
AdNauseam – clicking ads so you don't have to - JoachimS
https://adnauseam.io/
======
jordigh
I can't believe we've accepted the term "ad fraud" for this, as if we were
being any more deceptive than the ad industry is, or as if we had signed a
contract that we violated.

As if not truthfully clicking on ads were a crime.

We don't owe advertisers anything, least of all the truth.

~~~
minikites
To some people, nothing is a greater sin than disrupting market capitalism.

~~~
Tsubasachan
I think the general public doesn't really shed a tear for the advertising
industry. Those who cry over this probably have a financial stake in
ads&marketing.

~~~
Nasrudith
They did say some. It is also what is sarcastically referred to as felony
interference with a business model but that is a pretty niche term.

~~~
zentiggr
I had not heard that term, but oh my, wouldn't it be hilarious if some
congress critters tried to get that written up as an actual law?

------
Spare_account
Not sure if this is useful or not but this has been discussed on HN a few
times before, here are some of the most popular occasions:

"AdNauseam: Fight Back Against Advertising Networks and Privacy Abuse"
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13222733](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13222733)

"AdNauseam – Clicking Ads So You Don't Have To"
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15109251](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15109251)

"AdNauseam Banned from the Google Web Store"
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13327228](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13327228)

"Pale Moon blocks AdNauseam extension"
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15112524](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15112524)

~~~
SCdF
You might even say it has been discussed here ad nauseam…

~~~
mg794613
What sparked _this_ repost is probably:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19278643](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19278643)

So every once in a while it get's reposted. Not bad perse.

------
varelaz
Most of the ad networks already fight with ad fraud and validate clicks and
redirects. Their technologies are very sophisticated. So I don't think that it
does more harm to ad companies than to plugin users, who marked suspicious and
fraud. There are already plenty of bots who scrape ads and click on them. By
different estimates around 20-30% of web traffic is already caused by bots. As
for me plugin is a kind of way to say how you hate ad market and web in
general, nothing more.

~~~
_ak
I worked in adtech a few years ago, and AdNauseam-style click fraud is a
relatively trivial to detect and ignore. It does nothing, and adtech companies
don't care about your hate of online advertising the least because that's what
brings in the cash.

~~~
diplocorp
Do you mind shedding light on how such click fraud is detected?

~~~
rvnx
The most usual technique is to setup click baits/traps, once you click on a
trap link you (= IP or UID via cookie) are added to an ignore list, where all
your actions are not invoiced to advertisers. Simple and works,

~~~
AlexandrB
This actually sounds ideal for me too. Please ignore me and stop tracking me.

~~~
pixl97
They didn't say they stopped tracking you, just that they didn't charge the
advertisers.

~~~
chicob
But in that case it still looks like an effective way of fighting that
business model.

~~~
sgc
Or to receive more aggressive advertising/you are using ad nauseum overlays.

~~~
anoncake
Aggressively advertising to someone you know hates ads is stupid. They'll just
boycott you in spite.

------
Tade0
This extension made me switch to Firefox after Chrome banned it from their
store.

I have it set to "don't click on non-tracking Ads" and "don't hide non-
tracking Ads".

Ads are fine. Tracking is not.

~~~
varelaz
I switched to Safari, after Chrome started automatically login you to Chrome
account if you login to gmail. They become too aggressive on tracking.

~~~
nielsbot
I am thankful for Safari. Opinion: Safari is underrated.

------
cr3ative
So worse than just not supporting sites you visit (via blocking or not
clicking), you actively harm their conversion rate on ads, making their slots
worth less to networks. Super.

~~~
elcomet
So maybe that's good if you want to encourage sites to find other business
models that don't rely on advertisement.

~~~
manigandham
How many sites would you actually pay for?

~~~
elcomet
Well, maybe a subscription for every site is _not_ the right business model,
we could imagine a lot of different ones. For example, automatic tipping when
you spend more than x minutes on a website (something similar to what brave is
trying to do), or pay by article (a few cents) on news sites.

Eventually people won't be able to subscribe to every site they want content
from obviously. Look at netflix / hulu / amazon videos / youtube red ... It
adds up very quickly.

~~~
r3bl
Trying to convince me to set up a subscription upon any visit (and especially
upon the first visit) isn't gonna be very effective. It requires thought and
some calculations.

"Liked it? Pay me $2" is a way more simple decision to make. If I make it to
the end of your content and see a PayPal.me (or Ko-fi) link, there's a
reasonable chance I'm going to click on it. I can't say the same for links to
Patreon.

~~~
MarHoff
There could actually be a sweet spot for ApplePay (and similar service) there.
Quick anonymous and secure tips for website.

------
manigandham
This doesn’t work. Its very easily caught and actually makes you more
trackable because of the extra interaction signals.

Stick with the normal ad blockers.

~~~
rippeltippel
Can you elaborate more on how it can be caught and make users more trackable?
Even if there are more "signals", individual advertisers won't necessarily be
able to know that the same user clicked on all other advertisers' links.

~~~
varelaz
As more web pages you visit, as more tracking markers you've get. Yes, your
tracking history will be skewed because of random clicking, it's kind of GIGO
effect, but such kind of junk data is very easy to filter out. When you
clicking on everything you provide too much events, which become suspicious
and irrelevant. Also all clicks are made in background, which means that there
is no rendering, no view tracking, which is obviously easy to catch. Check how
vCPM and viewability work.

~~~
sanxiyn
Note that AdNauseam allows you to configure probabilistic clicking so that
it's harder to filter out.

~~~
varelaz
Once your IP is detected as fraud it's trivial. There are various ways to do
this. For example invisible links that you cannot click unless you're bot.

~~~
mg794613
Perfect, mission accomplished ;)

------
sametmax
I used it for a time, but it gets you blocked by plenty of filters and makes
captchas extra suspicious.

~~~
Tsubasachan
I have hardened my browser for privacy and now CAPTCHA hates me.

Its an arms race and I think the advertising industry knows that eventually
people will give up.

~~~
gabriel34
I don't believe users will lose this arms race. I don't have hard data, but
from what I observe in various circles is that the Zeitgeist is that the
user/consumer attention is valuable, content is cheap, so put up barriers and
the user will bounce

The sad part is that this commoditization of content ends up affecting the
quality content, that will probably end up becoming a niche market. Charge per
content and the user will bounce, charge per month and you have to be the
biggest because of network effects (try recommending a series from Amazon
Prime to someone who subscribes to Netflix)

There is a trend to use ads disguised as content ("People are using this
secret trick to earn mad $$ in [oddly specific location, close to you]"), or
intertwined with content that is yet immune to ad blocking(like ads in the
middle of youtube videos/podcasts), but that has a higher production and
negotiation cost, it will probably not be a market as big as ad networks.

EDIT: Just remembered about ads on smartphone apps which are a viable option
due to the lack of user control over hardware and software. There are some
solutions, but these are much harder than installing a browser extension and
thus not as widely adopted.

~~~
BentFranklin
Which is one reason why they are pushing lusers toward phones and away from
desktops.

------
bronzeage
so what if they can mark you as a bot. I'd love to be marked as bot so nobody
wants to serve ads to me. that's mission accomplished.

~~~
techslave
welcome to captcha

------
xan_ps007
Amazing concept. My only problem is the permissions it's asking while I tried
to install it on firefox.

\- Access your data for all websites [You could take away my passwords]

\- Download files and read and modify the browser’s download history [Why?]

\- Access browser activity during navigation [Why?]

------
ericsilver
Perhaps instead they could build a central store of potential ad clicks and
their base rate likelihood of being clicked. Then, instead of clicking
everything, they could click ads at the same rates an average user would,
across the network.

------
dennisy
This is not the right way to go about making anything better about the
internet.

~~~
sanxiyn
Why isn't it?

------
eitland
One kind of fraud that I suspect exist but I hear less talk about here is
fraud against advertisers;

Last time I clicked and bought something from an ad was 5 years ago. It costed
me about USD 30. Either I'm totally extraordinary (not likely) or this is true
for huge parts of the rest of ad viewers as well. I also suspect that there is
a connection between disposable income and resistance against ads.

More specifically I suspect ad networks fleece dumb and inexperienced ad
buyers buy selling ads they know cannot work.

~~~
linuxftw
I view online advertising similar to advertising in a print magazine.
Brand/product awareness. Occasionally ads are quite relevant to me, such as
travel savings.

------
edwhitesell
It seems the approach here is to reduce the click-data value to zero, because
every ad is clicked. How about just removing clicks all together?

Maybe about a browser extension that loads every ad, but there are no clicks.
Preferably the browser makes the ad un-clickable (if it's visible at all).

Now you've got advertisers spending money on creatives, building campaigns,
bandwidth, monitoring/management, etc. but there's an almost zero chance of
generating revenue. Would that be more effective?

~~~
Erlich_Bachman
There is already adblock and ublock.

This is preventing the ad campaigns from building a database about your
personal preferences, building a profile on you. Also this way the advertisers
are spending even more money, by paying for those clicks. If the goal is to
make advertisement cost more or provide some sort of political statement, then
this is surely more effective. (Regardless of whether the goal is really that
great.)

~~~
edwhitesell
Increasing cost was the thought, yes. I admit I'm not totally up-to-speed on
what adblock and ublock do, but I was under the impression that they don't
load the ads. So while you wouldn't see them, there's also no cost to serving
them.

Edit: But are the advertisers really paying for those clicks? Reading through
the thread, it seems like these get flagged as fraud pretty easily. So while
there's still a cost to create/serve the ads, to the point of my question, it
would seem they don't pay the websites for the clicks.

------
Kaveren
What is a "visit"? Is it executing JavaScript on the page it visits, and
acting completely like a normal browser? If not, trivial to detect?

------
exabrial
I'm okay with not running an ad blocker but what I really wish somebody would
do is block the obnoxious clickbait "<insert your town here> guy in his
thirties found this one weird way to make < insert the last thing you bought
on Amazon>!!!" and it has a picture of some some heavily photoshopped model.

~~~
plink
I agree that obnoxious, vile-quality ads deserve to be combated by the
recipient as though on a war footing.

------
leowoo91
Next up for anti-ad-block: if user clicks an irrelevant ad, block services.

------
TicklishTiger
"Install AdNauseam 3.7"

3rd party ads are bad for privacy. But browser extensions are even worse. They
can see everything you do on any website. They can change what you see.
Redirect you. Send data wherever they want. Without you noticing any of this.

Besides, using this thing result in sending even more data to the advertisers.

I can understand the hate about how user hostile the web is. But this is not a
solution. A solution would be to use bloated websites less.

On HN, we could downrank pages that send data to 3rd parties like this: Tell
the submitter of a page "The page loads sends data to 75 different servers.
Please be aware that we will not show it on the front page until it has at
least 75 upvotes".

This would make an impact.

Imagine Reddit or Twitter follwing this practice. The web would become better
fast.

~~~
sametmax
Except it's way easier to trust a bunch of extensions that the entire
community vets, with a code you can inspect, instead of the thousands of ever
changing 3rd party code executing in ads every day.

~~~
A2017U1
> the entire community vets

Pardon my ignorance, but not every extension is open source? Recently been a
few stories of popular extension maintainers offered money to either include
coffee or hand over all control to shady people.

Personally I wouldn't count thousands getting auto-updated malware installed
in their browser before the world notices as vetting.

~~~
anoncake
> Pardon my ignorance, but not every extension isnt open source right?

No, but this one is.

~~~
A2017U1
I realize that and even gave it a try long ago, the comment was meant in
general.

Besides ublock origin and noscript I avoid extensions like the plague.
Autoupdates mean that any malicious actor could infect many before it gets
pulled.

------
ReedJessen
This is one of those times I just sit down and think: "Damn... such an
obviously good/bad idea".

I am really proud of humanities ability to be creative.

------
r-u-serious
This is genius! Use people's resources to click on ads without them knowing,
brand it as "obfuscation", profit!

------
Dotnaught
The trouble is this helps sustain the ad delivery ecosystem. Simply blocking
ads does more to effect change.

~~~
mhfs
Yeah, unless the extension is used by a significant portion of the users, this
a probably pushing numbers up a bit for networks.

------
supergilbert
Amazing idea and clever name.

------
kgwxd
Any traffic you give them is just another datapoint to sell.

~~~
anoncake
So they can target you as someone who hates ads?

------
fabiandesimone
I'm in advertising and I'm not sure I get the hate towards ads.

I mean, anyone here does not have a business? Do you really expect to build a
company based on product quality and the ocasional blog post? I guarantee you
that 99% of postmorten posts posted in HN are because said startup couldn't
figure out their marketing strategy.

Anyways, isn't this click fraud?

~~~
elcomet
The problem is that advertising is shifting towards manipulation. Facebook and
co can target so well their users, and do brain research to understand how to
most effectively make someone want a product, or click on an ad, or buy a
service..

Also, we suspect cases of political manipulations through advertisement
channels (remember cambridge analytica ?)

Before, advertisement was just sensitization to a brand, making people know
it. Today, it's much more, and I find it absolutely horrifying.

Also, ads are very annoying when they prevent you to enjoy the content, and
block half of the page, as it is the case in a lot of sites.

(please excuse the language, not native speaker)

~~~
frostburg
It was almost always manipulation; recall all the old cigarette ads featuring
doctors.

~~~
elcomet
This is more a lie than a manipulation (and is punished by law, at least in
some country). But you are right that even without targeting, ads could hurt
people.

~~~
frostburg
That's now illegal in many countries (not that tactic, just advertising for
cigarettes). Faking legitimacy by implication of (spurious) association with
something seen as trustworthy is unfortunately entirely legal, as far as I
know.

