I spent $220 on Google app ads and 60% of the installs were robots

I keep hearing this same story over and over. It's starting to sound like that's just Google's business model.

Why would you ever ever ever on record "take full responsibility" for something you did not actually do?

If a person does that, then that's dumb. But a company? Don't you have like a legal department or similar telling you to not ever confess to something you did in fact not do?

I was getting an advert that was obviously some scam software on YouTube mobile. The image looked like a system alert that storage was low. It was an obvious attempt to trick users.

https://bsky.app/profile/atomic14.bsky.social/post/3mnc7ws2h...

Perfectly fine according to google.

I would suspect that entities affected don't have money for a lawsuit.

Considering the government routinely both decides Google is violating the law but is unwilling to do things to change it, like split apart their ad monopoly, suing them is most likely futile.

Better ways to spend your money, like funding competitors.

The new advertising strategy is posting your own content at scale by yourself, not paying to play.

Higgsfield got to a billion dollar valuation by spamming egregiously. It doesn't pay for Reddit ads. They spam Reddit directly with an army of robots and cheap overseas labor. Thousands of posts a day.

Higgsfield got banned from X for this, but they still do it.

How is that in any way equivalent to and ad buy on Reddit?

Yep.

And the pay for these things is "access to 500+ TB Jellyfin-like movie services for free"

Of course, it's all pirated out of country. And the pay is being a residential proxy.

And piracy being the only way to actually own, I'm not imaging this will stop anytime soon.

also why hyperscalers are paying folks to host gpu clusters in their homes. its to get at tgeir IP, it has nothing to do with space, cooling, etc.

Grey? There's multiple conferences that "ethically sourced" proxy providers feature at now (ex: extractsummit.io)

Web scraping (for LLM inference / training) I guess has transformed "residential proxies" into a giant industry.

What incentive do they have to do that kind of work? They get paid anyway and they've basically got no competition

I agree but that will eliminate a big cash cow for them.

Why would you expect the water company to check your water for poison?

Nobody wants to admit just how bad the bot problem is, because it starts to dig into the fact that advertising isn't nearly as effective as advertisers let on

Taking a blind guess here because I have never worked at Google, but I would assume there is one organization that has the data, and another organization that can block IPs from clicking on the ads and consuming the spend. There is a byzantine process preventing that second org from getting the data along with a lack of motivation because it would decrease ad-spend, which is one of their key metrics. Org2 which deals with people clicking the ads is a bad place to work and no one who is actually good sticks around long enough to navigate the process and implement this, so the can gets perpetually kicked down the road.

Tends to be how it goes once you reach a certain size.

Because doing this would reduce their profits.

Admitting in public how bad the bot and fraud problem would be, metaphorically speaking, shooting their primary revenue source in the dick.

There is https://knock-knock.net/, which is similar

Yeah if there's a DB that would be helpful - I'm not currently capturing the IP, but I'll see if I can add it in a future release.

+1

I maintain one: https://github.com/brianhama/bad-asn-list

Good read. If you put mixpanel+hotjar or something like that in and actually drill down into what the networks are sending you the discrepancies are often stark. A couple years back I was working on a campaign for someone and over a month X reported it had sent ~$30k in traffic, but on our side the analysis platforms showed we'd only gotten around $2k of inbound (never mind the quality), we reported it to x and a few weeks later they came back and said there was a "bug" in the ads platform and refunded us the $30k but at the time I thought...if someone unsophisticated was running ads, they'd be out whatever they spent, to a degree their own fault for not being on top of it as ads platforms are somewhat notorious for this kinda thing but never the less, not ideal. I'm pretty sure the only useful places to advertise online these days are LinkedIn and Instagram.

Does it matter from marketers perspective? I can measure incremental revenue/profit and decide based on that if the channel is worth it. I don't care if the rest of the money goes to the channel or is stolen.

Well... I've always believed that a good go to market should be extremely multi channel with paid being gravy anyway. I think DigitalOcean was successful because we did a combination of: Actually useful content marketing + being where your customer actually is (so attend&host event/conferences etc) + genuine community outreach and interest in what your customer base is all about (I spent time every day during DO on HN making sure if anyone had a problem it was solved) + for devtools (at least back in my day) I think supporting OSS meaningfully was also incredibly important. To a degree in DevTools, DevRel can basically be the same as paid influencers, I had Mikeal Rogers (rest in peace) working for me and his mission was "Do whatever you want as long as it's net positive to the nodejs community, have fun!" so I guess "paying influencers" can mean few diff things. With youtube a lot of people use sponsor blockers now too so paying someone to shill your shit in the middle of their video is probably not as effective as it once was, tho I doubt the sponsor blocks are as widespread as ad blockers.

If you're just getting started I think the best thing you can do by a mile is just attend conferences/events where your ICP is and try to bootstrap PLG with it.

This question is asked often, and the answer is always that it depends on who your audience is. Channels that work for one person might fail for you, and vice versa. Every product solves a different problem, which means different people who seek out information from different places.

Step 1 is to understand who those people are for your product, and figure out which information sources they trust. As implied above, almost nobody trusts online ads.

Meta ads are mostly obvious fraud afaict - unregistered lotteries, jet washes that don't need power, flashlights so powerful they'll fry an egg by shining at them, household goods developed by NASA, air-conditioning/heating that doesn't need outside air and plugs direct into a socket, ...

I've reported a few to Advertising Standards in the UK, but they're not really interested in combatting Facebook/Amazon fraud.

What's hilarious is having reported an ad to Facebook, they show you that ad more because you didn't longer looking at it. Mad.

Why's it hard to believe? Look around you at how belligerently foolish, irrational, inefficient, dysfunctional, and confidently wrong every large organization acts. Marketing departments confidently report that their marketing campaigns work, because to report otherwise would be to have their budget slashed to zero. Ad networks confidently report that the ads you buy are effective, because to report otherwise would destroy their companies. Ads are just a tax on the consumer which result in no improvement to any product whatsoever, a pure rent-seeking middleman, an intellectual landlord, a red queen's race, a dead weight on the economy, and, of course, a trillion-dollar industry, because we live in hell.

yes, they are wasting money, they know it, but caveats:

famous saying 'i'd cut my ad budget in 1/2 if i knew which 1/2 to cut'

'attribution' is the holy grail of hard thing in marketing.

so they know for sure the channel spend is iffy.

but it's hard to measure, esp. for brand and indirect campaigns.

so as a 'starting point' - it's a very 'noisy channel problem'.

the next wild idea is that ads come from a marketing budget which has $X to spend, and they have to spend it.

this is where the ROI stuff is wildy upside down.

large companies with 'market power' have a lot of surplus. they put that towards relatively lucreative marketing. the $ must be spent.

the cmo makes a budget, allocates, the managers follow the campaign, front line staffers spend. they try to get the best results they can.

there is often an unbelievable lack of true roi concern in all of that.

sometimes it's very aggressive, aka for some keywords, for sure.

but a remarkable amount of $ is spent in very unnacountable way, over what are 'grey' channels anyhow.

the marketing ops person is going home at 5pm and does not care one bit about bots. they were paid to spend it, they did. Facebook is paid to 'show a chart of view' ... they did that. 'everyone is happy'.

im not saying the whole system works that way, but much of it does.

the wild part is - there is so much 'dumb big money' in ads, it makes the whole thing very inneficient.

companies like P&G have 'distribution monopolies' on so many packaged goods, they have to keep up brand awareness.

It's why so many commercials are for commodity products like home stuff - the market is huge, the market channels are locked, they pay $$$ for ads for 'toothpaste' - the least novel and least productive kind of thing imaginable.

so 'Colgate' costs $5 at the store, it costs 50 cents to manufacture - that $4.50 gross margin is stuffed into a system of relative inneficiency up and down the economy. much of it in 'nearly useless ads'.

it's a deep market inefficiency people dont want to recognized because people assume private capital is inherently efficient and that a dollar spent = GDP = value and that's it.

our lives could materially be improved if we banned ads for a lot of things - feels like 'socialism' but really it'd just be about a kind of 'regulated market efficiency'.

It's complicated.

SMBs can find an audience that would otherwise be impossible to reach. The thing that is advertised is so diverse it's hard to generalize, however the main thing I've noticed is SMBs live and die by the quality of their ad creatives.

For big businesses which make up the other 50% of Meta ads revenue: They are very effective in circumstances where your main offering is operational and the long term value of a customer is very large. For example it would be a very good place to advertise health insurance and TV subscriptions (which is a significant amount of the big business spend). Here I am more certain. If you didn't invent your product, and it is a beneficiary of the zeitgeist promoted by social media itself (beauty-focused, soft core brain rot), and your thing is basically fungible, you will thrive.

>the reported CPI of 2.4%, which of course is nowhere near the actual increase in life's necessities but does show that you can get TVs cheap

I went through the CPI basket[1] and vaguely looked for categories "life's necessities" and came up with "Food and beverages", "Shelter", "Fuels and utilities", "Transportation", "Medical care", "Education and communication". Those categories alone make up 85.3% of the basket, and I didn't even bother going into detailed categories to look for other essentials. "Televisions" on the other hand makes up 0.1%. I'm sure there's more non-essentials on there, but 85% of the CPI basket being non-essentials seems... pretty reasonable? If anything, it's weighted more towards essentials than typical consumer spending patterns.

Probably the most succinct description of this phenomenon I've seen in a long time.

I have a theory that there are far fewer genuine users on Reddit at this point than you'd expect.

Even with certified real humans who actively clicked rather than being counted one if the many ways these counts are padded accidentally (or not so accidentally), you might be expecting far too much of their attention span when expecting a full 1% to care enough to think long enough to respond before scrolling on. It is worse these days than it used to be, because many who might previously have bothered may instead assume they'd probably be taking to a bot.

Unless you somehow insult their favourite entertainment franchise / political party / deity / etc., or praise one of the same that they don't like. That will get you piles of responses, though not in a way useful to your app!

It's to remove Meta's liability for failing to protect children. They only have to protect children if the parent selects an age less than 16.

Effectiveness can vary a bunch but the majority of the time bad results are correlated to the setup quality.

There are definitely industries and situations where ads are difficult to make perform, things like a single business working against aggregator heavy environment or markets where growth is more important than profit, but overall there's reason for hundreds billions spent on online ads, this when most business can track ROI results.

One of the bigger issues I see is even 'experts' hand over control to the ad platforms to optimise their spend. For better results often you need to manipulate the systems to work in your favour, which platforms try to limit but you do what you can.

One change I feel we need is for regulation around controls and data on ad platforms to stop this ever increasing 'give us your money and trust us' type behaviour.

I always wonder who the hell is clicking these ads. I skip all you tube ads (thanks Adblock)… I never click banner ads on principle. I assume anything paying for my eyeball time is a scam.

So who is this shit working on? These companies must have detailed profiles on “people who do what we tell them” as a whole class of people. Scary.

Ah yes, the "you're not spending enough" excuse, Reddit loves to use that one me.

How has been the return? 6 figs is a lot if your users aren't earning you that money back.

The main problem with Google Ads is that Google tries to squeeze money out of you in all possible ways.

I think the only sane way tu run a Google Ads campaign is to:

- only enable Google Search ads (i.e. disable all third-party publishers -- this may be a bit extreme but it's good if you're advertisting a niche product that people are actually searching for)

- only use "exact match" keywords ("broad match" is so broad that Google will show your ads in completely unrelevant SERPs)

- disable AI Max

- disable all automations

- reject any of their "optimization" tips

- set a max CPC even if they say it's bad for you

In other words, reject everything they suggest you to do. Maybe I'm wrong, or maybe this only works for my use case, but that's how I've been using Google Ads succesfully without wasting money.

I'm trying to confirm that I understand what you mean:

Bot farm is operated by a company that displays Google ads. This bot farm fakes traffic to the bot farm owner and simulates conversion Google wants to see. Google sees the high conversion and happily serves more ads to the bot farm owner. Bot farm owner is paid by Google for displaying the ads. The person paying for the ad gets screwed.

That’s why you display ads only on the Google search webpages.

It’s been known for decades that third party website are just lost money.

And then, even Google own pages get clicked by bots but this time from competitors so you spend all your budget and they get cheap auctions.

That's definitely a core principle of crapware that's widely done. Put that ad 0px away from the "mash here like crazy" button, PROFIT!

Surprisingly, no. 29 of the 30 zero-time installs had no click at all; Google credited them to someone watching the video. The install isn't what gets the farm paid. It's what makes Google's bidding think that placement is working, so it sends it more of your ads.

This was my thought too. It's easy to pretend to click one ad in order to make that ad money. But it's also easy for Google to tell apart a huge number of accounts that all clicked that one ad and no others. However, if a huge number of accounts simply click a whole load of ads there's basically no way to tell that it was targeted at any particular ad + they can bot for multiple ads at once.

These bug me so much. Those 20+ minute ads do nothing but piss me off. I have to grab the remote or switch tabs or whatever to get past them. To the point where I'm on the verge of adding YT to the permanent block list along with Facebook, Instagram, X, etc.

>Or do people really intentionally run campaigns like that?

Isn't that what you see on free to view TV. The same ads over and over.

Those work. You'll remember that brand if you ever need that product.

Is this a typo? 20 min ad?! I don’t use YouTube.

> It's so annoying Ive reduced video watching by 80-90%

This is the opposite of resourcefulness - unless the videos were a distraction, not a real goal of yours.

PS Genuine question: where is the fraud in a 20 minute ad?

Steve Balmer explaining his take on how local governments of the US work was a hilarious ad offering on my non-adblocked device the other day - I’m struggling to see vectors for fraud.

Drop a link. Don't want to search

But even reviews are fake now. 2 years ago I launched a service and added trust pilot to collect some reviews to help with SEO, then received many emails promising “verified” reviews for $x per review.

Same for Google reviews.

I’m a software engineer, and the way I find new tools is usually YouTube, GitHub, and HN. Even those channels are manipulated now with bots to inflate numbers to reach more

Hey, I need to add that to my list of reasons to build without vc [0]

[0] https://novc.fyi/why

If "Dayzle" (the app being advertised?) cost $5 to install, bot downloads would stop immediately.

They’re selling a limited ad-space - again, instead of to their competitor.

In that context: suggest a fairer way.

Now, it may just be you don’t like advertising in this context - a valid take. But a different one!

Ok but normally, the ads are on site, site owner pays click farms to click the ads, he earns on the difference between ad revenue and click cost.

How does that work for an app that's just some game ?

Depends on what you're selling. If you do it right, Google will give you plenty of organic customers who want to buy your product - no ads needed. You can market as much as you want on Meta also without having to pay for ads.

But if you need stronger marketing than that, there will always be willing affiliates.

I'm taking about verified real sales, not leads.