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The infamous x (lemmy.world)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/memes@lemmy.world
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[–] 1 point 2 years ago (2 children)

I wish I could remember the name of an extension I had on my old computer.

It hid all ads, but also clicked them all in the background. It accomplished 4 goals:

  1. I didn't see the ads
  2. The websites I visited made more money through the clicks
  3. It cost the advertisers money
  4. It made the cost/benefit worse for advertisers since they were paying for clicks without anyone being influenced by the ads
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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    I've got a feeling that advertising companies have ways to differentiate real and fake clicks. Best case scenario, they wouldn't count those. Worst case scenario, they could notice that too many clicks are fake and revoke the monetization for a website.

    If captchas exist, surely they can use similar methods to catch ad cheats like that.

    This is older, and not quite the same but back when I was into private Ragnarok Online servers, it was pretty well-known among server admins that you couldn't ask people to click your ads. Either because you asked, either because they noticed unusual activity, Google would demonetize the ads pretty quickly.

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