Junk websites filled with AI-generated text are pulling in money from programmatic ads::More than 140 brands are advertising on low-quality content farm sites —and the problem is growing fast.
Junk websites filled with AI-generated text are pulling in money from programmatic ads::More than 140 brands are advertising on low-quality content farm sites —and the problem is growing fast.
@L4s I’m still - and always have - wondering who clicks on all this shit. No ad makes money without a “conversion” into some sort of sale. I believe it’s all a circlejerking of various add companies scamming each other. At some point this useless well of crap must dry out. And now even the content is complete and utter nonsense… so nobody is going to even look at it. how’s that supposed to hold up
I work at a repair shop, and we had a customer come in that said, “I like to click on the ads sometimes. Is that why I keep getting viruses?”.
We’ve been asking ourselves this about email spam for several decades now.
I think we’re vastly overestimating human intelligence. There’s obviously enough completely clueless people out there that will buy what these spammers are selling.
Morning radio show I used to listen to talked all the time about the crap they bought off Instagram and tiktok ads. Like, ALL THE TIME. My ex and her family also bought a fair bit off of those sort of ads. Some type of people are just susceptible to it and others aren’t.
I’m not normally in favor of the death penalty, but I think we need public executions for spammers.
The irony of tagging and asking a bot this lol
It’s been a while since I’ve interacted with google ads, but if memory serves, by default, the dashboards don’t (or can’t) break down sales per site, it’s mostly impressions per category of ad deployment. “Clickthrough rate among banner ads on news websites” etc. It wouldn’t surprise me if the same makers of these spam websites also run bots that click the ads and prop up those metrics that 99% of advertisers don’t drill down through beyond surface level. Advertisers probably see clickthrough is good on a deployment and just assumes sales come from those.
I remember years ago someone from a niche industry commenting on this.
He was saying that the week they all had a big conferences, the click-throughs dropped by 95% (implying his competitors were clicking his ads to cost him money)
I think you are underestimating the power of low cost high volume advertising. Throw enough poo at a glass wall and some of its going to stick. This isn’t going away, it’s getting worse.
Some ads are paid on a “per view” basis rather than per click
When the sites are bot built like the ones described here its just a matter of Large Numbers. Create a thousand permutations of porhub and if they all only get a few thousand views a day in total you’ve made some money.
I see it all the time when I’m searching for answers on the web. Ngl I look up a lot of stuff for C# and C++ and if you use Google (and even DDG) you’ll always fine a couple of these. Google likes to put them up first. You can tell by the language in the article and the stripped down content on the page. I always end up backing out and I have ad-blockers but they still get the click.