Otherwise, I can’t explain why they don’t take it more seriously to stand up to bots. Even more so with meta and their eagerness to put in more accounts pretending to be human to “cover the friend market”.

Besides, what’s to stop them? They are the ones who control the information and surely they know perfectly well which accounts are authentic and which are bots. Maybe even several of those accounts are controlled directly by them and they use them to inflate the statistics to charge advertisers even more.

Or maybe I’m jut tripping…

  • rumschlumpel@feddit.org
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    2 days ago

    They’re definitely lying about the reach of their ads, this already came up a couple of times during elections. Though in the case of elections, it’s more about the precision of their targeting - apparently, a lot of the time they weren’t even able to precisely target the population of specific election districts. Or maybe just unwilling, who knows.

    I’m also pretty sure that a lot of advertising clients are not happy that they’re sharing ad space with porn ads and scam ads.

    • sunzu2@thebrainbin.org
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      m also pretty sure that a lot of advertising clients are not happy that they’re sharing ad space with porn ads and scam ads.

      I love how these parasites think that their slop is above porn and gambling 🤡

  • MushuChupacabra@lemmy.world
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    They are one hundred percent ripping off their advertisers.

    Consider how advertising on any of those platforms looks compared to five or ten years ago.

    Never liked ads, but have experienced a sharp drop in my tolerance, based exclusively on the nonstop ratcheting up of ad delivery.

    • rumschlumpel@feddit.org
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      Consider how advertising on any of those platforms looks compared to five or ten years ago.

      How does it look? I haven’t braved the web without an adblocker in years.

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        Annoying as shit. My girlfriend doesn’t have an ad-less youtube app on her phone, and whenever we watch a video on her phone I get genuinely annoyed by the ads.

        I’ve offered to do it for her but so far she doesn’t see the need to install one, but apparently youtube is pushing more ads cause she recently started complaining too.

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          I really don’t understand how so many people just put up with it. I actually helped an older relative with it a couple of months ago, he isn’t even the tech-illiterate type. Mere weeks after that, he’s back to using YouTube with ads.

          • bluesheep@lemm.ee
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            In my case it’s kind of my fault since I’m on iOS so I have to sideload uYou+, and sometimes I forgot to refresh the app which means I have to connect my phone to my pc and refresh it manually, which put her off of a third party app.

            But she has an android phone and, if all is still well and good in phone world since after I switched to Apple, she wouldn’t have to deal with that, which I told her. But so far she’s not interested and like you said, I have no idea why she puts up with it.

  • TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip
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    Also the incentives of this setup are pretty screwed up. The advertising agency gets money as long as they are able to convince the advertiser that their services are worth it. But how do you really measure that? Sure, we have lots of fancy tracking technology, but not all consumers click ads to buy stuff. Whats the role of those purchases? Who knows. The agency will undoubtedly claim that all the sales were a direct result of an advertising company, and they have every incentive to say that. Do they really have any incentive to be completely honest about the effectiveness of their ads. I doubt it.

    • NONE@lemmy.worldOP
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      It’s just that, the way the market is run, there is no incentive to be honest with the data. If the line has to go up, it has to go up, even if it’s an imaginary rise.

    • Dragonstaff@leminal.space
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      Tracking ROI from advertising is pretty sophisticated. Ad agencies will be tracking conversions in most cases. Especially on FB, where you have people’s real names and can track if someone who saw an ad bought through another platform.

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        google has ethics?

        also, i think it would be more cost effective for them to just make the numbers up, no bots needed.

        • CameronDev@programming.dev
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          The site itself might be tracking views, so might need it. Dunno how to make the bots not look like datacenter IP addresses though.

      • slazer2au@lemmy.world
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        I could be wrong but impression seems like something very easy to fake so as an advertiser you would like something more concrete then just ‘We showed your ad X amount of times.’