Junk websites filled with AI-generated text are pulling in money from programmatic ads::More than 140 brands are advertising on low-quality content farm sites —and the problem is growing fast.
“…wasting massive amounts of ad money.”
I don’t see this as a problem.
And our time. I’m sick of googling something and getting nothing out these fluff pieces with little or no real information. It’s made Google near useless for entire subjects. Try searching for troubleshooting on anything Apple for example.
Yeah it’s even shit for dumb searches.
Decided to Google the most popular SUVs and I get a top 10 article where it expects me to click through each one so it can load a new page and ads for each item in the list.
Then you get the news tab in edge, msn news maybe and half the ads are literal scams.
The latter is infuriating to me. If I’m actually searching for a product, by all means show me an ad for the type of product I’m looking for. That’s a win-win scenario. How these mainstream sites put up literal scam ads I don’t understand. How can they be paying better than Ford?
We’ve come full circle. Original web searches sucked because you couldn’t trust the results to be ranked in a useful way. You could search for a historical fact and you were just as likely to get an 8th grader’s homework they posted online instead of a credible source. Then Google came along and solved that problem with their magic algorithm. Only took them a little more than 20 years to get to the point where their algorithm now sucks so bad that we’re back to where we started. But instead of an 8th graders homework, we get AI articles that appear to be trained from said homework. Fascinating.
Google overall has just turned to shit. You can’t trust any new thing they do, and their existing ones are degrading all the time.
Especially true for Assistant, I’ve found. My Home speakers keep getting dumber and dumber all the time.
Yeah ads are a plague and not just online.
I can’t walk around my town without having billboards and super bright ads shoved down my throat.
Driving down the motorway, yeah we’ve got ads here too. Don’t look at your phone but sure read this advert as you fly past at 70mph.
This is why you need to add reddit to the search.
Which is sad as hell.
Or the fun variant where you intentionally search for something in your native tongue because you want results relevant to your country and get badly translated articles that nowhere inform you that they are translated.
Use bing chat, it’s currently the best search engine out there
I tried it for a few days initially but it was confidently wrong a third of the time, or very slow.
Did you switch it from creative to precise? In creative mode it’s genuinely awful, but with precise set, it always finds exactly what I’m looking for. It also has gpt-4 integration now.
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Oh no :( Won’t somebody think of the poor advertisers???
It affects me, the user, because I have to sift through garbage sites, because advertisers pay to keep those garbage sites online. So I think it’s a problem worth discussing and addressing.
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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?”.
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
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.
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.
I’m not normally in favor of the death penalty, but I think we need public executions for spammers.
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.
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.
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)
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.
Some ads are paid on a “per view” basis rather than per click
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.
Bots making websites and filling it with bots so advertising bots will buy ads that will only be seen by bots
I’d like to help. What’s the best way to create a garbage site to make money off these advertising scums? I’ll give the money to planned parenthood.
I think it’s just gonna land on the consumer in the end. More expensive to advertise? Better raise the prices so our bottom line is still nice and fat
Fuck the whole advertising industry
This just increases the importance of human-driven filters like Lemmy (and Reddit while it’s still relevant), as well as StackExchange for the subset of topics it encompasses.
I feel like this is the ad-equivalent of the sub-prime mortgage situation, pre-crisis. With mortgages, you had loans that no individual bank or bank manager would want, and then you had an automated process that obfuscated the individual loan details and produced financial products that could be sold as high quality. In the ad world, it’s the same thing. You have these websites that nobody would buy ads from, individually, but somehow, through an automatic process offered by Google and friends, the worthless product becomes valuable.
The more direct problem for people in general is that finding what you’re looking for has become even more of a “needle in a haystack” problem than it already was.
The indirect problem is that if genuine content creators can’t get much out making content (not necessarilly money: for many simply the satisfaction of seeing how many people liked their content is incentive enough) because viewers are much more dispersed due to the AI-rewritten info cloning sites, then there won’t be much new info for the cloners to copy in rewritten form, which is maybe fine for “questions already answered 1000 times” but won’t be for questions or tutorials about new stuff.
Sounds like a good gig while it lasts. Half a mind for a weekend project it seems
Reminds me of the Bing search rewards points a while back. A bunch of people I know were scripting searches and cashing in points until they got caught lmao
Even the porn?
Especially the porn.
The reply I was waiting for!
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The internet as we know it is going to change dramatically very soon. Probably for the worse in the short term, but I do hope something better emerges from the ashes.
If Lemmy is an early indication, I suspect the proletariat will make our own internet. With blackjack and hookers.
What happened to reddit will probably happen on a much larger scale to the entire internet. First the enshittification destroys everything and then a new thing will emerge that much more resembles the old internet. Google’s Web Environment Integrity could be the last nail in the coffin and speed up the change significantly.
Surely we’ll see a new Ad crash soon. The entire internet seems to be run on ads and sponsorships which doesn’t sound stable to me.
Keep the Reddit-slamming to appropriate fo— wait. This is about OTHER junk websites with AI-generated text. Carry on.
Robots are making money from robots for humans. I don’t see an issue.
