[HN Gopher] An inside look into the illicit ad industry
___________________________________________________________________
An inside look into the illicit ad industry
Author : psanford
Score : 172 points
Date : 2021-11-05 15:09 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ariadne.space)
(TXT) w3m dump (ariadne.space)
| soared wrote:
| > ad tech is about trying to scam the rest of ad tech as hard as
| possible, while trying to not get scammed too hard yourself
|
| That's a joke of a quote. You could say that about literally any
| industry and it would never be true. If a company solely exists
| to scam others, over the long term it will not last. Adtech
| provides digital marketing which drives actual revenue and
| profits for businesses. There certainly are scammers, but this
| quote just ignores an entire legitimate industry.
| comprev wrote:
| Another industry which often flies under the radar of many people
| is the marketplace for products which eBay, Facebook Marketplace,
| Amazon, PayPal, Stripe, etc. will not touch.
|
| The market for [non-FDA] diet pills, MLM eBooks, "mind, body &
| soul" empowerment videos, etc. is massive - even more so during
| the pandemic when employees are getting bored at home.
|
| A business I knew with saw revenue rocket during the last 2
| years, and they owned the whole stack - affiliate marketing
| schemes, an ecommerce platform (which still supports IE7!),
| virtual call-centres, right down to a payment processor (that
| also accepted adult content, CBD products, etc.).
|
| The experience really opened my eyes into how much money there is
| to be made by... how can I put this politely.... exploiting
| overweight gulliable people with low self-esteem.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Fascinating article to a layman who has no idea what goes on in
| the bowels AdTech. The scamming and detection cat-and-mouse game
| seems like such a zero-sum waste of
| energy/talent/servers/everything, but I suppose while there's
| opportunity to play these games and shovel money towards oneself,
| it will keep attracting people. And nobody seems to be losing
| except ad buyers (monetarily) and end users (via a shittier web
| experience). I guess my question to the author would be: Once you
| found out what it really was that you were working on, what did
| your internal ethical dialog sound like, and how did you justify
| to yourself continuing to work on it?
| Dlanv wrote:
| A big portion of the world consists of cat and mouse games like
| this.
|
| Everything 'security' in the world is the same way.
| RedBeetDeadpool wrote:
| I remember reading somewhere that a lot of our dna is pretty
| much this 'security' you speak of.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I'd like to see the pull requests please
| andrewflnr wrote:
| You can get diffs, but the documentation is going to be
| sparse.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| This was a while ago, but:
| https://github.com/msporny/dna/pulls.
| wyager wrote:
| Not everything. Formal methods research, for example, is not
| cat-and-mouse.
| mpeg wrote:
| AdTech gets a lot of flak, but I did spend quite a lot of time
| in my career building tools on the opposite side of this. We
| also did reverse engineer what the big networks like Google
| were doing but with the objective of learning the best
| techniques to use - which is actually quite disappointing in
| practice, these days the most important measure of being a real
| user is whether Google can doxx you or not.
|
| It was quite fun for a while, and some of the tools and
| techniques ended up having applications beyond ads, for example
| developing 0-day techniques to unmask Tor and VPN users (webRTC
| leaks, etc.) that could then be reused on seized/honeypot onion
| sites to catch predators.
| mojuba wrote:
| > And nobody seems to be losing except ad buyers (monetarily)
| and end users (via a shittier web experience)
|
| Aa well as end users via subsidizing the ad spending for the ad
| buyers. Who you think pays for the ads in the end? It's us, the
| consumers.
| paulpauper wrote:
| I remember seeing a pop-under script as late as 2013 that could
| bypass chrome popup blockers
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Side note: I've seen these articles which blame Capitalism ("ad
| tech: capitalism refined to its purest?"), and while that may be
| true, they never address what solution they want. Communism? As
| if communist China isn't launching malware attacks. Socialism?
|
| For that reason it feels like blaming something unrelated.
| circlefavshape wrote:
| When someone blames "capitalism" for something, what they
| usually mean is that they'd like if this thing didn't happen,
| but don't have any concrete proposal for preventing it. It's
| equivalent to blaming "society"
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| If we followed this logic, we'd still have slavery because
| "you can't blame capitalism" and the famous poster at
| protests "race mixing is communism"
| ryandrake wrote:
| You could also substitute "unregulated capitalism" for
| "capitalism". Often when someone criticizes capitalism for
| allowing some social ill, the underlying message is: This
| wouldn't happen if there were some regulatory guard rails and
| a legal system that punished this particular ill.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| A lot of us actually mean capitalism because we believe
| that the incentives it creates are inherently baked into
| its structure. For example, the construction of capital
| markets inevitably lead to labor exploitation through a
| natural series of actions and reactions. That's anti-
| capitalism 101.
|
| Anyone who has worked at a heavily funded startup knows
| this. They may not have the words for it, or they may even
| like it, but they cannot deny that the situation creates
| the incentives.
| bravura wrote:
| "the construction of capital markets inevitably lead to
| labor exploitation through a natural series of actions
| and reactions"
|
| Can you explain what this means, with some key examples?
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| I really wish I could, but this is essentially asking for
| a distillation of Capital Vol 1 in a Hacker News comment.
| If this is something you're interested in, I encourage
| you to read it from the source. It spells out exactly
| this.
|
| If that doesn't quite suit you, feel free to reach out
| (email in profile) and I'm sure we could find a way to
| convey this conversationally.
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| Hmm, I don't read it that way. It's just as easy to interpret
| that subhead as "the dose makes the poison" in which case the
| author isn't arguing for Communism as the solution but less-
| pure Capitalism (i.e., not the Wild West). The advertising
| industry does strike me as a particularly unpleasant outgrowth
| of Capitalism, and I liked the characterization of it as buying
| and selling of things without value, not in the trivial sense
| of monetary value - it has that, clearly - but social value.
| drclau wrote:
| I have this idea that maybe ads should be entirely disallowed
| from everywhere, except for catalogues, printed and online.
| Crazy, right?
|
| It would work like this: you feel like spending money or you
| want to buy a specific type of product? You pick-up/load the
| catalogue and browse until you can't take it anymore, or at
| least until you find something. And then follow a link to the
| seller's website, or get the address of the local store. No
| more ads everywhere, not in the physical world and neither in
| the online world.
|
| Admittedly, I have not spent much time thinking about it and
| the possible side effects.
| bostik wrote:
| > _ads should be entirely disallowed from everywhere, except
| for catalogues, printed and online._
|
| I've been saying this for a few years now, but that's only
| part of a Terminal Solution[tm].
|
| I wouldn't disallow online _ads_ , because done sensibly
| (https://bostik.iki.fi/aivoituksia/random/no-stalking.html)
| they could happily coexist with everything else. Here's the
| more heretic take: make the core EU take the universal one -
| any and all data on an individual is _ALWAYS_ the property of
| the person in question. No exceptions. Any third part storing
| a copy of it is merely a guardian of the data, not its owner.
| Then require for every single use of that data to
| _compensate_ the individual.[ss] That flips the incentives,
| because all of a sudden every data processing round costs you
| real money that you have to pay out. Not in amortised compute
| costs, but in actual payouts.
|
| In a strange twist, the sums themselves don't need to be
| particularly large. The sheer overhead of requiring accurate
| accounting, auditable records, and all the extra back-office
| operations to make it possible to repay people at a global
| scale is expensive enough to transform the practice of
| hoarding personal information from an asset into a liability
| with capital L.
|
| In other words: if you want to advertise to me, you need to
| pay _me_ for the privilege of wasting my time, my bandwidth,
| my electricity and my screen real estate. Through the nose,
| if needed.
|
| ss: I'm willing to make an exception to legal hard
| requirements. But unless you're a government conducting their
| necessary activities, you pay.
| igorkraw wrote:
| I've been thinking about this for a year and haven't found
| any downsides
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Sao Paulo's been living it for 14 years. I'd love to hear
| from residents how they feel about it too.
| asxd wrote:
| That's fascinating. Looks like this is due to the clean
| city law put in place in 2006 that removed upwards of
| 15000 billboards and other outdoor ads.
|
| The wikipedia entry [1] contains an account from a local
| reporter there. Here's the first bit:
|
| > Sao Paulo is a very vertical city. That makes it very
| frenetic. You could not even realize the architecture of
| the old buildings, because all the buildings, all the
| houses were just covered with billboards and logos and
| propaganda. And there was no criteria. And now it is
| amazing. They uncovered a lot of problems the city had
| that we never realized.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa
| ATsch wrote:
| Capitalism is a system where, so it is claimed, atomized
| individuals pursuing their "rational self-interest" produce an
| inherent moral and societal good. This is to be aided by a lack
| of regulation and interference by non-market forces. The freer
| the markets the freer the people.
|
| This case is a pretty clear example of how this is not in fact
| the case. By the metrics of a captialist system this should be
| a huge success. You have investment, voluntary contracts, free
| markets and fierce competition that results in huge amounts of
| innovation. Yet the result is horribly useless waste that hurts
| society. I think it's pretty fair to call it out.
| robocat wrote:
| That sounds like a straw man argument to me. I think
| capitalism is amoral.
|
| Regulations are added to restrict some of the harmful effects
| of uncontrolled greed.
| ATsch wrote:
| I can't personally speak to the effectiveness of all of the
| systems humans have lived under or seriously proposed, but
| I'm fairly certain that among them capitalism is pretty
| unique in being a system where a paperclip maximizer can be
| considered a good product. (incidentally also fairly unique
| in being the only system so far under which hunans have
| created a global extinction level event)
| cbsmith wrote:
| It's not blaming capitalism. It's blaming purism.
|
| X at "its purest" is pretty awful, for all values of X.
|
| Shocking news flash: pretty much any system has unintended
| consequences, distortions, etc. You invariably need checks and
| balances (which rob it of its "purity") in place to mitigate.
| When you get into the extra-legal space, where those checks and
| balances are most mitigated, you see some pretty terrible
| stuff.
| throw10920 wrote:
| > It's not blaming capitalism. It's blaming purism.
|
| I've never seen an article that blames "purist capitalism" on
| HN (maybe two that reference "lassie-faire capitalism"), and
| dozens that just blame "capitalism", no further elaboration
| given. The most straightforward explanation is that
| capitalism itself _is_ being blamed, and I think that this
| explanation is supported by the recent (past 20 years?)
| increase in support for socialism /communism (both in the US
| and globally).
| cbsmith wrote:
| I guess it depends on how you read it. This article is
| pretty clearly critical of "capitalism in its purist form",
| and [checks notes] it was posted on HN.
|
| So your perception may be more of projection of your own
| POV than that of others.
| qwerty2021 wrote:
| you're seeing an increase of mentally ill and/or unhappy
| people with internet access.
| mikestew wrote:
| I highly recommend staying away from hemlock tea, despite the
| fact that I am unable to provide you with an antidote.
|
| Just because a solution isn't provided does not necessarily
| invalidate one's criticism. And China as your poster child for
| communism? Man, I don't want to get all "no true Scotsman" on
| you, but...
| elefanten wrote:
| Your analogy perfectly defeats your point.
|
| The alternative to drinking hemlock tea is not drinking
| hemlock tea.
|
| You can't _not pick_ an economic system of organization. Even
| if you don 't pick one, you will have one. So the question
| becomes "what's the best choice available?"
|
| To choose "not capitalism" is still choosing something --
| something which may work much worse.
| mikestew wrote:
| Thanks, Neil Peart?[0] I'm not saying "don't choose", or
| "choose differently". I'm saying one doesn't need to offer
| alternatives in order to state that $THING might have
| downsides. Just because I have a lot of money tied up in
| the U. S. stock market doesn't mean that it's hypocritical
| to point out the jackassery that can come with
| capitalism...like ad tech.
|
| [0] https://www.rush.com/songs/freewill
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| In agreement. Far too many "debaters" do not acknowledge
| this truth. Identifying a problem and proposing a
| solution are two different things. I get that actionable
| statements are appreciated, but they aren't a
| requirement. Conflating the two rhetorically sophomoric.
|
| Another way of putting this is the burden of proof to
| also provide on a solution is not on the problem
| identifier. Asking as much is implicitly making the
| argument that the problem doesn't exist because the
| solution doesn't yet exist. We can all agree how absurd
| that is.
| throw10920 wrote:
| > I'm saying one doesn't need to offer alternatives in
| order to state that $THING might have downsides
|
| Which is a completely reasonable and true point! And it's
| a rhetorical pattern that, if we could assume noble
| intent more often, would be way more popular.
|
| However, unfortunately, when people act in bad faith, the
| reasonable expression "x has problems" can have the
| subtext "we should use [popular alternative y] instead".
| This is the case with supporters of socialism and
| communism - "capitalism is bad" is not used in order to
| try to improve the regulatory mechanisms around
| capitalism (which, as other people have pointed out, are
| absolutely necessary), but in order to try to drum up
| support for their favored economic system instead.
|
| The pattern that consistently appears is that people who
| are trying to improve or draw attention to the regulatory
| landscape around capitalism consistently talk about
| regulations (e.g. focusing on the FAA's lack of oversight
| over Boeing, or old environmental regulations that were
| revoked under a recent administration), and the people
| who are trying to advance another agenda instead throw
| out lines to the effect of "capitalism bad" or "this is
| the result of capitalism".
| InitialLastName wrote:
| Your assumption that selection of a system is binary, as in
| you either have an absolute unrestricted free market or you
| have uncompromising centralized state control of the entire
| economy is missing the question.
|
| We don't have either of those things now (neither does
| China). Control of the economy exists on a multidimensional
| spectrum, of which there are many possible options; blaming
| "capitalism" for a problem is shorthand for noting that, in
| some situation, the unrestricted free market is leading to
| negative externalities or a poor use of the commons.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| I understand - I'm not saying it's not capitalism, but that I
| don't see from this article why using a different system
| would prevent this from happening. It's just something to
| blame.
| [deleted]
| cheese_van wrote:
| Perhaps but if you assume a spherical true Scotsman...
| betenoire wrote:
| That paragraph stuck out to me too.. it makes no sense. They
| say it is refined capitalism but also nothing of value is being
| traded. Isn't capital supposed to have value? That's refined
| snake oil.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| "they never address what solution they want. Communism?"
|
| As much as I enjoy hackernews, is it economically illiterate.
| There are 50 different economic schools of thought, and
| 'Capitalism/Communism' are not among them, they are
| vulgarities.
|
| 'Capitalism' of 1800 was mercantelism - it was protectionist,
| featured slave trade, etc.
|
| 'Capitalism' of 1980's was Keynesianism, when income tax was
| 70% in the top bracket, high inflation, cheap housing, we could
| build infrastruture effectively, etc.
|
| 'Capitalism' of today is 'Neoliberalism', and it's the pinnacle
| of laissez-faire approach to economy.
|
| There is also Shumpeterianism which proritises technological
| development, Austrian school, and countless others
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schools_of_economic_thought
| xmodem wrote:
| Here's an idea: like, capitalism, but with some restraints on
| it to protect the world. You know, like how we have regulators
| that (nominally) ensure food safety and clean air and whatnot.
| hiccuphippo wrote:
| It sounds like a lot of this could be prevented if Javascript had
| a way to disallow monkeypatching. Maybe there could be something
| like `const` that would prevent external code from modifying an
| attribute of an object. At least for objects provided by the
| engine itself. Is there any non malicious reason to allow
| everyone to replace `window.encodeURIComponent`?
| moron4hire wrote:
| Well, window is the default global scope, so it can't be sealed
| or any top-level declarations wouldn't work. You'd have to
| create a new global scope to be able to seal window, and that
| would break large swaths of the web.
| dylan604 wrote:
| >and that would break large swaths of the web.
|
| I'm thinking that might not be as bad of a thing as you might
| be making it out as. Sometimes, you just need to light a
| match and watch certain things burn. Allow their ashes to be
| fertilizer for the regrowth period.
|
| Unfortunately, in the world of today, I think the underworld
| of slimey devs would fill the void faster, and implement
| "new" that appeals to their needs.
| moron4hire wrote:
| And what of all those government websites that don't get
| updated very often, with forms that people rely on to get
| access to benefits? Something as simple as client-side pre-
| form-validation would break access and it could be months
| before anyone does anything about it. Sure, you could argue
| that the various government bureaus should be better about
| updating stuff, but that's really just not going to happen.
| eitland wrote:
| I've been proposing the same approach as Mozilla took
| with asm a few years ago:
|
| Specify a subset of the language and guarantee that if on
| sticks to this subset it will run in a simplified and
| heavily optimized branch of the code.
| austincheney wrote:
| If browsers provided an option to block third party script
| requests... solved.
| Sephr wrote:
| It's absolutely possible to have JavaScript coexist in a
| potentially hostile environment. We utilize a secure reference
| cache for Transcend Consent so that potentially malicious
| scripts cannot interfere with the operation of our consent
| manager.
| jefftk wrote:
| It's only possible if you can ensure that you are operating
| on the page before any other scripts. [1] Most third parties
| on pages don't have that.
|
| [1] And that there are no relevant extensions, and no one has
| modified the browser itself.
| Sephr wrote:
| Indeed. We advise our customers to place our consent
| management script before any scripts that they wish to
| regulate due to this inherent limitation.
| dennisy wrote:
| Is it possible to ensure that your resource is delivered on a
| specific site?
|
| For example if I have an image and need to be 100% certain where
| it was loaded, is that possible to do with some very high level
| of certainty?
| waynesonfire wrote:
| only if you can trust the source and destination, which, from
| the point of view of the ad server, is not the case hence the
| uphill battle of ad fraud.
|
| this is the value add of closed platforms. though not perfect,
| they have the most reliable ads. amazon, google, facebook,
| netflix, pinterest, tv. any fraud just makes these platforms
| more money so what's the incentive? maybe there are some edge
| cases with revenue sharing models. the fraud that i can think
| of on these platfroms is the extent that the quality of
| platform is misrepresented [1].
|
| [1] https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/18/facebook-knew-for-years-
| ad...
| [deleted]
| trasz wrote:
| So what's illicit about it, compared to the usual ad business?
| michael1999 wrote:
| If an advertiser says "place this ad, but not on TPB", and a
| network says "sure, we'll run your ad, and not on TPB", and
| then through trickery runs the ad on TPB, but in a way that
| fools the advertisers auditor, that is clear fraud.
| PeterisP wrote:
| Isn't this more like a network says "if you run this ad on
| your nice-and-fluffy-site, we'll pay you $x" and the nice-
| and-fluffy-site says "yep, we'll run this ad on our site" but
| runs this ad on TPB instead ?
|
| I.e. as far as I understood the particular situation
| described by OP, the breach of contract happens between the
| site and network, not between the network and advertiser.
| 123pie123 wrote:
| My assumption was they were displaying ads and falsifying the
| clicks to the ads and getting money (fraud?)
| mmierz wrote:
| This is answered in the article!
| trasz wrote:
| It's not. The article simply assumes that actions that the ad
| networks don't like are somehow "illicit", without providing
| a rationale.
| yborg wrote:
| These guys are delivering ads for Lexus to moviepiracy.com
| by using an intermediate server that obscures the actual
| target site. Lexus doesn't want its brand associated with
| these types of sites and would normally prevent this from
| happening. Intermediary collects the money.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Officially Lexus doesn't want that, in reality, they care
| about sales.
|
| They'll be upset if this "gray" traffic doesn't convert
| well, but Lexus buyers just might be the type with the
| disposable income for gambling.
| mpeg wrote:
| I know some people that made tons of money simply for
| setting up the arbitrage, shell companies that would sell
| ad space to big brands promising top tier media orgs and
| then turn around and buy it directly from porn, gaming
| and piracy sites.
|
| Same thing as this article, but without actually building
| the technology themselves, simply being the middleman.
| secondcoming wrote:
| What I don't understand about domain masking is how the offender
| gets paid? Surely the owner of the 'borrowed' domain gets paid
| instead?
| gowld wrote:
| Advertiser buys ads (via a network intermediary) on "Good
| sites, but not Pirate Bay"
|
| Evil person creates a (simple, weak) good site, and sells ads
| on it.
|
| Advertiser pays Evil person to show ads on simple, weak, good
| site.
|
| Evil person then displays those ads (via iframe) on Pirate Bay.
|
| Advertiser thinks the end-user visited Good site.
| vzqx wrote:
| How does Evil person interact with Pirate Bay owners? Does
| the Pirate Bay knowingly host fraudulent ads in return for a
| share of the profit?
| andrewla wrote:
| The "Evil person" and the "Pirate Bay owners" are the same
| people.
|
| The ads are not fraudulent per se -- real humans are seeing
| the ads and interacting with them.
| jklinger410 wrote:
| Like many takedowns of the digital ad industry, this paints an
| incomplete picture.
|
| We use 3rd party impression and click tracking, along with
| pairing purchases to user/session ids to make sure our ads our
| working. If a user tries to mask their data from us, they simply
| come in as direct traffic, and we don't attribute that to our ad
| campaign.
|
| If this fraud stuff trips you up you aren't doing it right.
| mojuba wrote:
| You should add your retention rates into the picture though.
| The ad network can bring you really shitty users who had
| incentives to click (usually from within games) but are
| absolutely not interested in your product. These can be real
| users, not bots, but they will ruin your retention stats later.
| ohyeshedid wrote:
| >If this fraud stuff trips you up you aren't doing it right.
|
| That mentality, across the entire ad industry, is how I retired
| before 40. Assumptions of security, understanding, and
| operating knowledge create huge blindspots, and those were my
| flow state.
| jklinger410 wrote:
| I tend to agree but this article doesn't address the
| blindspots that I think are relevant.
| bentice wrote:
| Most of the ad industry believes that because they use a 3rd
| party impression or click tracking they are safe from these
| attacks. This article outlines how ad fraud operations find
| vulnerabilities in those technologies that the ad industry
| trusts. 3rd party verification does not mean you have avoided
| fraud.
| cbsmith wrote:
| Yup, but that's the thing: "you aren't doing it right" is more
| the norm than otherwise.
| gardis wrote:
| I'd really like to see a movie or a documentary on this topic.
|
| Comments in here and the post itself are such a niche that only
| people browsing hacker news get to see.
| bentice wrote:
| The only way to really solve this is to follow the money. There
| will always be vulnerabilities but whether it's profitable to
| exploit them is another story. Ads move fast but money moves
| slow.
|
| The victims are good publishers ( miss out on ad dollars that
| would have gone their way) and advertisers (who have generally
| moved their money to walled gardens where there isn't an agency
| incentive problem).
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| That is a very accurate description of the 'ad tech' business we
| got to interact with at Blekko. Greed caught many of the folks,
| they would be making $2K - $4K a week and suddenly jump to
| $15-$20K ? And all the anti-fraud algorithms would light up. I
| don't doubt for a moment that the small numbers were also fraud
| but until they crossed the threshold they got away with it.
|
| The CFO and I were convinced that everyone would switch to "CPA"
| or per-action models (you only pay on the ad if the click
| resulted in a sale/conversion etc) that seemed like a much harder
| thing to defraud. But for brand impressions? That isn't something
| you can do easily.
|
| Our crawler uncovered a registrar that had sold thousands of
| domains on one of the odd top levels to a scammer who had
| populated them with duplicate data driven "forum", "blog" and
| "review" sites. At the time the crawler would flag sites with
| identical copy and this person had been fairly clever in that
| they clearly had a crawler of their own and they crawled through
| forums and just duplicated all of the messages and then populated
| their "fake" forum with them (as an example). If you looked at
| one "page" it kind of made sense (it clearly was written by a
| human) but different responses were talking about randomly
| different things (likes one post on cats and then a post on
| rebuilding an engine).
|
| We speculated it had started as a black hat SEO operation and
| then expanded into an ad fraud farm. But still it was amazing to
| see what was perhaps hundreds of thousands of "web pages" that
| existed simply to exploit a way to extract money out the web
| ecosystem.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| The opposite is true: ad companies will often not count all the
| legit impressions, until you start putting monitoring and call
| them out.
|
| Ads are just a dirty business at this point.
| Beltiras wrote:
| Has it ever not been?
| codyb wrote:
| Just personally, I'm not super opposed to ads sold on
| television networks that come over my antenna that
| basically just market to specific demographics.
|
| Billboards a bit problematic if they distract drivers but
| otherwise don't bother me much either.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| If you read the excellent Bernays' propaganda
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_(book)), you can
| have dive into how advertising was perceived in 1920.
|
| While I don't buy that this is the only view at the time,
| and that there was no dirt to find, I believe that there
| was a time were ads were imagined as a way to inform the
| consumers, or at least convey some kind of information to
| them.
|
| Unfortunately, the market doesn't optimize for what's
| right, only for what's profitable. The too may or may not
| aligned at first, but give it enough time, and it will
| deviate.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| obligatory ref to "Century of the Self" four-part
| documentary
| winternett wrote:
| It's only when you look into the Black Hat world that you
| realize how deceptive the Ad world is... Major Record labels
| botting their music videos to make them look extremely popular,
| social media profiles with millions of followers for sale
| providing instant impressions of fake fame, and the majority of
| ad-based revenue being eaten up by scammers.
|
| Even Google analytics are so convoluted now that they really
| make a simple process of tracking real engagement into a
| maddeningly confusing bowl of spaghetti.
|
| The people that seek to overcomplicate the web also create wild
| pyramid schemes for profit that really corrupt purpose and
| utility of the Internet. It won't be long before we begin to
| see completely fabricated statistics everywhere, and it will
| feed into misled investors and more deception.
|
| I'm glad we still have the ability to create our own web sites
| and resources, many companies have been lobbying to take that
| ability away from us, to drive costs of doing so up wildly, and
| to cripple our ability to have an even playing field.
|
| I don't run ads on my personal web sites though, it's better I
| don't contribute further to the problem.
|
| My friends and family don't realize why I'm such a pessimist
| when I speak about the Internet and Social Media now, I worry
| about them being scammed and influenced by the fake aspects of
| certain business and celebrity online.
|
| If there's one thing that the Pandemic has shown, it's who had
| money and who was faking. There were many people using black
| hat techniques to fake popularity, success, and fame and that
| began to dry up quick every time Google pushed an algorithm
| update.
|
| The sad reality is that normal creators, and business owners
| that don't participate in the ad/manipulation madness can't
| ever make it to a point where they'll be visible, and the
| Internet can't ever return to the point where equal opportunity
| existed because of all of the now embedded ad-based revenue
| culture that we all let take hold of it.
|
| The only way to thrive moving forward will be to create small
| (focused) communities that avoid the current pitfalls of ad
| based communities, and to be able to sell valuable and highly
| useful products and services within them that fund reasonable
| expansion and operation of those communities.
| fedreserved wrote:
| Future4200.com is a perfect example of the small community
| you discussed.
|
| It's a marijuana/hemp forum that is one of the biggest
| resources in the space.
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