

Ask HN: Do you click on ads as a donation? - ishener

Sometimes I find myself clicking on ads on a site or a blog as a way to show my appreciation.<p>Am I the only one? Is this a widespread phenomena so that I can attribute clicks on my own site to this?
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notahacker
No. Bearing in mind that a lot of very smart people invest a lot of time
studying analytics and refining algorithms to detect spurious clicks, I don't
imagine that such "well-intentioned" clicking is ever going to be more than a
trivial portion of the sites' income.

At the point numbers of "donor" clicks start becoming non-trivial, the site
owners start getting their publisher accounts banned, so I'm working on the
assumption they probably don't want me to do it.

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xauronx
I've read before that this can actually be harmful for the person whom you're
trying to help. The article was in reference to a pirated android app. The
author noticed some crazy amounts of ad traffic from one of his apps.
Evidently, the pirates were using this as a method of compensating for
stealing the app. As it turns out, since the conversion rate was so low (a lot
of clicks and no purchases) his ad revenue became basically zero dollars. So,
they stole the app and made the only other revenue stream worthless.

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jamesjguthrie
I never click on adverts. I usually don't see them anyway as I always use
Adblock Plus.

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xk_id
I do too sometimes. For similar reasons.

I realised I can look at it this way after I put AdWords on my website and I
was warned by Google that I am now allowed to encourage visitors in any way to
click on my ads.

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kristianp
Sometimes I do. Sometimes I am tempted to click on the especially annoying ads
(e.g. tricks to a flat stomach), just to cost the advertiser money.

Why don't you create a poll?

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ishener
I don't have enough karma... almost...

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niico
Yes. I do. When they give me what I've been looking for I would click on one
banner.

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xijuan
I don't.

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rk0567
no, I don't.

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weitzj
Ido

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steventruong
No

