangover.
      - jrockway 13y ago
        Is it the mint or the cocaine that cures the hangover? :)
  - derefr 13y ago
    Mint facts! The reason people say to put toothpaste on a bruise or a hickey is that toothpaste is traditionally flavored with mint. It's really the peppermint oil they're after, which is a strong vasodilator. For this same reason, peppermint oil is, at high doses, an abortificant.
    - 13y ago
M4v3R 13y ago
The article doesn't seem to mention this, but there is another trick in these guys arsenals - fake news articles about their products. They build entire webpages, along with side-stories and article comments that support their product. They look SO real that once I (and I consider myself pretty tech-savvy, having access to Internet for 15 years) fell for it briefly, and then had to explain it to my wife who stumbled upon them as well. I was truly impressed by amount of work these guys went through not only to write a pretty long science-looking article, but to build a whole (albeit pretty static) webpage and write realistic comment sections. Sadly, this whole effort is done to deceive other people.
- chewxy 13y ago
  Eventually they do one better, and actually produce content cheaply - aka Demand Media. Flogs and farticle sites are so 2006 though. Now they use markov chain based generators to generate sites based on content scraped off other sites.
  - adambratt 13y ago
    More info on this? Hadn't heard of this being done other than through content spinners
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
- nadaviv 13y ago
  > They build entire webpages, along with side-stories and article comments that support their product. A lot of those websites are created by affiliates, and not by the product owner. The affiliate commission for digital products is pretty high (75%-85% is quite common), and affiliates often create various review sites for the products they're promoting, or use existing sites they own and add reviews written by "users" of the product.
- Anonymous238 13y ago
  Fake product reviews are popular as well. They'll do a top 5 write-up where their product, or the one offering the highest paid commissions is first, followed by 4 real products in that niche that are well respected. For example, let's say teeth whitening. I don't know who tops the charts here, but let's say Crest Whitestrips is a big name. They'll list them as second, and say they're great. Then they bring in their loaded product for number one. "Don't get me wrong, Crest Whitestrips is one of the best products available, but I was completely surprised by XYZ. I have to say, after three weeks with the product, I think it offered similar results at half the price, and I found they better formed to my teeth, allowing for more comfort." Insert sales or referral link here.
CGamesPlay 13y ago
http://www.oneweirdkerneltrick.com/ http://www.oneweirdkerneltrick.com/
- StavrosK 13y ago
  That's amazing.
- patmcguire 13y ago
  Oh my god, how deep are there fake links?
  - aspensmonster 13y ago
    They're this deep: http://www.oneweirdkerneltrick.com/polytope.pdf http://www.oneweirdkerneltrick.com/polytope.pdf >Abstract >Pyramid schemes are a well-known way of taking bundles of money from suckers. This paper is not about them. Although on first inspection, this paper sounds like it is about pyramid schemes, we promise that it is not. And a little further down... >1. Introduction and Related Work >This is not a pyramid scheme. This is an easy way for you to make money. It is not related to a pyramid scheme because it is a polytope scheme. For a comparison, please see Fig.2 >If you want guaranteed financial freedom and personal fulfillment from algebraic geometry, sign up now to invest in our gift-giving invest- ment scheme. All laid out in beautifully typeset LaTeX. Brings a tear to my eye.
    - Tloewald 13y ago
      The paper is truly awesome and fractally hilarious. Thanks for the link.
    - bravura 13y ago
      Found a typo: "You do not want to be pursuing some Ph.D. when all your friends are pouring crystal all over benjamins in the Cayman islands." "crystal" should by "Cristal", the much hyped bubbly in hip-hop lyrics.
    - surement 13y ago
MartinCron 13y ago
I would feel a lot better about Slate (and everyone else) if they didn't run those "SPONSORED FROM AROUND THE WEB" pseudo-article links at the bottom of each page with this exact same kind of manipulative ads in them. Come on Slate. You think better of your audience than this, right?
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- brandnewlow 13y ago
  They are a plague run by publishers to try to boost their own traffic and revenue via arbitrage. I complained to the Slate folks about the image as running under their articles these day. Those are really awful.
  - gee_totes 13y ago
    Plague? That depends on what you click on. Since I can't get rid of them (even with Adblock), I've trained those ad tracking/interest algorithms to add a "scroll down for boobs" feature to their client websites.
    - stephengillie 13y ago
      Add in the adblocking Hosts file (and maybe Ghostery) on top of Adblock to really get rid of them. http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm
- eli 13y ago
  That's Outbrain: http://www.outbrain.com/engage/ http://www.outbrain.com/engage/ In theory the ads are targeted to the content of the site, but I agree that they're often pretty crummy.
  - ig1 13y ago
    As far as I can tell, that's not Outbrain, Outbrain is the "More from Slate" / "From Around the Web" section. The "SPONSORED FROM AROUND THE WEB" section appears to be a standard ad panel from Content.ad.
brandnewlow 13y ago
When we launched Perfect Audience, we wanted to make things easy to use and as open as possible to marketers looking to get into retargeting. Yes, we were a bit naive. The sheer multitude of bad actors participating in the ad/marketing world is bewildering. It tooks us a solid month after launch to get processes in place that let us weed out the bozos swiftly without tying up the whole team. We have many many of these "one trick" people sign up and try to use our tools. We'll keep turning them away and staying vigilant for the next ruse.
- MartinCron 13y ago
  Keep fighting the good fight.
- nhebb 13y ago
  > weed out the bozos swiftly without tying up the whole team. I bet there's a trick to that. You should sell an ebook.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- jacques_chester 13y ago
  "Marketers hate him"
- iopq 13y ago
  One weird trick that an advertising company found to filter out low quality ads. Click here!
sokrates 13y ago
> You've seen them. No. AdBlock.
- mindslight 13y ago
  It's truly amazing the amount of mental energy people will apparently spend dwelling on advertising, even worrying that if they accidentally click it their life could be forfeit to a scam, but yet they won't spend the five minutes it would take to simply install Adblock.
  - vacri 13y ago
    I use flashblock instead of adblock. Advertising pays for much of the internet, so I feel it's reasonable to let some of it through. Flashblock kills the worst offenders, and given I also run noscript (which isn't for everyone), the rest of the bad ones are taken care of as well. Simple images are allowed through, and these kinds of ads aren't particularly distracting. In the rare case there is a bad animated .gif, hitting 'esc' stops them cycling. Adblock just feels like bad faith to me - there is no 'give and take', it's just 'take'.
    - MBCook 13y ago
      I used to skip adblock for the same reason. Using Flashblock used to be good enough. I just wanted to avoid animated crud and auto-play audio, and it worked great. Two years ago (or so) I installed adblock and set it to only block those annoying little social share buttons which started infecting everything. Eventually I had to turn the main rules on. As more sites started to put more and more obnoxious "Take our survey!" and "Hey, why not sign up before you view the site!" pop-ups and JS-hover-ads and such, I couldn't stand it any more. I make an effort to support the sites I like. I have subscriptions to Ars, Reddit, LWN, and a few other sites. I turn the ad-blocking off on sites that act reasonably (Reddit and LWN are two examples). It amazes me to use other people's computers (or my own iPad) sometimes. I'll go to a site I see links from now-and-then and realize just how much ridiculous crud is getting filtered out by AdBlock. I understand your point of view, I still largely feel that way. But things were getting so intrusive I finally gave in. I like that AdBlock has a "good ads" program, I hope it succeeds.
Agathos 13y ago
How this stay-at-home mom used one weird trick to conquer the internet! Click here! (And yes, that's how I parsed the link title at first glance.)
mistercow 13y ago
>Why are the illustrations done by small children using MS Paint? None of those images look like the were drawn by a small child. The ones in the screen cap vary from "kind of crappy, but obviously done by an adult" to "probably the work of professional illustrator".
rogerbinns 13y ago
> “Research on persuasion shows the more arguments you list in favor of something, regardless of the quality of those arguments, the more that people tend to believe it,” [1] has some different research which claims that people average the arguments made, rather than summing them up, which most expect. It won't make any difference if you have a whole bunch of low value arguments, but will if there a combination of strong points and weaker ones. [1] http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/10/the_presentation_mistake_you_d.html http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/10/the_presentation_mistake_you...
throwawayg99 13y ago
I work with a dozen or so people who are involved in this sort of work. I think it is very interesting to see how they rationalize and deal with their moral compass internally. One of the guys is the most caring, liberal, loving person you'd ever meet; he justifies being involved in this sort of skeezy marketing work as "I can take a small amount from a lot of people and amplify the result to do good with a lot of money." He genuinely believes this. A lot of the other guys simply try not to see the "punters" (potential customers [1]) as real people, they are disconnected through the impersonal nature of the internet. [1] http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british/punter_2 http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british/punter_2
- MBCook 13y ago
  I saw lots of cognitive dissonance when I worked for a company that was something of an advertising firm. Everyone hates pop-ups and spam... but it's probably OK if we do it. We can turn off the user's pop-up blocker right? What do you mean we can't get around it? How are we supposed to get them to see our side offers if we can't do pop-ups? And the constant discussions about how to keep our emails from landing in spam folders. Since we weren't running a scam, there had to be a way to get our emails in the inbox right? Even though we don't know the person... bought their address from someone (who bought it from someone)... sent them 3 emails this week already... I'm glad to not be involved in some of that any more.
  - corin_ 13y ago
    Just to show a little balance - there are those of us in advertising who try to do the best we can for our audience, and don't even need morals to make that decision, since doing the right thing gives us better results than trying to trick people.
    - svmegatron 13y ago
      That's one of the beautiful things about advertising that a lot of us (well, I assume a lot of us - I can't be the only one, right?) did not realize at first. Especially over the long term, being respectful toward the audience leaves you in a better position to market to that audience. The end result is you make more money.
corwinstephen 13y ago
The culmination of this article was just as obvious and unsurprising as the very ads it describes.
timcederman 13y ago
Reminds me a lot of the X10 ads that used to be everywhere in late-90s/early 2000s.
- rhizome 13y ago
  It was more recent than that, and there was a great deal of overlap with Netflix's popunder ads (which still persist to this day).
  - vidarh 13y ago
    X10 came online in '96, and their most aggressive campaigns peaked around 2001. They filed for chapter 11 in 2003: http://news.cnet.com/2100-1014_3-5095260.html http://news.cnet.com/2100-1014_3-5095260.html I don't know if they emerged or if the remains were bought, but the "current" X10 never got anywhere near as aggressive as their pre-chapter 11 self.
callmeed 13y ago
Scams aside, it would be interesting to use some of these techniques on landing pages for legitimate, valuable SaaS apps. "One weird trick to improve your SEO/conversions/customer satisfaction/whatver KPI" which links to a page with a crude, long-form, un-pausable video. After that, you could probably at least get them to create a trial account. Has/would anyone try this?
- username223 13y ago
  "Scams aside", your scam would work as well as theirs.
  - corin_ 13y ago
    It's not a scam because of the way they hook users, it's a scam because the end product doesn't work. If callmeed has a genuine, decent product at the end of it then his version wouldn't be a scam, even if he marketed it the same way as these guys.
    - king_jester 13y ago
      It's a scam because it deliberately attempts to undermine the reader's ability to determine if the product being sold is factually able to do what it says. These techniques take advantage of distorting information literacy in order to make a sale, regardless of the effectiveness of the product.
- showerst 13y ago
  I'm certain that people have, but (as the article mentions) part of the point of these is to lure a certain kind of unsophisticated consumer while filtering out the others, which is not exactly a strategy you want to pursue for SaaS.
username223 13y ago
I'm sorry if this is trivial, but “what’s holding you back from the big penis you deserve" has to be one of the greatest phrases ever written.
cpeterso 13y ago
Another "weird trick" sites use is to include numbers in headlines. The sidebar of this very Slate article lists headlines for "7 of John Adams' greatest insults" and "'A Different World': 12 Things We Learned". There must some psychological lure that makes readers think "oh, that is such a specific number that it must be a very important and definitive list!" :\
- personalcompute 13y ago
  Note that it's not numbers per-se, it is a list of things (with the length of the list identified, and often a 'top' list.) This is a well known method to drive hits in blogging.
- cheald 13y ago
  People consume bullet points easily. Headlines that promise a quick, content dense read frequently perform well.
- InclinedPlane 13y ago
  This is basically the entire premise of cracked.com.
- philwelch 13y ago
  Yes, the well-worn "list of n things": http://www.paulgraham.com/nthings.html http://www.paulgraham.com/nthings.html
orangethirty 13y ago
I stumbled into some weird data as to how startups may be able to use this kind of technique without exploiting people. Yeah, it sounds hard to believe. But you have to understand that every technique out there can be used for good. Anyhow, turns out that there are some tricks that these type of advertisers use to increase their response. One just needs to carefully read the source of their pages (specially the Javascript), and you will find lots of interesting stuff in it. Just beware. Once you dig into this type of advertising your view on the subject might change dramatically. You can learn more about it here: http://bit.ly/13wOrj2 http://bit.ly/13wOrj2 Edit: 16 clicks on 2 minutes. This sort of technique works on everybody, including smart hackers. Its mostly about talking about what you want. Some people want to lose weight, others control their diabetes. Apparently, lots of people want to learn of a little known advertising secrets for startups. I should make a Copy as a Service startup. (: See how many are suckered into clicking: http://bit.ly/13wOrj2+ http://bit.ly/13wOrj2+
- turtlerose 13y ago
  Oh, come on. There's such an obvious difference of situations here it's not even worth going into.
  - zombio 13y ago
    Agreed, it was obviously satire.
    - lotharbot 13y ago
      I considered clicking just to see if it was a rickroll.
      - robobenjie 13y ago
        I was disappointed it wasn't.
- derleth 13y ago
  Congratulations. You're smart enough to abuse a position of some minor trust. That's never been done before. The fact your draw a nonsensical conclusion from it just makes the moment that much more special.
D9u 13y ago
Conquered the internet? I don't think so. I've never clicked on any of those ads, and I'm sure that millions of other users of Ad Block, etc, have never even seen these ads. Of interest to me was the author's reluctance to click on links due to malware threats. Even when I used WinXP, years ago, I never have been infected with any malware, but then, I'm not the average PC user.
- ToastyMallows 13y ago
  What, you don't want free animated smilies?
arnehormann 13y ago
If you have to watch the video for 15-30 minutes, I think it's not the persuasion aspect but probably loading different sites in an iframe to defraud advertisers: http://www.behind-the-enemy-lines.com/2011/03/uncovering-advertising-fraud-scheme.html http://www.behind-the-enemy-lines.com/2011/03/uncovering-adv...
interject 13y ago
What actually happens when you hand over your credit card details? Do you get an eBook or something? The article doesn't actually say.
- stonemetal 13y ago
  The last paragraph hints at it. It appears two were pills and one was a pamphlet, the cinnamon for diabetes one isn't clear probably a pamphlet or ebook.
runn1ng 13y ago
Well... I excepted the article to go deeper. Investigate who actually pays these ads,,where does the money go, why are they allowed to basically lie in the ads. Instead the author just clicked on the ads and watched the videos. Well, I can do that too.
RyanMcGreal 13y ago
Once again I give thanks for AdBlock.
talmand 13y ago
I once worked for a company that operated along these lines. It wasn't quite as bad as those mentioned in the article due to the fact that the industry in question had several government agencies watching almost everything they do but it was an interesting learning experience. There's likely two reasons why so many follow the same pattern. It's possible that many did enough A/B testing to determine the best direction that provided the best results. More likely one person came up with the pattern, the rest decided that it seemed a successive effort, and they all copied that one person's pattern. I can't tell you how many times I created a landing page and/or email that was built in one specific way that originated with one guy that the rest perceived as the most successive guy in their type of marketing. If he said it, then it was gold. It was a tad disheartening as there was no real design involved. "Copy is king!" was the mantra and a nice design was not necessary. Even a decent design that made the copy easier to read was not considered worth the time. This was typically the type of landing page that uses the funnel method of long, sensational text with call-to-actions sprinkled down the page leading to a short order form at the bottom. This insistence of copying everybody else because of perceived success, no data to support that perception of course, made for interesting conversations. "We're doing it this way." "Why?" "Because that's how they did it." "Why should we do it because they did?" "If they're doing it then it must work." Although it was always fun to introduce a new kink to the marketing pattern and watch everybody else copy you. Especially when we hadn't yet decided if the new method even worked or not. My favorite story that shows how locked into a pattern they would be until something shattered their illusions involved one sales email. For the longest time it was the rule to use as few images as possible in emails. The reasoning being because modern email clients do not automatically download images so you don't want things hidden from the potential customer before they interact with the email. I fought that quite a bit using legit companies like Apple and NewEgg as examples in that they successfully sell stuff and use images quite frequently through their emails. No dice. So one day I design a new email template that did use images heavily, our products were displayed in a grid that looked like stickers placed on the email. That meant that the copy listing details and pricing of the products were in the images, which was a no-no. I didn't tell anyone I did this knowing that all of them had their email clients downloading images automatically that came from us. The email was approved and sent out. A few weeks later I asked how that email did, "Best money-making email we've ever sent out!" I then confessed to what I had done to their totally shocked confusion. After that I was able to actually design stuff that looked nice instead of the scammy look they insisted upon. And of course most of those newer designs, not all mind you, made more money. Interesting that I didn't see many other companies copying the new pattern. I guess it broke the mold enough to not be perceived as successful. Anyway, even with the occasional moral problems, it was a good learning experience. Almost everything I know about SEO, ads, email, marketing, analytics, customer relations, and much more came from this company. Kind of gives me a somewhat unique perspective at my new job at a more traditional agency.

294 points by weston 13y ago

junto 13y ago

This is the same as the 'Nigerian 419' fraud concept. They fill the email with spelling and grammar mistakes and in doing so, they filter out the marginally intelligent, resulting in a pre-filter to attract the most gullible. The crappy, hand drawn ads, the dire videos, and the bad production have the same effect. The punter needs to be a gullible fool, since a fool and his money are soon parted.

grimtrigger 13y ago
Makes sense, but Occams razor is more than enough to explain the bad grammar and production effects. Any evidence its a conscious decision?
- mmanfrin 13y ago
  PlentyOfFish did a small test: http://blog.ads.pof.com/2012/04/03/throw-everything-you-know-about-ads-out-the-window-pics-inside/ http://blog.ads.pof.com/2012/04/03/throw-everything-you-know...
  - swamp40 13y ago
    Great resource - thanks!
  - atondwal 13y ago
    Hmm, I didn't even notice the first ad, because I subconsciously scanned over it as an ad. The second one looked liked content to me, so I saw that one, and even felt an impulse to click and see what kinda game someone built with such a campy art style
- wutbrodo 13y ago
  Microsoft Research wrote a paper about the intentional use of bad grammar/spelling in 419 scams. Keeping the ostensible source as the email Nigerian is another tactic along these lines, since anyone even slightly savvy will see that as an immediate red flag after all these years. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/tzink/archive/2012/06/24/bad-spelling-in-419s-is-a-screening-tool.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/tzink/archive/2012/06/24/bad-spellin...
  - grimtrigger 13y ago
    I skimmed the actual paper and wasn't very impressed. It uses theoretical models without any actual data to support its claim. The claim the paper actually proves is: If there is a technique that successfully weeds out false positives, then such a technique can be used profitably. Which is a far cry from their supposed claims, that the spammers are using bad grammar and "Nigeria" to weed out false positives. They basically proved a molehill and claimed a mountain.
sc00ter 13y ago
Just like it says in the article. (You did read the article, right?)
- corin_ 13y ago
  Although the article only made that connection with the video (unless I was skim-reading too much), not with the crappy advert drawings (which they assigned other, perhaps equally relevant logic to) or moronic messaging.
  - recycleme 13y ago
    It also mentioned the badly drawn ads.
brazzy 13y ago
I heard it different: all that stuff is intended to make the mark feel superior and less likely to suspect that they're being scammed. Makes a lot more sense to me.
- JonnieCache 13y ago
  That's pretty much the same thing.

Havoc 13y ago

I like how one of the stories in slate's sidebar is "The Secret Ingredient [...] will blow your mind"

MartinCron 13y ago
Spoiler: It's Mint in your iced coffee. I'm eager to try it now.
- jmduke 13y ago
  Mint and salt in a cold brew is incredibly good.
- graue 13y ago
  Interesting! I tried mint with black tea and wasn't a fan. To me, they were two great tastes that did not go great together. But I love mint with green tea or yerba mate. I'm surprised it mixes with coffee.
  - surement 13y ago
    One interesting thing I found was mint and coca tea. It's readily available in grocery stores in Peru, and it's an incredible cure for a hangover.
    - jrockway 13y ago
      Is it the mint or the cocaine that cures the hangover? :)
- derefr 13y ago
  Mint facts! The reason people say to put toothpaste on a bruise or a hickey is that toothpaste is traditionally flavored with mint. It's really the peppermint oil they're after, which is a strong vasodilator. For this same reason, peppermint oil is, at high doses, an abortificant.
  - 13y ago

M4v3R 13y ago

The article doesn't seem to mention this, but there is another trick in these guys arsenals - fake news articles about their products. They build entire webpages, along with side-stories and article comments that support their product. They look SO real that once I (and I consider myself pretty tech-savvy, having access to Internet for 15 years) fell for it briefly, and then had to explain it to my wife who stumbled upon them as well. I was truly impressed by amount of work these guys went through not only to write a pretty long science-looking article, but to build a whole (albeit pretty static) webpage and write realistic comment sections. Sadly, this whole effort is done to deceive other people.

chewxy 13y ago
Eventually they do one better, and actually produce content cheaply - aka Demand Media. Flogs and farticle sites are so 2006 though. Now they use markov chain based generators to generate sites based on content scraped off other sites.
- adambratt 13y ago
  More info on this? Hadn't heard of this being done other than through content spinners
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
nadaviv 13y ago
> They build entire webpages, along with side-stories and article comments that support their product. A lot of those websites are created by affiliates, and not by the product owner. The affiliate commission for digital products is pretty high (75%-85% is quite common), and affiliates often create various review sites for the products they're promoting, or use existing sites they own and add reviews written by "users" of the product.
Anonymous238 13y ago
Fake product reviews are popular as well. They'll do a top 5 write-up where their product, or the one offering the highest paid commissions is first, followed by 4 real products in that niche that are well respected. For example, let's say teeth whitening. I don't know who tops the charts here, but let's say Crest Whitestrips is a big name. They'll list them as second, and say they're great. Then they bring in their loaded product for number one. "Don't get me wrong, Crest Whitestrips is one of the best products available, but I was completely surprised by XYZ. I have to say, after three weeks with the product, I think it offered similar results at half the price, and I found they better formed to my teeth, allowing for more comfort." Insert sales or referral link here.

CGamesPlay 13y ago

http://www.oneweirdkerneltrick.com/ http://www.oneweirdkerneltrick.com/

StavrosK 13y ago
That's amazing.
patmcguire 13y ago
Oh my god, how deep are there fake links?
- aspensmonster 13y ago
  They're this deep: http://www.oneweirdkerneltrick.com/polytope.pdf http://www.oneweirdkerneltrick.com/polytope.pdf >Abstract >Pyramid schemes are a well-known way of taking bundles of money from suckers. This paper is not about them. Although on first inspection, this paper sounds like it is about pyramid schemes, we promise that it is not. And a little further down... >1. Introduction and Related Work >This is not a pyramid scheme. This is an easy way for you to make money. It is not related to a pyramid scheme because it is a polytope scheme. For a comparison, please see Fig.2 >If you want guaranteed financial freedom and personal fulfillment from algebraic geometry, sign up now to invest in our gift-giving invest- ment scheme. All laid out in beautifully typeset LaTeX. Brings a tear to my eye.
  - Tloewald 13y ago
    The paper is truly awesome and fractally hilarious. Thanks for the link.
  - bravura 13y ago
    Found a typo: "You do not want to be pursuing some Ph.D. when all your friends are pouring crystal all over benjamins in the Cayman islands." "crystal" should by "Cristal", the much hyped bubbly in hip-hop lyrics.
  - surement 13y ago

MartinCron 13y ago

I would feel a lot better about Slate (and everyone else) if they didn't run those "SPONSORED FROM AROUND THE WEB" pseudo-article links at the bottom of each page with this exact same kind of manipulative ads in them. Come on Slate. You think better of your audience than this, right?

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
brandnewlow 13y ago
They are a plague run by publishers to try to boost their own traffic and revenue via arbitrage. I complained to the Slate folks about the image as running under their articles these day. Those are really awful.
- gee_totes 13y ago
  Plague? That depends on what you click on. Since I can't get rid of them (even with Adblock), I've trained those ad tracking/interest algorithms to add a "scroll down for boobs" feature to their client websites.
  - stephengillie 13y ago
    Add in the adblocking Hosts file (and maybe Ghostery) on top of Adblock to really get rid of them. http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm
eli 13y ago
That's Outbrain: http://www.outbrain.com/engage/ http://www.outbrain.com/engage/ In theory the ads are targeted to the content of the site, but I agree that they're often pretty crummy.
- ig1 13y ago
  As far as I can tell, that's not Outbrain, Outbrain is the "More from Slate" / "From Around the Web" section. The "SPONSORED FROM AROUND THE WEB" section appears to be a standard ad panel from Content.ad.

brandnewlow 13y ago

When we launched Perfect Audience, we wanted to make things easy to use and as open as possible to marketers looking to get into retargeting. Yes, we were a bit naive. The sheer multitude of bad actors participating in the ad/marketing world is bewildering. It tooks us a solid month after launch to get processes in place that let us weed out the bozos swiftly without tying up the whole team. We have many many of these "one trick" people sign up and try to use our tools. We'll keep turning them away and staying vigilant for the next ruse.

MartinCron 13y ago
Keep fighting the good fight.
nhebb 13y ago
> weed out the bozos swiftly without tying up the whole team. I bet there's a trick to that. You should sell an ebook.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
jacques_chester 13y ago
"Marketers hate him"
iopq 13y ago
One weird trick that an advertising company found to filter out low quality ads. Click here!

sokrates 13y ago

> You've seen them. No. AdBlock.

mindslight 13y ago
It's truly amazing the amount of mental energy people will apparently spend dwelling on advertising, even worrying that if they accidentally click it their life could be forfeit to a scam, but yet they won't spend the five minutes it would take to simply install Adblock.
- vacri 13y ago
  I use flashblock instead of adblock. Advertising pays for much of the internet, so I feel it's reasonable to let some of it through. Flashblock kills the worst offenders, and given I also run noscript (which isn't for everyone), the rest of the bad ones are taken care of as well. Simple images are allowed through, and these kinds of ads aren't particularly distracting. In the rare case there is a bad animated .gif, hitting 'esc' stops them cycling. Adblock just feels like bad faith to me - there is no 'give and take', it's just 'take'.
  - MBCook 13y ago
    I used to skip adblock for the same reason. Using Flashblock used to be good enough. I just wanted to avoid animated crud and auto-play audio, and it worked great. Two years ago (or so) I installed adblock and set it to only block those annoying little social share buttons which started infecting everything. Eventually I had to turn the main rules on. As more sites started to put more and more obnoxious "Take our survey!" and "Hey, why not sign up before you view the site!" pop-ups and JS-hover-ads and such, I couldn't stand it any more. I make an effort to support the sites I like. I have subscriptions to Ars, Reddit, LWN, and a few other sites. I turn the ad-blocking off on sites that act reasonably (Reddit and LWN are two examples). It amazes me to use other people's computers (or my own iPad) sometimes. I'll go to a site I see links from now-and-then and realize just how much ridiculous crud is getting filtered out by AdBlock. I understand your point of view, I still largely feel that way. But things were getting so intrusive I finally gave in. I like that AdBlock has a "good ads" program, I hope it succeeds.

Agathos 13y ago

How this stay-at-home mom used one weird trick to conquer the internet! Click here! (And yes, that's how I parsed the link title at first glance.)

mistercow 13y ago

>Why are the illustrations done by small children using MS Paint? None of those images look like the were drawn by a small child. The ones in the screen cap vary from "kind of crappy, but obviously done by an adult" to "probably the work of professional illustrator".

rogerbinns 13y ago

> “Research on persuasion shows the more arguments you list in favor of something, regardless of the quality of those arguments, the more that people tend to believe it,” [1] has some different research which claims that people average the arguments made, rather than summing them up, which most expect. It won't make any difference if you have a whole bunch of low value arguments, but will if there a combination of strong points and weaker ones. [1] http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/10/the_presentation_mistake_you_d.html http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/10/the_presentation_mistake_you...

throwawayg99 13y ago

I work with a dozen or so people who are involved in this sort of work. I think it is very interesting to see how they rationalize and deal with their moral compass internally. One of the guys is the most caring, liberal, loving person you'd ever meet; he justifies being involved in this sort of skeezy marketing work as "I can take a small amount from a lot of people and amplify the result to do good with a lot of money." He genuinely believes this. A lot of the other guys simply try not to see the "punters" (potential customers [1]) as real people, they are disconnected through the impersonal nature of the internet. [1] http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british/punter_2 http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british/punter_2

MBCook 13y ago
I saw lots of cognitive dissonance when I worked for a company that was something of an advertising firm. Everyone hates pop-ups and spam... but it's probably OK if we do it. We can turn off the user's pop-up blocker right? What do you mean we can't get around it? How are we supposed to get them to see our side offers if we can't do pop-ups? And the constant discussions about how to keep our emails from landing in spam folders. Since we weren't running a scam, there had to be a way to get our emails in the inbox right? Even though we don't know the person... bought their address from someone (who bought it from someone)... sent them 3 emails this week already... I'm glad to not be involved in some of that any more.
- corin_ 13y ago
  Just to show a little balance - there are those of us in advertising who try to do the best we can for our audience, and don't even need morals to make that decision, since doing the right thing gives us better results than trying to trick people.
  - svmegatron 13y ago
    That's one of the beautiful things about advertising that a lot of us (well, I assume a lot of us - I can't be the only one, right?) did not realize at first. Especially over the long term, being respectful toward the audience leaves you in a better position to market to that audience. The end result is you make more money.

corwinstephen 13y ago

The culmination of this article was just as obvious and unsurprising as the very ads it describes.

timcederman 13y ago

Reminds me a lot of the X10 ads that used to be everywhere in late-90s/early 2000s.

rhizome 13y ago
It was more recent than that, and there was a great deal of overlap with Netflix's popunder ads (which still persist to this day).
- vidarh 13y ago
  X10 came online in '96, and their most aggressive campaigns peaked around 2001. They filed for chapter 11 in 2003: http://news.cnet.com/2100-1014_3-5095260.html http://news.cnet.com/2100-1014_3-5095260.html I don't know if they emerged or if the remains were bought, but the "current" X10 never got anywhere near as aggressive as their pre-chapter 11 self.

callmeed 13y ago

Scams aside, it would be interesting to use some of these techniques on landing pages for legitimate, valuable SaaS apps. "One weird trick to improve your SEO/conversions/customer satisfaction/whatver KPI" which links to a page with a crude, long-form, un-pausable video. After that, you could probably at least get them to create a trial account. Has/would anyone try this?

username223 13y ago
"Scams aside", your scam would work as well as theirs.
- corin_ 13y ago
  It's not a scam because of the way they hook users, it's a scam because the end product doesn't work. If callmeed has a genuine, decent product at the end of it then his version wouldn't be a scam, even if he marketed it the same way as these guys.
  - king_jester 13y ago
    It's a scam because it deliberately attempts to undermine the reader's ability to determine if the product being sold is factually able to do what it says. These techniques take advantage of distorting information literacy in order to make a sale, regardless of the effectiveness of the product.
showerst 13y ago
I'm certain that people have, but (as the article mentions) part of the point of these is to lure a certain kind of unsophisticated consumer while filtering out the others, which is not exactly a strategy you want to pursue for SaaS.

username223 13y ago

I'm sorry if this is trivial, but “what’s holding you back from the big penis you deserve" has to be one of the greatest phrases ever written.

cpeterso 13y ago

Another "weird trick" sites use is to include numbers in headlines. The sidebar of this very Slate article lists headlines for "7 of John Adams' greatest insults" and "'A Different World': 12 Things We Learned". There must some psychological lure that makes readers think "oh, that is such a specific number that it must be a very important and definitive list!" :\

personalcompute 13y ago
Note that it's not numbers per-se, it is a list of things (with the length of the list identified, and often a 'top' list.) This is a well known method to drive hits in blogging.
cheald 13y ago
People consume bullet points easily. Headlines that promise a quick, content dense read frequently perform well.
InclinedPlane 13y ago
This is basically the entire premise of cracked.com.
philwelch 13y ago
Yes, the well-worn "list of n things": http://www.paulgraham.com/nthings.html http://www.paulgraham.com/nthings.html

orangethirty 13y ago

I stumbled into some weird data as to how startups may be able to use this kind of technique without exploiting people. Yeah, it sounds hard to believe. But you have to understand that every technique out there can be used for good. Anyhow, turns out that there are some tricks that these type of advertisers use to increase their response. One just needs to carefully read the source of their pages (specially the Javascript), and you will find lots of interesting stuff in it. Just beware. Once you dig into this type of advertising your view on the subject might change dramatically. You can learn more about it here: http://bit.ly/13wOrj2 http://bit.ly/13wOrj2 Edit: 16 clicks on 2 minutes. This sort of technique works on everybody, including smart hackers. Its mostly about talking about what you want. Some people want to lose weight, others control their diabetes. Apparently, lots of people want to learn of a little known advertising secrets for startups. I should make a Copy as a Service startup. (: See how many are suckered into clicking: http://bit.ly/13wOrj2+ http://bit.ly/13wOrj2+

turtlerose 13y ago
Oh, come on. There's such an obvious difference of situations here it's not even worth going into.
- zombio 13y ago
  Agreed, it was obviously satire.
  - lotharbot 13y ago
    I considered clicking just to see if it was a rickroll.
    - robobenjie 13y ago
      I was disappointed it wasn't.
derleth 13y ago
Congratulations. You're smart enough to abuse a position of some minor trust. That's never been done before. The fact your draw a nonsensical conclusion from it just makes the moment that much more special.

D9u 13y ago

Conquered the internet? I don't think so. I've never clicked on any of those ads, and I'm sure that millions of other users of Ad Block, etc, have never even seen these ads. Of interest to me was the author's reluctance to click on links due to malware threats. Even when I used WinXP, years ago, I never have been infected with any malware, but then, I'm not the average PC user.

ToastyMallows 13y ago
What, you don't want free animated smilies?

arnehormann 13y ago

If you have to watch the video for 15-30 minutes, I think it's not the persuasion aspect but probably loading different sites in an iframe to defraud advertisers: http://www.behind-the-enemy-lines.com/2011/03/uncovering-advertising-fraud-scheme.html http://www.behind-the-enemy-lines.com/2011/03/uncovering-adv...

interject 13y ago

What actually happens when you hand over your credit card details? Do you get an eBook or something? The article doesn't actually say.

stonemetal 13y ago
The last paragraph hints at it. It appears two were pills and one was a pamphlet, the cinnamon for diabetes one isn't clear probably a pamphlet or ebook.

runn1ng 13y ago

Well... I excepted the article to go deeper. Investigate who actually pays these ads,,where does the money go, why are they allowed to basically lie in the ads. Instead the author just clicked on the ads and watched the videos. Well, I can do that too.

RyanMcGreal 13y ago

Once again I give thanks for AdBlock.

talmand 13y ago

I once worked for a company that operated along these lines. It wasn't quite as bad as those mentioned in the article due to the fact that the industry in question had several government agencies watching almost everything they do but it was an interesting learning experience. There's likely two reasons why so many follow the same pattern. It's possible that many did enough A/B testing to determine the best direction that provided the best results. More likely one person came up with the pattern, the rest decided that it seemed a successive effort, and they all copied that one person's pattern. I can't tell you how many times I created a landing page and/or email that was built in one specific way that originated with one guy that the rest perceived as the most successive guy in their type of marketing. If he said it, then it was gold. It was a tad disheartening as there was no real design involved. "Copy is king!" was the mantra and a nice design was not necessary. Even a decent design that made the copy easier to read was not considered worth the time. This was typically the type of landing page that uses the funnel method of long, sensational text with call-to-actions sprinkled down the page leading to a short order form at the bottom. This insistence of copying everybody else because of perceived success, no data to support that perception of course, made for interesting conversations. "We're doing it this way." "Why?" "Because that's how they did it." "Why should we do it because they did?" "If they're doing it then it must work." Although it was always fun to introduce a new kink to the marketing pattern and watch everybody else copy you. Especially when we hadn't yet decided if the new method even worked or not. My favorite story that shows how locked into a pattern they would be until something shattered their illusions involved one sales email. For the longest time it was the rule to use as few images as possible in emails. The reasoning being because modern email clients do not automatically download images so you don't want things hidden from the potential customer before they interact with the email. I fought that quite a bit using legit companies like Apple and NewEgg as examples in that they successfully sell stuff and use images quite frequently through their emails. No dice. So one day I design a new email template that did use images heavily, our products were displayed in a grid that looked like stickers placed on the email. That meant that the copy listing details and pricing of the products were in the images, which was a no-no. I didn't tell anyone I did this knowing that all of them had their email clients downloading images automatically that came from us. The email was approved and sent out. A few weeks later I asked how that email did, "Best money-making email we've ever sent out!" I then confessed to what I had done to their totally shocked confusion. After that I was able to actually design stuff that looked nice instead of the scammy look they insisted upon. And of course most of those newer designs, not all mind you, made more money. Interesting that I didn't see many other companies copying the new pattern. I guess it broke the mold enough to not be perceived as successful. Anyway, even with the occasional moral problems, it was a good learning experience. Almost everything I know about SEO, ads, email, marketing, analytics, customer relations, and much more came from this company. Kind of gives me a somewhat unique perspective at my new job at a more traditional agency.