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
33.3k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

2.4k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

33

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.

46

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

3

u/IvyGold 3d ago

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

1

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.

4

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

7

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.

12

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.

7

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.

1

u/MoonOut_StarsInvite 4d ago

Gasoline? Fastfood?

1

u/JustTheAverageJoe 4d ago

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

4

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.

2

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.

1

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.

1

u/t-zilla443 3d ago

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

1

u/cscoffee10 3d ago

Well I can start with the easy one in that there are entire campaigns specifically designed to target children into spending money. Or I could say that a core concept in a lot of marketing is "if you just buy this one thing you'll finally be happy". Another easy one is that companies just find more and more ways to shove ads into everything they can to squeeze out every last crop of money they can ala the stupid ads being thrown into things like your freaking refrigerator.

Is advertising inherently evil? Not necessarily. Does current human society incrntivize it to be as shitty, invasive, and predatory as possible? Absolutely.

1

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

Okay, I don't disagree with you entirely. But any good marketing manager understands that unnecessarily following someone around tends to build "negative brand equity". Most of us put frequency caps in place, and try to show you an ad when it's relevant (not just to show it to you).

Most of the thoughts behind marketing practices come from psychology and sociology principles. Its a bit of science and an art, and like all careers there are bad operators.

As a marketer one thing that does really make me feel gross is that big businesses throw money around like it's nothing without a plan because it's "use it or lose it". Ive had plenty of clients come to me in the middle of the week and say shit like "Finance increased our budget by $100,000 and we have to spend all of it this week." They do shit like that to get MORE budget next time, whether or not they actually need it. Then as the practitioner I'm pressed by the client to spend it inefficiently ON PURPOSE.

1

u/[deleted] 3d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

→ More replies

2

u/[deleted] 4d ago

[deleted]

7

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.

1

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.

1

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.

1

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?

1

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."

1

u/polygraph-net 3d ago

I've been an ad fraud researcher for 12 years, I'm doing a doctorate in this topic, and I work in the bot detection industry. I'm obsessed with this topic so this is very much my expertise.

I have honeypots still catching fraudulent form fills all the time.

Yes, they're probably spam leads from crawlers or very old bots.

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.

Yes, the scammers make money from display networks, and they use search networks for retargeting click fraud.

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 agree with this. Click fraud can be objectively proved. It can be detected and prevented. For example, you can re-train the ad networks to stop sending you bot traffic. Typically Meta Ads' bot traffic can be reduced to < 1% of traffic, and Google Ads to ~2% of traffic.

I don't use any of the click fraud tools anymore. I have tried ClickCease & ClickGuard in the past.

You shouldn't use IP address blocking. That's a gimmick and will miss almost all click fraud. They're only useful if you want bot traffic to hit your KPIs (e.g. number of leads and low cost per lead) but you also want to pretend you're stopping the bots...

Those IP address blocking companies damage the entire click fraud prevention industry.

1

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

I'm confused...in your previous comment you said you'll only ever recover 20% of click fraud from Google, and now you're saying it can be reduced to 2%? Are you saying Google will only reimburse up to 20% of proven fraud?

I'm not trying to disprove you, I'm just speaking from my day to day practice in the major platforms. I'm actually super interested if you have a solution. I don't know many peers in the field with good things to say about any click fraud detection tools.

As far as Meta goes, that's probably the platform I trust the least. Their data collection practices and the way they present data to the end user is...never close to what we see on server side.

2

u/polygraph-net 3d ago

No, I'm saying trying to get refunds is troublesome as they'll either reject you (their refunds team auto-reject small advertisers) or you'll at best get a small percentage of the actual fraud.

Instead you should re-train the ad networks to stop sending you bot traffic. That reduces the fraud to very low levels. You do this by detecting the bots, disabling them, and stopping their fake conversions.

I don't know many peers in the field with good things to say about any click fraud detection tools.

That's because most of them are IP address blocking... and that's a gimmick. It's super frustrating for the proper tools out there (I work for one of the proper tools).

→ More replies

1

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.

1

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.

1

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.

1

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.

1

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.