• makeasnek@lemmy.ml
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    9 months ago

    Remember that every time you click an ad, you cost the advertiser somewhere between 10c and several dollars. And that which ads you’ve clicked on informs which ads you will get in the future. It would be a shame if somebody weaponized this knowledge and clicked ads without any actual interest in buying the products.

    • droans@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Depends on if they pay per view or per click. And then depends on the site/app, the location of the ad, and the bid.

      For the Play Store, the CPM is usually around $10-15. So for every 1,000 people who see the ad, they pay $10-15.

      YouTube can be $30-40 for the video ads with some going up close to $80. An ad at the bottom of a news site can be as little as $0.50.

      The ads you’ll be shown will be the highest bidder who meets the criteria to display it. In general, the more targeted it is, the higher the bid. So McDonald’s might just say, “show this ad anywhere on the site to anyone who is in the US” and bid $0.25. A high-end watch company might say “Show this at a banner ad to men who are between 30-45, have an income above $150K, who care about fine products, likely own multiple nice watches, and are visiting high end watch websites” and bid $50.

    • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      I used to have an extension that hid ads from me, but in the background clicked on every one. I’m super annoyed that I forgot the name of it.

      It made the sites I visited more money and hid the ads from me while hurting the advertisers (by costing more money) and ad networks (by screwing with the value proposition from advertising). It was great!

    • CleoTheWizard@beehaw.org
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      9 months ago

      No. It’s an open secret kind of deal that most online advertisements don’t actually sell or do anything. In fact, a large amount of google views are bots.

      How? Because there’s nothing stopping thousands of apps from using the ads incorrectly and showing them to phones or accounts or users that aren’t real people. At least with iOS, it’s very hard to run instances on servers or bot clients. Meanwhile, android can run on windows. Exploits galore.

      But, no one cares. The companies are told to spend more on advertisement. The ad department of the company has a budget, they don’t care where it’s spent. So they buy ads from google and they don’t care who they get shown to 90% of the time. Everyone wins except the company but the company doesn’t care because they’re already making money.

      Not to mention that the average consumer is shown thousands of ads a day. The more they see the less they notice the ads.

      Basically ads are just designed to waste time for everyone. Truth social ads just lead to more installs by people already looking for their garbage app.

      • trailing9@lemmy.ml
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        9 months ago

        Companies don’t care because it’s equal for everybody. If fake views would be removed, fees per thousand clicks would just increase.

        But companies wouldn’t waste money. If you offer more real viewers for the same price, companies would switch.