Technology

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[–] LinuxSBC@lemm.ee 44 points 3 years ago (1 child)

I work at a repair shop, and we had a customer come in that said, "I like to click on the ads sometimes. Is that why I keep getting viruses?".

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[–] camillaSinensis@reddthat.com 3 points 3 years ago (1 child)

I do understand the curiosity though, just seeing what malware is trying to do can be quite interesting. Maybe someone should tell that person about VMs though lol

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[–] LinuxSBC@lemm.ee 8 points 3 years ago

That's definitely not why. From how I understood it, it seems that she clicked on ads because she actually wanted to look at the product, and she was confused about why she kept getting malware on her computer.

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[–] lemmyvore@feddit.nl 19 points 3 years ago (3 children)

We've been asking ourselves this about email spam for several decades now.

I think we're vastly overestimating human intelligence. There's obviously enough completely clueless people out there that will buy what these spammers are selling.

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[–] RivenRise@lemmy.world 8 points 3 years ago

Morning radio show I used to listen to talked all the time about the crap they bought off Instagram and tiktok ads. Like, ALL THE TIME. My ex and her family also bought a fair bit off of those sort of ads. Some type of people are just susceptible to it and others aren't.

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[–] lolcatnip@reddthat.com 2 points 3 years ago

I'm not normally in favor of the death penalty, but I think we need public executions for spammers.

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[–] NotYourSocialWorker@feddit.nu 2 points 3 years ago

I heard it said that spam is intentionally badly written because they don't want people who can figure out it's a scam to actually click the links.

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[–] ultimate_question@lemmy.world 14 points 3 years ago (1 child)

The irony of tagging and asking a bot this lol

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[–] LinuxSBC@lemm.ee 6 points 3 years ago

They're on Mastodon. Mastodon replies work by tagging.

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[–] Dran_Arcana@lemmy.world 14 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (1 child)

It's been a while since I've interacted with google ads, but if memory serves, by default, the dashboards don't (or can't) break down sales per site, it's mostly impressions per category of ad deployment. "Clickthrough rate among banner ads on news websites" etc. It wouldn't surprise me if the same makers of these spam websites also run bots that click the ads and prop up those metrics that 99% of advertisers don't drill down through beyond surface level. Advertisers probably see clickthrough is good on a deployment and just assumes sales come from those.

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[–] GreatAlbatross@feddit.uk 7 points 3 years ago

I remember years ago someone from a niche industry commenting on this.
He was saying that the week they all had a big conferences, the click-throughs dropped by 95% (implying his competitors were clicking his ads to cost him money)

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[–] Imgonnatrythis@lemmy.world 7 points 3 years ago

I think you are underestimating the power of low cost high volume advertising. Throw enough poo at a glass wall and some of its going to stick. This isn't going away, it's getting worse.

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[–] funkpandemic@lemmy.ca 6 points 3 years ago (1 child)

Some ads are paid on a "per view" basis rather than per click

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[–] jecxjo@midwest.social 7 points 3 years ago

When the sites are bot built like the ones described here its just a matter of Large Numbers. Create a thousand permutations of porhub and if they all only get a few thousand views a day in total you've made some money.

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[–] Sanctus@lemmy.world 1 point 3 years ago

I see it all the time when I'm searching for answers on the web. Ngl I look up a lot of stuff for C# and C++ and if you use Google (and even DDG) you'll always fine a couple of these. Google likes to put them up first. You can tell by the language in the article and the stripped down content on the page. I always end up backing out and I have ad-blockers but they still get the click.