this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2024
867 points (97.9% liked)

memes

9680 readers
2939 users here now

Community rules

1. Be civilNo trolling, bigotry or other insulting / annoying behaviour

2. No politicsThis is non-politics community. For political memes please go to [email protected]

3. No recent repostsCheck for reposts when posting a meme, you can only repost after 1 month

4. No botsNo bots without the express approval of the mods or the admins

5. No Spam/AdsNo advertisements or spam. This is an instance rule and the only way to live.

Sister communities

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
867
The infamous x (lemmy.world)
submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
52 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

I wish I could remember the name of an extension I had on my old computer.

It hid all ads, but also clicked them all in the background. It accomplished 4 goals:

  1. I didn't see the ads
  2. The websites I visited made more money through the clicks
  3. It cost the advertisers money
  4. It made the cost/benefit worse for advertisers since they were paying for clicks without anyone being influenced by the ads
[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

You're probably talking about AdNauseum, but unfortunately the ad servers can tell when a real person clicks the ad or when a bot clicks them.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago

I've got a feeling that advertising companies have ways to differentiate real and fake clicks. Best case scenario, they wouldn't count those. Worst case scenario, they could notice that too many clicks are fake and revoke the monetization for a website.

If captchas exist, surely they can use similar methods to catch ad cheats like that.

This is older, and not quite the same but back when I was into private Ragnarok Online servers, it was pretty well-known among server admins that you couldn't ask people to click your ads. Either because you asked, either because they noticed unusual activity, Google would demonetize the ads pretty quickly.