Fraud Bots Cost Advertisers $6 Billion 190
Rambo Tribble writes A new report claims that almost a quarter of the "clicks" registered by digital advertisements are, in fact, from robots created by cyber crime networks to siphon off advertising dollars. The scale and sophistication of the attacks which were discovered caught the investigators by surprise. As one said, "What no one was anticipating is that the bots are extremely effective of looking like a high value consumer."
Advertiser hate coming in... (Score:3, Insightful)
3... 2... 1...
Adblock Edge - What ads? (Score:2)
characters in the body
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But at this point there is no market for paid content on the web, or anywhere else (note the crash-and-burn of investigative journalism as a result) - nobody even remembers or can imagine what a spam-free web would look like. (Including you adblock users, since there is nothing to consume but ad-sponsored content). So it'
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Fair enough, though I am not familiar with it. Let's include craigslist and wikipedia as examples of awesome signal-to-noise ratio that is possible when full monetization through advertising is foregone, for whatever unusual reason that is specific to each.
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Been busy loading all the ads, or why the lateness?
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Bots can handle Captchas more easilly than individuals with accessibility issues.
Emulating Dults (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe because "high value consumers" are usually bot-like drooling idiots.
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Artificial intelligence is by now not far away from natural stupidity.
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you would have thought that EVERYONE would have been anticipating just that though.
there's no point running a bot that looks like a low value customer and provided that you know what counts as a "high value customer" then surely you make it look like that.
like, what kind of idiots commissioned the study?? there's a reason why many people only pay for adclicks that result in a sale. because if you're paying for impressions, you're paying for air.
Good. (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't want the money, I just want to make sure Madison Ave doesn't have it either.
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Did you see the AdNauseam story?
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/... [slashdot.org]
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I'll wager it doesn't actually matter (Score:3, Interesting)
Here's the thing. This is like a microeconomics modeled market. If the click rate is inflated by 25%, I'll wager the payouts compensate by being deflated by 25%. Advertisers are willing to pay for clicks, and will probably adjust their prices accordingly.
One of the few times I feel comfortable saying online that the free market will handily solve this problem, without worrying that I'll end up sounding like a lolberterian.
Re:I'll wager it doesn't actually matter (Score:4, Informative)
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In all honesty, I don't really see this as being much different from High Frequency Trading, or half of the other crap companies do -- price fixing, collusion, non-poaching/non-compete agreements. Basically anything they can do to manipulate the system in their favor, and skim a little off the top.
Someone is always gaming th
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Here's the thing. This is like a microeconomics modeled market. If the click rate is inflated by 25%, I'll wager the payouts compensate by being deflated by 25%. Advertisers are willing to pay for clicks, and will probably adjust their prices accordingly.
One of the few times I feel comfortable saying online that the free market will handily solve this problem, without worrying that I'll end up sounding like a lolberterian.
Doesn't matter? tell that to all the millions of websites that get a 25% cut in advertising revenue because those with bot nets need to get their cut. Your statement is moronic, The effects are potentially massive as it funnels funds away from legitimate sites in favor of the corrupt and I say that as someone that despises advertising.
Re:I'll wager it doesn't actually matter (Score:4, Informative)
You assume this is to divert ad revenues to phony sites? The article disputes that:
Unfortunately, the article didn't get around to explaining why spammers would inflate ad impressions on legitimate sites. Are we so sure these legitimate sites aren't clients of marketing agencies that are paid to increase the clicks, never mind how they do it?
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The article clearly states it is fraudulent bot traffic for selective sites, that doesn't mean the site has to be fraudulent. They said the sites were not organized crime but that doesn't make it any less fraudulent or less intentional. You have a site legitimate or not stealing revenue from others.
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Unfortunately, the article didn't get around to explaining why spammers would inflate ad impressions on legitimate sites.
To make them look like real people. Real people click around the internet and gather cookies. If everyone who comes to your website has no advertiser cookies, it makes your website seem like a scam site.
That's my hypothesis.
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number of reasons.
for example, you're an advertising agency. your campaign payout is tied to the number of rise in traffic. so you buy extra traffic. or maybe you buy it to get extension of the contract. once your campaign stops, you stop the extra traffic. then you have black and white data about your campaign being effective.
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The effects are potentially massive as it funnels funds away from legitimate sites in favor of the corrupt and I say that as someone that despises advertising.
Since I can't think of a single online ad network that I don't consider corrupt, I think this is more funneling funds away from one corrupt group to another corrupt group.
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It isn't funneling revenue away from the ad network, it funnels it away from the websites that have advertising on them. More hits generate more money for the advertising networks, not less.
bot == high value customer (Score:5, Insightful)
That's because a "high value customer" doesn't behave much different than a bot. Sadly, it's not the other way around.
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This is more like "high value mall-rat" than customer.
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I'm a little confused as to what constitutes a high value customer". Wouldn't a customer, to qualify for the title, actually have to buy something?
This is more like "high value mall-rat" than customer.
Here's (roughly) how it works: advertisers bid in real time for ad space on sites. They use what they know about you to determine how much they want to bid for the ad you're about to see. If they want to advertise for some car dealership, people who have searched for cars are more likely to click on an ad for a car dealership, so the advertiser who wants to serve a car dealership ad will make a higher bid than the advertiser who is hocking gummi bears.
If you know enough about which user characteristics i
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I'm a little confused as to what constitutes a high value customer". Wouldn't a customer, to qualify for the title, actually have to buy something?
Well, first of all, it has to be someone stupid enough to click the ad. That's already plenty.
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I was thinking the other way around: bots click many ads, so they appear to be interested in looking at ads, and that is what makes them look like a high value customer.
After all, people like me (AdBlock installed; for that reason alone won't ever click on an ad, not even accidentally) have no value for online advertisers, no matter how rich I am or how much stuff I buy.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:New Revenue System (Score:4, Insightful)
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Which would result in the ad-supported websites dying because very little people actually purchase based on a click through. Instead they'll probably click it, then browse around a bit then come back later and do the transaction.
I'm sure advertisers probably alread
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Doesn't work. Most of advertising is not to generate a direct sale; it is to get your name out. To get your brand image in potential customer's minds, so that when later they're in a shop they gear toward the know, i.e. your, brand. It's impressions that really count for most advertising, not click-through rates, though the latter (with the increased number of visitors on your web site) do give you a nice, warm, fuzzy feeling.
CPALead is annoying (Score:2)
Perhaps advertisers should finally move away from the current revenue system that pays per-click and should instead move towards a profit sharing system where the referring website receives a commission based on any sales or executed transactions.
Then you get things like CPALead where you have to choose one of three offers and complete it in order to view a page. One time I visited a site locked by CPALead and all three were to download, install, and try a Windows-exclusive program. Though I have Wine installed on my PC, it still wouldn't let me in due to my Linux user agent.
Its just practice (Score:2)
Not surprising to me.... (Score:3)
not in the least. I never click on those annoying ads unless its by mistake. Which begs the question...who exactly is clicking on those ads? And how many of those clicks add up to actual sales? I think it's a lot lower than advertisers would lead us to believe.
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I'm just going to leave this here. (Score:5, Interesting)
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/... [slashdot.org]
Seems like everyone in this article though it was a bad idea..but it looks like it does hurt them.
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Domo arigato Mr. Fraudboto (Score:2)
Self-inflicted (Score:3)
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Yo dawg, I heard you like clickbots so I downloaded a clickbot with a clickbot so you can commit click fraud while you commit click fraud.
So the mod proposed to auto click sound good (Score:2)
I'm surprised online ads work at all. (Score:2)
I then wanted to simplify the system and just have a streaming network where you watched advertisements and got paid. The problem is that someone could simply turn it on and walk away from their computer and there's no way to know they watched the ads. The same thing is going on with bots. Anyone can say they watched ads or clicked on ads with computer, and until you so
wrong way around... (Score:2)
What no one was anticipating is that the bots are extremely effective of looking like a high value consumer.
Actually, what is surprising is that these supposed high value customers are not in fact actually bots (instead of essentially being web users programmed to be overconsumers by a history of exposure to saturation advertising and silly enough to click on adverts for stupid things).
Philosophically, when some thing exhibits indistinguishable from another (e.g, a consumer exhibiting behavior indistinguishable from a bot), are these high-value consumers not really acting like "artificial" bots? Because we know
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By also controlling the website, and getting paid the ad revenue.
Re:How do the criminals make moeny? (Score:5, Informative)
Imagine it as if were a company that would pay you if you filled out a survey about your interests and you handed them hundreds of fake surveys in order to get more money.
Re:Not sure who to cheer for (Score:4, Interesting)
So in order for a website to remain free for the users use, they will need to post more advertisements to make up for it.
If you don't like advertising on you favorite site. Then you better find them a business model where they can keep running (as it isn't free for them) and feed their family's.
Otherwise just suck it up as the cost of having free access to their data.
Re:Not sure who to cheer for (Score:5, Insightful)
So in order for a website to remain free for the users use, they will need to post more advertisements to make up for it.
If you don't like advertising on you favorite site. Then you better find them a business model where they can keep running (as it isn't free for them) and feed their family's. Otherwise just suck it up as the cost of having free access to their data.
If they can't 'feed their families' on the income of their website, and they don't wan't to add a subscription tier to the site, maybe they should get actual jobs.
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In the information age, is providing data an actual job?
I'm sure you meant something else, but your biases did not permit you to translate. Consider it again, and explain yourself more clearly.
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In the information age, is providing data an actual job?
If they're providing useful data, someone will pay for it.
Websites used to do that before the ads came along, and the website owners mostly paid for the sites themselves. Now many only exist to spam you with as many ads as possible, and most of the rest exist to display cat pictures alongside the ads.
cheer (Score:2, Insightful)
Advertisements do not pay for the internet.
The net existed long before advertisers got a hold of it and ruined it. Advertisers are not sponsoring the net there just cashing in on its popularity. The article calls the bots "a criminal network." it should call them heroes of the fucking universe.
Re:Not sure who to cheer for (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not my job to find their business model. If no one wants to pay for their content then the have worthless content. People are not owed money just because they put up a website.
Re:Not sure who to cheer for (Score:5, Insightful)
A thousand times this.
I would much rather have 99% of the web disappear than have it continue in its current state (ads everywhere, selling my info, letting advertisers control content, forcing me to watch an ad and type "I LOVE MCDONALDS" before showing me content, etc.).
The vast majority of content is worthless. Not just to me but to the vast majority of people.
Costs are going DOWN, and have been for ages. If you want to run a blog without ads under your own hosting account, that will cost you less than nearly any other hobby you could think of, even if your blog features adorable corgis that have gone viral. If you want to post videos of yourself playing video games you'll have an upfront cost of capture equipment, a webcam, and maybe some editing software. The PC, consoles, games, and ISP bill were shit you would be paying for regardless.
The majority of "content producers" on the web have little to no cost and produce little to no original content, let alone worthwhile content. Even for the subset of content I personally enjoy, I recognize that it is worthless - I would not pay a single cent to access it. If it were paywalled I would simply go without it. Serving ads alongside content makes me enjoy the content less, so I block those ads. If you fight against this, your content becomes less enjoyable.
TL;DR: The web would be better without ads, even if the majority of ad-supported content became paywalled or disappeared (as determined by what viewers feel is worthy of their $). The vast majority of content on the web is produced at little to no cost anyway. If you want your web content to be your job, then charge for it. If you want it to be your hobby, then pay for it as you would any other hobby.
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The majority of "content producers" on the web have little to no cost and produce little to no original content, let alone worthwhile content. Even for the subset of content I personally enjoy, I recognize that it is worthless - I would not pay a single cent to access it. If it were paywalled I would simply go without it. Serving ads alongside content makes me enjoy the content less, so I block those ads. If you fight against this, your content becomes less enjoyable.
Except time. Sure work provides me with a desk, computer, power and lights but 99% of what they pay for is my time. Most of /. would be living on the streets if we couldn't put a price tag on that. Even if you're self-employed and don't cut yourself a paycheck doesn't mean anyone else has the right to demand you give it away for free. How are most blogs not original content? This diatribe is original content, I mean I don't expect to get paid for it but if I wanted to I could put it up on a blog and see if
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Costs are going DOWN, and have been for ages. If you want to run a blog without ads under your own hosting account, that will cost you less than nearly any other hobby you could think of
This, hosting a large site costs less than a bag of golf bats.
Hell, a small site costs me A$90 per year to host in Australia on a reputable ISP (so I could get it cheaper if I used Dodgy Brothers datacentres) including registering the domain.
The problem with advertising is that it has become so intrusive and annoying. So people are fighting back with ad blockers. We dont like pop-ups, pop-unders, pop-reacharounds ads that load before content, talking ads, flashing ads so we block them. Strangely enoug
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It's not bullshit. If people are unwilling to spend any amount of money on something that means it has no financial value to them. Thus by definition it would be "worthless".
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If and only if they also do not visit the site. Not being willing to spend money does not equal worthless as their time has worth.
People waste time on lots of things they think are worthless. Spending time to do something doesn't mean you give it worth.
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How do you figure that? More specifically, what worth would I give all of the things I didn't do while doing whatever I spent time on? Would that be negative worth?
Also, there are piles of databases and information sources that I am willing to pay X dollars per month to access, where X represents the cost of my internet connection. I am not willing to spend more than that, but it is worth the cost of access. If it were all worth zero, I would
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If you actually thought this you would not visit those sites and would not care what they do
Not true at all. Advertising has a general corrosive effect on the web. I care about its presence even on sites I don't go to because it tends to degrade the entire web.
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what if he really doesn't look at porn? then he certainly wouldn't notice 99% of the web disappearing.
by using opendns, i have practically eliminated that much web on my home network. what else is there? news, lolcatz, epic fail videos, social networks, corporate websites and wikipedia. well under 1% of the web.
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I'd be willing ot wager than there is nobody on this planet who could visit more than 1% of the web on a regular base.
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Probably not. The internet and its companies are not old enough to have bought enough politicians to be considered "too big to fail".
Re:Not sure who to cheer for (Score:5, Insightful)
>If you don't like advertising on you favorite site. Then you better find them a business model where they can keep running (as it isn't free for them) and feed their family's.
>Otherwise just suck it up as the cost of having free access to their data.
Oh hay look, the old "if you don't like ads and block them you're stealing from the mouths of the children" argument.
It would be fine if I could trust the ad networks to not serve up malware, but even my own favorite sites have hosted malware from their ad networks from time to time.
Blocking ads is a much more of a security issue more than a convenience issue.
--
BMO
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The TV-style bullshit that just leaps for your eyes and blares at you is insufferable; but at least it only watches you at the level of granularity provided by the Neilson lab rats.
If the onli
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The TV-style bullshit that just leaps for your eyes and blares at you is insufferable; but at least it only watches you at the level of granularity provided by the Neilson lab rats.
Not so much, anymore. With the addressable digital boxes that the TV providers use, there is just as much profiling done when you watch TV, too. Your TV provider knows what you watch, how you watch it, and when you watch it. I think it can, however, be gamed to work to our advantage:
If enough people time-shift live TV by 15-20 minutes per hour (the typical amount of advertising) and skip past all the ads, at least on networks where it isn't disabled, that sends a message that we don't want ads. Or, the
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It would be fine if I could trust the ad networks to not serve up malware, but even my own favorite sites have hosted malware from their ad networks from time to time.
That's a serious problem.
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Yep, ditto for third-party javascript.
If you simply must have the latest javascript widget on your website, host it on your own damn server, don't link to a third party. I might trust you, but how the hell do I know I can trust them? (noscript ftw).
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(noscript ftw).
How is the web even usable with noscript these days?
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How is the web even usable with noscript these days?
the way most websites are built today they aren't usable with noscript either. nowadays "ux" prima donnas seem to have no interest whatsoever in providing graceful degradation.
almost half of internet content is crap anyway. the other half is assholes trying to monetize that same crap over and over again. i don't mind the least if all that disappears today, internet was just fine before all this bullshit started.
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Blocking ads is a much more of a security issue more than a convenience issue.
It is also an issue of preserving bandwidth and staying within monthly data caps. The sheer amount of javascript bloat, ad images, and flash objects spewed by top 100 sites is atrocious.
Re:Not sure who to cheer for (Score:5, Insightful)
They could just host the ads first party based on CPM statistics like a god damn newspaper, but then they would have to do actual work instead of plugging in some 3rd party malware laden ad engine.
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And you don't think that presents a risk to those that are paying out the CPM? At least with an established, third-party network, their reputation stands on accurate reporting. If you're paying someone to share your message, are you just going to blindly trust that they started having a million uniques per day?
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No question that it does present a risk, and it's fair to discuss how to mitigate that.
I propose that they can go about it the same way they do in the newspaper industry, it would be fraud for the New York Times or my local free newspaper claim a larger circulation than they really have when negotiate ad sales. I see why no reason why websites wouldn't have to present Alexa type statistics to back up their claim.
Taking out ads on some sketchy Eastern European hosted link farm should be viewed just as s
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well, you could do your own analysis on the clickthroughs that you're getting. as you should. how the fuck do you know otherwise if your ads are effective or not? dollars spent on marketing vs. dollars gained from marketing.
It's not clickthroughs that you really care about, it's how much dollars you need to spend for a sale.
big brands who do just "recognition" campaigns are another issue of course, since they care only about impressions.
thing is, you should know the site is popular before you buy the adver
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So in order for a website to remain free for the users use, they will need to post more advertisements to make up for it.
If you don't like advertising on you favorite site. Then you better find them a business model where they can keep running (as it isn't free for them) and feed their family's. Otherwise just suck it up as the cost of having free access to their data.
I oppose personal targeted adds and tracking adds. Click bot networks defeat this ad model. Positioned adds on articles that people who might buy a product based on the fact that a certain demographic reads these type of articles I have no problem with and in fact encourages production of good articles to attract adds and readers.
Re:Not sure who to cheer for (Score:5, Funny)
The only ads I get that are truly targeted come AFTER I've bought something. I bought a freezer a few days ago. Now I get ads for fridges and freezers everywhere because I had looked up some reviews. Do these idiots really think I'm in the market for two freezers? Same thing happened with an engagement ring. I'm STILL getting targeted ads for jewelry even though they're almost a year late. I have made a point to visit a few high profile lingerie sites just so that my targeted ads for the next few months will feature scantily clad models. Just have to go to their homepage then close the tab.
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Oh, god, yes.
Bought an Epson printer off Amazon last week - and all I see on the sites where I still allow ads, are ads for Epson printers. That's really useful.
Re:Not sure who to cheer for (Score:4, Funny)
You think you have it bad? I was looking for liquid latex to cover some electronics with a non-conductive and non-slippery surface.
You have NO idea what ads I had to endure when my adblock was out of order due to an update of the browser. The images ... THE IMAGES ...
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So in order for a website to remain free for the users use, they will need to post more advertisements to make up for it.
If you don't like advertising on you favorite site. Then you better find them a business model where they can keep running (as it isn't free for them) and feed their family's.
Otherwise just suck it up as the cost of having free access to their data.
I call BULL and SHIT.
I've run several website over the years. Some were rather popular (though none were huge) and he costs of hosting them was a joke.
In my job I help maintain a site that gets hundreds of thousands of hits a day. Again, the cost for hosting is trivial, though, since it's an important site financially, changes to it are done through committee and such, and that costs a bit. It depends on if it's a site that "can't" go down. If it's a hobby site, or just for fun and your users understand you
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Are you talking a pure content/journo site that's barely more than Wordpress? Then yes, costs are cheap.
There's more than one type of website/idea out there, though. Some exist to store, manipulate, and sort through large amounts of data for a large niche (sounds like an oxymoron, but in my personal case, I ran a site for a gaming community (niche part), but had 5 million users (large part, relatively speaking)).
Heavily CPU-bound and applications that transfer a lot of data (TB/mo) are going to cost money n
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but 120 is at the expensive range of cable tv though?
and for 1TB / month, you would be providing a service equivalent of providing few hours of cable tv per day for what, 50-100 people?
you could run a fairly popular web forum for 100 bucks/ month, or an insanely popular walkthrough site, or the most popular nethack spoilers site there is.
you couldn't host a lot of videos, but who the fuck hosts videos apart from porn sites and there's only a handful of sites that actually host their own free porno anyways(m
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So in order for a website to remain free for the users use, they will need to post more advertisements to make up for it.
First, a website with advertisements isn't "free". Readers pay for it by viewing the advertisements. That aside, a very high number of websites carry advertising when they don't need to. Web hosting is very, very cheap (you can host a decent web site with a decent reader base for about $10/mo), so unless you're a biggie, you can afford to run on your spare change. The web would be much better off if that advertising just went away.
If you don't like advertising on you favorite site. Then you better find them a business model where they can keep running (as it isn't free for them) and feed their family's.
Otherwise just suck it up as the cost of having free access to their data.
No. It's not my job to come up with a business model for other people. They c
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It also takes time & energy to, you know, develop, maintain, and generate content for a website.
There's more to the costs of a website than just "how much electricity does the server use"
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No. Just no.
It is NOT my job to solve someone else's business model problem. You can't sustain your webpage with me using an adblocker and your ad customers leaving you? Have me pay for your page. Don't think I'd pay to use your page? Guess you're not really convinced of your page if you yourself don't think I'd pay for using it.
It is NOT your visitor's job to do yours. It is NOT my problem how you fund your webpage. You are NOT entitled to anything. Neither to visits nor to people clicking anything. If you
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So in order for a website to remain free for the users use, they will need to post more advertisements to make up for it.
I think you've got that backwards.
It isn't costing the websites money, it's costing the advertisers who are paying for clicks without any potential sales from those clicks. In theory this just helps the websites.
How the guys running the fraud bots get anything out of the deal is a bit mysterious, unless they're in cahoots with the website owners. But then the mechanics of online advert
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>How the guys running the fraud bots get anything out of the deal is a bit mysterious
No mystery.
The fraud-click is part of generating a cover story for the individual bots.
The big revenue generation comes after each bot has a credible cover story, and presence on the various social networking sites.
If, as a result of generating a cover story, a competitor of a friend's business no longer advertizers on the Internet, so what?
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Yeah, they're in cahoots. There are services out there that will contact you offering to magically drive up ad-clicks on your site (for a small fee, of course). I'm sure that some of the website owners think that they're driving actual users to the site, but... it's hard to imagine how anyone tech-savvy would not understand what they're doing.
Gotta spend money to make money, right? :b
1. Outdoor Holiday Lights 2. ??? 3. Profit! (Score:3)
The biggest problem here is ignoring that there are different types of transactions in a community, which include subsistence, gift, exchange, planned, and theft (as discussed on my own website). Selling eyeballs to advertisers to fund a website is primarily an exchange economy transaction. But, as with putting up holiday lights just to make the darkness cheery, there can be gift giving involved in an action (even with a substantial power bill for the lights). You put up lights this year in one place, someo
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The entitlement attitude is not coming from the website owners. It is coming from you. Don't use the web of you don't like it.
don't publish if you don't like users.
Sure, it would be nice if everything was free in this world. It's not.
as a matter of fact, the best stuff *is* free. i'm sorry for you if you think otherwise.
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ha! Or maybe they only click on ones where you have to punch a monkey.
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I'm curious: Could you list off a few discussion sites you pay a subscription fee to? I'd just like to know where I should go after you get your way.
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One that I pay a subscription to is Ars Technica. They actually make content worth paying for. Not vacuous, ad-ridden clickbait.
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In this case the site is a lot more than just a forum though, the owner and admins go through a lot of effort to organize material so it's easy to reference. It's not quite to Wiki-level organization, but short of being user editable it's pretty damn good.
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None. If they're gone, I'll find something else to do. I might even do something useful with my time, who knows?
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And? How is it?
Curious minds want to know, I'm fairly sure I'm not the only ad-virgin here.
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Which is fraud, because when you join an ad network you enter into a contractual agreement not to do that.
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Think of it as "copyright infringement" vs. "piracy".
It's all in the delivery, to make it sound like it's somehow wrong.