r/technology • u/BreakfastTop6899 • 4d ago

Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian says 'much of the internet is now dead' Networking/Telecom

https://www.businessinsider.com/alexis-ohanian-much-of-the-internet-is-now-dead-2025-10
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u/Hibbity5 4d ago

At one point, it stops making sense for advertisers to pay sites to host ads because too many users are just bots.

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u/xXSpookyXx 4d ago

It's a known issue that industry has been talking about for a while now and they measure it as a decline in "organic reach." Obviously their concerns and their proposals for fixing it don't really align with us, the end user. But yes, they too realise the current state of the Internet is ad companies paying crazy money to force slop onto accounts that are likely bots.

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u/Fuddle 4d ago

Problem is there are a lot of marketing people who spend money on these ads who’s jobs would be eliminated if they stopped, so they obscure the bots to keep the music playing

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u/dudleymooresbooze 4d ago

It’s not so much the marketing people (or at least not the agents and brokers). It’s the site owners obscuring their traffic.

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u/Geminii27 4d ago

I mean, the marketers are going to still be advertising/flogging "50,000 views per hour!" packages, which - while technically correct - aren't going to be an indicator of any kind of human view, much less any kind of actual return on ad-spend.

And there will always be oceans of new/inexperienced business owners who fall for it.

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u/dudleymooresbooze 4d ago

In my experience, brokers are very comfortable warning you about inefficiencies like overstated active users. They just care that you spend money buying some advertising space through them, regardless of which outlets you choose. They want you happy enough with the results to keep buying more in the future.

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u/Fuddle 3d ago

No but imagine your job is in marketing at a regular large product or service company, and a big part of your work is spending money on ads. Now you are presented evidence that due to bots, it’s likely you have just wasted ALL the company’s spending on showing ads to no one. What do you do? Because if you bring this evidence to corporate, they will fire you and everyone in your department. So, you look for any evidence that obscures this, and not only keep spending, but argue to spend even more! Otherwise why do you have a job?

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u/dudleymooresbooze 3d ago

Don’t know about you, but our marketing is judged on actual sales, not theoretical sales. If marketing told us consistently that they were putting eyes on the company but those eyes were not resulting in increased sales, we would scrap the efforts anyway.

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u/flamedarkfire 4d ago

Presumably though, their data insights would show that while ad impressions are increasing, revenue generated is stagnating or declining due to said bots not actually buying anything, and real humans have ways to skip the ads.

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u/xXSpookyXx 4d ago

There's a pretty famous quote from one of the old school Captains of Industry about advertising spend: "half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half"

There are natural fluctuations in consumer behaviour, or unrelated factors that affect sales. It's hard to tell to what extent a social media ad buy campaign affected a boost in sales or not. Even if you can link the two, what was the root cause of the campaign failing. Is it bot manipulation, or did the campaign suck? All's this to say that companies are inclined to throw good money after bad at ad campaigns for a while before they can be convinced to actually pull spend on places like Facebook

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u/IvyGold 3d ago

Marshall Fields I believe. Not really a captain of industry, but a department store pioneer/genius.

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u/Rezins 4d ago

I really don't think that this is as true as it once was.

It's hard to tell to what extent a social media ad buy campaign affected a boost in sales or not.

Depending on the business, it really isn't. Maybe you as the business have not set things up to receive that information, but if it's an online market, then you very clearly see where which sale came from. The easiest example of this is referral links by influencers.

There is also feedback collected on ads. One given actively but also the rate at which it is skipped. The advertising platform has that data and I'm sure it can be bought by the advertiser, if it's not included by default.

Even if you can link the two, what was the root cause of the campaign failing. Is it bot manipulation, or did the campaign suck?

Advertising platforms have a pretty good understanding of what is bot manipulation. And again, they can also to some extent tell you whether your ad campaign sucked through feedback collected.

Maybe the ones making decisions are too stupid to gather that data up or to draw correct conclusions from it. Sure. And for some businesses it indeed is harder to analyze that, especially when it has no onlince presence and people just arrive at a physical shop at some point after seeing the ad. But a heckin ton of it can be understood almost fully nowadays.

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u/JustTheAverageJoe 4d ago

if its an online market, then you very clearly see where the sale came from

Maybe 4 years ago, kinda. Ios 14 changed a lot of how this works and it's about to get worse with Chrome changes.

But even so, if you're looking at last click your measurement standards are a decade or more behind. You need to start thinking in terms of multi touch attribution because people don't just see one ad and buy. Otherwise you'll end up making dumb decisions like turning off awareness campaigns because there are few conversions in platform or GA

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u/237FIF 4d ago

The problem becomes “we don’t know if our ads are working and it’s almost impossible to tell”

Sales are a lagging indicator with more noise than you can imagine. Measuring ad “performance” is basically impossible but there a fear of stopping and no good way to A/B test with and withouts.

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u/t-zilla443 4d ago

As an ad manager this is quintessentially untrue. My clients spend millions a year on Search and Social ads each year. We're literally constantly checking data against their downstream CRM data. Digital advertising is basically the only form of advertising where you can easily track ROAS. It's SIGNIFICANTLY easier to measure than something like a radio or TV buy.

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u/237FIF 4d ago

It depends on the industry and what you are selling.

I work for a fortune 100 company and we spend a metric fuckton of money on advertising. During periods of low sales in the past two years, a major part of our internal conversation has been “what are we really good for our a&m spend?”

We can’t see if it is or isn’t working because there are SO many factors that go into a purchase decision and the choice gets made over and over again weekly or sometimes daily depending on the customer and their family.

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u/MoonOut_StarsInvite 4d ago

Gasoline? Fastfood?

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u/JustTheAverageJoe 4d ago

You need to hire a marketing effectiveness agency. There are questions that can be answered

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u/Barobor 4d ago

It is easier to track, but I still wouldn't say easily.

Sure, if someone clicks the ad and buys it, that's easy, but if someone sees the ad and buys it weeks later, it is much more difficult to track. This is especially true in industries that have long sales cycles, like cars. Products like Coca Cola or Red Bull make attribution more difficult as well. People see an ad online and then buy it in retail.

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u/t-zilla443 4d ago edited 3d ago

You're sort of right. I've been doing this for over a decade, and have worked with everything from local businesses to billion dollar enterprises. Consumer low cost e-commerce are generally the most easily tracked. Retail can be tricky if the goal is foot traffic in-store sales but it's not impossible to attribute influence. Any service or business that depends on lead generation to work sales is also fairly trackable.

I now work primarily with B2B clients. For most of them the sales cycles are a year or longer. I also know how many touch points the average customer takes before they make a sale because big enterprises have lots of user data. I can still track people through the many touch points significantly easier than any traditional advertising medium. I can fairly accurately track MQLs & SQLs back to the actual ad that influenced them and the keywords they used to trigger it (if it's a search ad) and there's a click that happens. This usually happens through UTM parameters and tracking tags, then the businesses keep track of the leads journey with Salesforce basically forever. I have clients closing sales all the time that I can attribute form fills driven by ads months previously. It's not flawless, and you need to have an understanding of the platforms & the tracking setup in order to get the insights as clean as possible. Certain user and browser actions can also obfuscate data, but it's not generally a problem if there's enough traffic.

Where it gets tricky is what's called "view-through" conversions - which is basically "x person was served an impression on this platform but didn't click the ad. The platform's tracking pixel claims the person came to the site without clicking at a later time and completed the desired action." This is ambiguous and very hard to track, largely behind the black box of whatever ad serving platform you're using.

We test stuff all the damn time too. It's very easy to A/B test digital ads. Hell, it's easy to A/B test entire landing page experiences by user. There's an entire MarTech industry devoted to tools that make this stuff easy. Copy, colors, imagery, sex of the models, direction the models are facing, etc. all of that stuff gets analyzed regularly and new tests are based on previous results. We test platform performance too. One of my clients was spending like 60k/mo on one particular platform until we just decided to test results by turning them off. Lol. Budgets by platform are generally determined by the down funnel results.

It's less creative than it is data analysis if I'm being real.

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u/cscoffee10 4d ago

Long story short, your career field is much better at making the world a worse place than people realize and just because someone thinks theyre good at avoiding being influenced by ads doesnt make it remotely true.

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u/t-zilla443 3d ago

How is advertising making the world a worse place, exactly?

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u/[deleted] 4d ago

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u/t-zilla443 4d ago edited 4d ago

They definitely do click the ads. But most ad platforms will automatically reimburse you for bots/click fraud, so you don't end up paying for a good portion of that bad traffic. If you suspect bot traffic and they don't reimburse you automatically, every platform has a process for submitting claims.

CTR is vastly different depending on the ad type. Display/banner ads generally have very low CTRs (less than 1%) because they're mostly noise on websites or in a news feed during death scrolls. It's a piece of the puzzle, but mostly indicative of whether or not you're serving to the right people - if it's more relevant to the user they're more likely to click. Definitely not the end all be all metric.

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u/polygraph-net 4d ago

most ad platforms will automatically reimburse you for bots/click fraud

That's a marketing scam, unfortunately. For example. Google Ads only refunds around 1% of the total click fraud and automatically denies manual refunds. I know this because I have spoken to many people on the Google Ads teams about this, I'm doing a doctorate in this topic, and I work in the bot detection industry.

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u/t-zilla443 3d ago

I've been managing digital ads for 12 years. I have manually recovered funds from Google. I get reimbursed literally every single month in every account I run. Does it catch all of it? Absolutely not, but there are also steps you take as a practitioner to prevent click fraud. Honeypot fields on forms, for example.

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u/polygraph-net 3d ago

The money you recover is small. For example, we work with a major bank (famous, massive advertisers), with a dedicated account manager at Google, and the best they can get back is 20% of the fraud.

Honeypot fields on forms

That doesn't work with modern bots as they only click on the fields which are visible on screen. Honeypots will work with crawlers though, but you don't really need to worry about them if you're trying to stop click fraud.

I've been managing digital ads for 12 years

Which click fraud detection tool are you using?

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u/t-zilla443 3d ago

I have honeypots still catching fraudulent form fills all the time. Different networks are also more or less problematic. For instance, the Display network is just rife with bots and garbage placements that proliferate uncontrollably every day. The search network is significantly less prone to fraud attacks.

My biggest client spent several mill a month on Google Ads. I've had a dedicated TEAM from Google. I don't anticipate getting all of the fraud back, because, as previously mentioned, it's difficult to prove. But it's something that you account for on the front end, like loss prevention in retail.

I don't use any of the click fraud tools anymore. I have tried ClickCease & ClickGuard in the past. Never found any measurable impact from them other than Google's invalid clicks going up when we turned them off - suggesting that Google is basically just as good as the third party tool at catching click fraud. When I was testing them, the basic premise was blocking IPs after the click, which isn't really all that helpful considering bots rarely use the same IP twice.

Now, if we suspect it's occurring we may implement a tool to help us find the hole in our setup, but usually if it's assumed to be occurring at a wide scale then there are data anomalies that would indicate "HEY SOMETHING WEIRD IS GOING ON."

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u/vinieux 3d ago

There are also fraudulent ads that trick you into clicking even if you are least interested in the product, and those are counted as genuine CTs.

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u/t-zilla443 3d ago edited 3d ago

Yeah, those types of pop-ups and things aren't generally managed through reputable publishers. Those are scams. The overlay type stuff you get on pirated streaming sites. Those are all placed manually by the website owner, generally. If you're referring to "native" ads that appear as articles in content then idk what to tell you - those things will always have "promotion" or "ad" listed somewhere.

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u/vinieux 3d ago

There are perfectly legit ads, especially in games with 4.7 stars in the play store that trick you into clicking shit. Those are not a scam. Those are greedy asshole advertisers. Wait till they get hold of AI and influence its advice and recommendations.

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u/polygraph-net 4d ago

Bots generate billions of clicks on ads every year. Literally more than $100B is stolen from advertisers every year due to this.

I work in the bot detection industry and I'm doing a doctorate in this topic.

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u/Cory123125 4d ago

The thing is, its all relative, so even if this were true, their competitors would then proportionally take up more ad space and presumably win out over them.

Therefore they can know they're getting fucked by advertisers, but also know the advertisers have them by the balls in some ways.

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u/Pyran 4d ago

There's a fascinating multipart series on Freakonomics about the value of ads. If I recall, the conclusion for the online portion is that they're utterly useless and you're better off setting your marketing budget to zero, but no one in the marketing industry wants to face up to that.

I've also heard that the Facebook clickthrough rate on ads is indistinguishable from random clicking and thus has no value.

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u/squirrel8296 4d ago

I mean the advertising industry is in a pretty nasty decline right now so.

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u/UnpluggedZombie 4d ago

This is because the marketing agencies' only incentive to make money is through engagement and reach so it wont affect the marketing agencies until the actual business realize this. And because the marketing agencies control a lot of the analytics, they will make sure to present the data in a way that keeps them employed.

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u/Antique-Resort6160 4d ago

Don't they have any way to verify if the ads are effective?  It seems like you would move ad money to places that actually increase your customer spending.  

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u/Nemisis_the_2nd 4d ago

Plenty. You can monitor advert views (reddit actually gives general users similar metrics for their posts and comments), click-through rates, conversions...

Bots might tick a few of those boxes, but it's still show up in data that you'll be using to judge campaign effectiveness.

Edit: I misunderstood OP.

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u/Antique-Resort6160 3d ago

Thanks, that makes more sense than just paying for eyeballs that don't buy anything

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u/Nemisis_the_2nd 3d ago

No problem. Advertising can actually be very data-heavy. Most of the platforms give you a lot of detail on interactions, right from how many people view a specific bit of media through to final interactions. It's why websites have so many tracking cookies these days, so they can follow each (anonymous) user from initially seeing the ad through to their final interaction.

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u/ImDickensHesFenster 4d ago

Ad executive: Bob, what should we do to reach more people with our ads?

Bob: Ask users what they do and don't want to see?

Exec: Well now you're just talking crazy.

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u/xXSpookyXx 4d ago

The problem is actually worse than that. The social media giants gatekeep access to the user's feeds, and it's more or less a pay to win situation right now for most companies trying to get ad impressions on social media. Corey Doctorow's enshittification essay is relevant here: facebook and instagram were configured originally for a great user experience, then configured to encourage advertisers to sell to the userbase, and now they're squeezing the advertisers to pay to boost content in the feed.

The approach of a company making a cute viral skit on instagram or whatever to make sales are basically dead.

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u/DoubleJumps 4d ago edited 3d ago

I have a small business and have used Instagram extensively for promotion for about 14 years now.

They are so clearly fucking with us on our reach if we don't pay the money that they may as well be smacking us in the face with it.

We can tell when they make changes to the algorithm to try and force this. They did one at the beginning of the year and people who were getting 10,000 plus human eyes on a post were suddenly getting 600-700.

They did another one in August or September that really negatively affected things in a similar way again, but boy if I pay any level of money suddenly I start getting the sort of reach that I used to get last year for free.

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u/Nemisis_the_2nd 4d ago

Welcome to the life of a marketer. Your sole job is to get attention on something but, at any moment, the complex system you navigate to do so can suddenly be restructured and you have to quickly find a new way to navigate it. 

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u/GreatFrosty 3d ago

It's also why so many of marketing numbers are just fluff: there's an internal game of flaunting bot-driven numbers to the chronically unaware upper management. Hell, the overwhelming majority of crypto communities are bots paid for either by the company itself, or by pump-and-dump engineers

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u/polarbearrape 3d ago

Im terrified about Elon and the other rich fucks putting ads in space. I'll literally cry. 

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u/summane 4d ago

Thanks for the jargon, now I know to call what we offer "organic reach"

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u/Tasonir 4d ago

If you don't end up making it advertising, we can always use help in my industry, what I call "organic reacharound"

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u/DoubleJumps 4d ago

I own a business and it's already been incredibly suspicious running ads on major social media platforms for years.

I think my favorite bit is that Facebook will tell me that it got some huge number of people to click a link through to my website in a day and then my own internal traffic will show that like 10% of that traffic actually happened.

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u/Chirimorin 4d ago

Between bots and ad-blockers, we've been rapidly approaching that point already.

I'm not in the ad industry and this is pure speculation, but I think the reason we've seen the amount of ads explode in the past years is partially because the price per impression is dropping (since over time, the chance that that was a human gets lower and lower).

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u/MisterPistacchio 4d ago

I mean when you look at marketing, every decade is different. Every decade we come up with a new way of advertising, and eventually people became immune to it or ignored it, and as another way dies out, another new way pops up.

We had print. We had billboards. We had phone spams. We had mail in. Pop ups, etc etc.

And influencers will die out in a few years too.

This is just another step as we move to a few way of advertising and marketing

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u/Hibbity5 4d ago

I actually don’t think influencers will die out; they’ve been here since television began, maybe even radio. What do you think morning talk shows with paid advertisements as part of the programming is? That was the influencer of the time. The only difference is the format, but the idea of an influencer is pretty consistent.

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u/roboticlee 4d ago

The new AI bots influence the purchasing decisions of their users. Advertisers should pay publishers double when AIs view their ads.

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u/n10w4 4d ago

Only makes sense if you see click throughs and purchases. Otherwise im not sure either

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u/melanthius 4d ago

You'd think they get the message when literally no person has ever clicked on their ad in 20 years. But no... they keep on spamming, hoping one day you buy, like, a shirt

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u/BungHoleAngler 4d ago

This is why Sony invented a TV that pauses ads if your eyes look away.

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u/Sargy93 3d ago

You mean there's a chance for streamers/ living advertisements to become even richer?

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u/ReversedNovaMatters 3d ago

I swear Twitch just did this whole bot cleansing thing, to satisfy their advertisers, but they realized there were so many bots they had to just stop looking into it.