
Tired of Ads and Shitty Content? Click Everything - messel
http://www.victusspiritus.com/2010/10/17/tired-of-ads-and-shitty-content-click-everything/
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jnorthrop
Vigilantism isn't the answer. Visit the sites that publish good content and
click on ads that peak your interest -- let the internet marketplace sort
itself out.

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wccrawford
Plus, 1 person doing this won't matter a bit. 10% of the people doing this
probably still won't have much impact. And there's no way you can get 10% of
the internet to do the same thing.

~~~
ryanpetrich
Unless you can trick 4chan into doing it.

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mattmaroon
First off, shitty content sites don't sell ads directly (generally) anymore
than good content sites do. The ads come through a network like AdSense which
means all that will result in is the shitty content site getting a lot more
money.

Second, it won't ruin online advertising if lots of people do this. At the end
of the day all ads are converted to CPA and bid on accordingly. It's the only
metric advertisers care about. They pay by CPM or CPC, which you can game by
refreshing the page a bunch or clicking the ads, but the advertiser's cost
will just adjust until they're effectively paying the same CPA. For instance,
if half of all clicks suddenly become fraudulent, bids will decreases such
that CPCs drop by half, resulting in the same amount of money changing hands.

The only real problem with click fraud is when it is applied independently to
one advertiser but not the ones he's bidding against. For instance if a bunch
of people click AT&T adds fraudulently but not Verizon. If the click fraud is
spread evenly throughout the market it has no effect.

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ojilles
Sounds like a new AdBlock plug-in? Automatically click all banners and
adsense, etc but have the results go into /dev/null

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jawee
but think of the bandwidth!

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ojilles
Could be delayed (e.g. when nothing else is going on, download all content)

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devmonk
Why not automate it? And why not automate it for everyone else also?

How about writing a freeware system agent/daemon that would allow people to
submit sites, and then everyone running that agent/daemon would automatically
spider the site as one or more standard browser user-agents, so that the IPs
would be different and couldn't be as easily blocked without blocking
legitimate clicks. You could make it peer-to-peer and rate limiting so it
wouldn't be blamed as a DoS attack client. OR allow it to do DoS non-rate
limited attacks for some sites if enough clients feel that the site is nasty.

~~~
messel
Now that's hacker thinking, not bad mind you but not the right message.

It has to represent a determined social push, the hacker answer could be
abused while representing only a small percentage of web browsers.

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stcredzero
I've said time and again, users should be vote directly on ads. Not only will
this allow those serving ads to target them better, it will also allow direct
feedback on ads that are crappy in themselves.

As a side effect, this would generate reams of extremely valuable personalized
data on users!

Google could modify Chrome, such that everything in the browser can be voted
on. This alone would be a killer app for Chrome. (Come to think of it, they
could even enable voting on UI features of the browser itself!)

~~~
high5ths
Though it sounds like a good idea, I can't imagine that constantly voting on
everything I see would improve my browsing experience. I mean, browsing can
already be a huge time-suck: you want to add another step and tell me that it
will eventually improve the ads on my pages? It's easier to just ignore them.

Hulu lets you say whether or not an ad is relevant, and although I often do
vote, I'm not convinced it changes anything.

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YuriNiyazov
I just read the TechCrunch guest lobbyist post that he referenced in the
article ([http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/16/crashing-washington-how-
cle...](http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/16/crashing-washington-how-
cleantechsilicon-valley-can-have-their-cake-and-eat-it-too/)), and wasn't at
all disgusted. In fact, the guy sounded reasonable. Am I the only one?

~~~
messel
It wasn't all bad. I just woke up on the wrong side of the bed when I read it
at 4am. Ignoring gov isn't an optimal solution for growing businesses. It's
wishful thinking that wide scale social changes can happen outside of
regulated areas.

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rubinelli
I think the the problem with content-driven sites is that satisfied visitors
more often than not simply close the tab/window once they are done; only a
small percentage keep "foraging" for more good content. On the other had, as
Direct Media discovered, decent but far from great content keeps visitors
searching for more, so they are much more likely to click on an ad.

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robryan
Sure you will get rid of some junk content, but when ads are devalued you will
be getting rid of the good content to.

