“35-50% of clicks on Reddit Ads are fraudulent”

Every newspaper in America has obvious scam ads on its homepage. The whole online ad market is diseased and needs to be uprooted.<p>Common sense fixes:<p>- Never allow dynamic ad content! Ads should be individually approved by publishers and not subject to change after approval.<p>- Ban user tracking and targeting. It&#x27;s a red queen&#x27;s race and no one benefits. Everyone is better off once it&#x27;s illegal.<p>- Pay for ad time slots, not user impressions. Instead of selling by CPM, publishers should say &quot;independent analyst X says we have traffic Y on an average Sunday. You can buy placement for next Sunday for $Z.&quot; This is how all offline ads are sold, and it&#x27;s much healthier for everyone than CPM. It essentially kills the motivation for the Reddit fraud discussed here.<p>- Use anti-trust to prevent link aggregators from being advertisers. This is a bigger issue, but putting ads on the aggregators creates perverse incentives to promote bad content and not actually pay for it. Why would you pay to put an ad on publisher A which may or may not have traffic when you can put the ad on aggregator B which will definitely have traffic? The problem is this means A cannot pay writers and the whole system breaks down.

I completely forgot Reddit even has ads.<p>I was watching a screen share on someone else&#x27;s computer who was looking at a news article and I was completely shocked at the experience. How do people live without adblock?

I find it so weird idea that people really click on ads. I don&#x27;t know if I&#x27;ve ever done so (intentionally). As such I would have expected more like 90% of clicks to be fraudulent.

I gotta say... this is an incredibly naive analysis.<p>To demonstrate Reddit Ads isn&#x27;t doing click fraud protection, you should try to generate a fraudulent click yourself. Looking at what is getting through and finding that a lot of it as easily identifiable as fraudulent is NOT a valid signal.<p>It&#x27;s incredibly likely that there are far more bots that are being blocked and that the bots that are getting through have invested a lot of effort in to fooling Reddit&#x27;s fraud protection, but really don&#x27;t care at all about fooling the landing page site (and of course, there are a lot more such sites, so it&#x27;s a lot more expensive to design &amp; operate a system that would fool all the other sites). Consequently, they&#x27;re &quot;easily identifiable&quot; (though in truth the author is unfortunately use a very crude model for identifying fraud which will include a ton of false positives) by the landing page, but not by Reddit.

I get the impression that Reddit&#x27;s ad network is just immature.<p>We&#x27;re finding that Reddit ads perform well and are cheap, suggesting that there isn&#x27;t much competition for clicks.<p>More mature ad networks such as Google&#x27;s and Facebook&#x27;s are better at reducing spam clicks. Google bought a company focused on this about 10 years ago, I&#x27;m sure Facebook put similar effort in.<p>I&#x27;m sure this is something they&#x27;ll work to improve over time as their ad network gains traction.

What I don&#x27;t get here is - who is doing this? I&#x27;m not sure who has the motivation to falsify clicks on Reddit ads. For Google ads, somebody might want to falsify clicks on the ads displayed on their site because they get paid by the click, but who other than Reddit would want to do that here?

If I&#x27;m going to see ads, I&#x27;d prefer targeted ones personally. Show me something I might want - product discover is actually hard, if an ad can show me something that solves a need&#x2F;want I have that&#x27;s great for me and for the company.

Reminds me of <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.samueljscott.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;09&#x2F;08&#x2F;linkedin-ad-fraud&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.samueljscott.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;09&#x2F;08&#x2F;linkedin-ad-fraud&#x2F;</a><p>Online advertising is a giant scam.

adnauseam.io<p>i don&#x27;t know how many people actually install this extension, but it is specifically designed to clicks ads so you don&#x27;t have to :)

Advertising manager here - The real problem is that not enough companies pay attention to the results they are getting from their ad campaigns. Most big companies just dump money into a lot of different campaigns without putting in place strict measurement procedures. So this puts the ethical ad seller at a major disadvantage. Currently you have companies spending tens of millions of dollars on digital ads each quarter and only looking ad metrics like cost per click or cost per impression. So they are judging the effectiveness of the ad campaign on metrics the ad seller provides. They are not putting in place effective checks and balances.<p>Why you ask? Because if the huge companies buying ads wanted to actually measure everything it would be extremely time consuming and expensive. It is a lot easier to pretend the problem doesn’t exist and just go with the flow.<p>So small companies with small budgets are actually a lot better at measuring results in most cases. Also online only businesses are a lot better at it. Measuring the offline impact of online ads is very hard.<p>But the bulk of ad dollars are spent by huge companies with huge bureaucracies. So game theory says you need to capture those dollars to win.<p>Source – I’ve been doing digital marketing for the last 12 years at a variety of companies.

What ads? I block them all, at home, at work, and do the same for friends and family. The only ads I see are the half second ads during my DVR playbook, and then skip. I pay for the Internet, for email, for the software I use. I&#x27;m not suffering through ads. One project I&#x27;m working on is sorting out how to get the Pi-hole to block YouTube ads 100%. I don&#x27;t see them on my Linux latops because of Nano Adblock, but my kids see them on their iPads. For some reason no one (yet) seems to be able to sort out how to block ad content on YouTube 100%. There has to be a way.

Does it really matter if they are fraudulent? Most advertisers measure (and are willing to pay for) conversions, not clicks. So even if there are lots of fake clicks, the number of purchases wouldn&#x27;t change.<p>If advertisers have to pay for more than their conversion rates justify they will stop advertising on reddit which forces reddit to solve the fake clicks problem.

Bummer, one of my reddit ads in 2010 - 2012 outperformed anything I&#x27;d done before &#x2F; since.<p>I was advertising officially licensed Minecraft merch (cardboard steve heads, foam pickaxes) and it did extremely well in MC &#x2F; Gaming subreddits.

Many ads are not clicked on by a real person, but a bot, or someone clicking ads as fast as possible because it is their job.<p>Many comments would be considered &quot;fraudulent&quot; in the same sense, in that they were not authored by a real person, but a bot, or someone writing comments as fast as possible because it is their job.

I&#x27;m pretty surprised the aws bot got through. I used to be responsible for detecting fraud for ads in the past and we had access to a blacklist that likely would include a lot of these ips. If we didn&#x27;t do things like this, advertisers would actually stop working with us.

Does this actually matter? If you are doing online advertising, you should be able to attribute a particular visit to a specific ad campaign, so you can calculate your conversion rate. If Reddit has lots of bots, it just means your conversion rate for those ads will be lower, and you can adjust your spending accordingly. There are a lot of things that can significantly affect clicks other than fraudulent clicks (popups people click on by accident, small &quot;close&quot; buttons, mobile vs desktop, etc.), so I think evaluating your success based on just clicks is going to be pretty useless regardless.<p>I&#x27;m not in advertising though so I have no idea.

I don&#x27;t see how they can be sure based on their criteria that those are fraudulent clicks. They could be web crawlers, users with various ad blocking tech, and so on. Going straight to fraud is premature.

I’m getting the same ad on the reddit app over and over again for what feels like a year, and it’s so bad I would never even think of clicking on it.<p>Now that I write this, I notice that’s actually true for most ads I see because they would require a pihole and I haven’t gotten around to setting one up.<p>It really feels like the ad business is inherently flawed these days. Who clicks on ads? How many of those are going through with a purchase? There is just way too many and poorly created ads for any brand to stand out from all that garbage people get shoved in their face all day.

This is less of a problem for pay-for-action type ads.<p>If you send X number of people to your site with Y conversions, it doesn&#x27;t really matter that &#x27;bots don&#x27;t buy&#x27; - because the $Z spent on ads for Y conversions is the metric used.<p>It&#x27;s much more of a problem for impressions or for ads without directly measured value.<p>It&#x27;s one of the reasons Google makes so much money, the spend is generally optimized for the return, not for &#x27;how many visitors are fake&#x27;.<p>Though it&#x27;s a problem.

I&#x27;d love to see fraud&#x2F;mis-click adjusted returns for various social networks. I&#x27;d wager a significant percentage of ad engagement is non-productive.

Most dynamic ad platforms are similar, I also got 100% fake traffic from testing out Facebook ads: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;marketing&#x2F;comments&#x2F;4smisl&#x2F;facebook_ads_100_fake_clicks&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;marketing&#x2F;comments&#x2F;4smisl&#x2F;facebook_...</a><p>I know it could be improved with better targeting, but by default it should not give you 100% fake clicks.

The suggestion &quot;Don&#x27;t charge the same IP address more than once in a certain time period (e.g. 24 hours)&quot; is clearly broken. For people at work in larger companies, there can be thousands of users that all appear to have the same IP address. You can only charge once per day for all of them?<p>As the reddit posting points out, there are plenty of other ways to determine that a click is fake (no css or images loaded, etc).

Don&#x27;t tell that to my AdNauseam extension ;)

I may or may not have participated in click fraud in 1997 with DoubleClick by forging source IP headers and going through a proxy ... that I may or may not have been running. I can only imagine how much more sophisticated click fraud has become today. Even if you raise that bar, I suspect a vast % of clicks are probably fraud anyway.

How does the fraudster make money on reddit ads frauds? Reddit operates the site, so don’t any money go to them?

We need to get it to 99.99%, and then maybe they will all switch to some honest business model!

I don&#x27;t understand how, even after so much privacy was eroded to give marketers additional data to target ads - I still get such irrelevant ones.

Does anyone here remember clicking on an add in the last week or month? How about just remembering an add or brand they saw online? I sure don&#x27;t.

The post is flaired &quot;Community responded&quot; and all the mods are admins. Yet there is no resolution and no stated plan to address the issue.

That&#x27;s all? If they did a larger sample on a more fraud heavy vertical (at least 100k clicks) they would get bigger proportional numbers.

How is this not actionable?<p>I&#x27;d get in touch with my state AG&#x27;s office as well as the FBI.

I wonder if pay for impression (CPM) is a better to mitigate this cost?

Well don&#x27;t buy clicks then, i mean it s not like they are expensive. My peeve is that Reddit would be great for some specific kind of ads (cryptocurrency) but sadly they dont allow them

Could it be just badly coded scrapers?

How many more of them were misclicks?

it&#x27;s more like 99%; for the whole internet

...And that&#x27;s why I use ad blocker.

As bad as these numbers sound, they&#x27;re pretty typical for online and mobile advertising.

Reddit&#x27;s ads are terrible. It should come as no surprise that no one clicks on them.

&gt; Facebook lookalike audiences. Upload customer list (with attributes you want in your targeted demographic) and have Facebook create a lookalike audience for it. Incredibly precise<p>What the fuck? Facebook allows people to do these things?