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Junk websites filled with AI-generated text are pulling in money from programmatic ads
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this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2023
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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?".
I do understand the curiosity though, just seeing what malware is trying to do can be quite interesting. Maybe someone should tell that person about VMs though lol
That's definitely not why. From how I understood it, it seems that she clicked on ads because she actually wanted to look at the product, and she was confused about why she kept getting malware on her computer.
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.
I'm not normally in favor of the death penalty, but I think we need public executions for spammers.
I heard it said that spam is intentionally badly written because they don't want people who can figure out it's a scam to actually click the links.
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.
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)