[inversionOf]

Aside from bot traffic, a significant percentage of "legitimate" traffic seems, anecdotally, to be engineered accidental clicks -- the mobile site that is constantly pushing content around in the hopes that one of your screen interactions accidentally yields an ad click. As one of an endless number of examples, a well respected, major recipe site has a mechanism to change the servings, and first you have to click on a "servings" button, and then on the actual serving count. After clicking on the servings, several hundred milliseconds later an ad appears exactly where the count input is, and clearly considerable engineering effort went into designing this, and many other, accidental interactions.

For what? I can only speak for myself but my immediate reaction is to click back and feel annoyed, and consider ad blocker options. It has never led to engagement or a purchase. Ever. The end result is that the performance of ads simply collapses, and sites have to get even trickier to entice accidental clicks. Rinse and repeat.

If you work in the "trick click" space, you are just dooming yourself. It is a race to the bottom.

[coldpie]

Firefox for Android supports uBlock Origin and it works wonderfully. Highly recommended to improve mobile browsing, including faster page load times and less bandwidth usage.

[commentzorro]

> engineered accidentally clicks

You mean the Slashdot model. Four huge buttons that take up the entire screen while scrolling. No room on either side to avoid them or get past them. Slashdot has become the poster child for this crappy model.

[dspillett]

slashdot, now there is a memory...

I used to spend a lot of time there. That went down to barely any in recent history as HN and other sources "took over". When the sourceforge adding rubbish to downloads and slashdot reportedly censoring discussion of the topic (they are owned by the same parent company) I realised how little I'd visited in recent months and decided that I never needed to go there again.

Silly tricks like the one you describe when seen on previously respectable sites seem to be a symptom of the site slowly dying and desperately grasping for what it can on the way down.

[eli]

> the mobile site that is constantly pushing content around in the hopes that one of your screen interactions accidentally yields an ad click

I think a lot of the time what you're seeing is shoddy web design (i.e. incompetence and not malice). Not saying it never happens, just that I don't think it's common.

Also, at the risk of stating the obvious, tricking people into clicking on ads is not a good long-term strategy for making money online. Savvy marketers judge ads by conversions, not clicks. Sending a bunch of clicks that don't convert is just going to drive down how much you get paid per click.

[inversionOf]

i.e. incompetence and not malice

The primary revenue source of many of these sites are ad clicks (impressions often don't matter). If the function paying the bills are ad clicks, and site stickiness really isn't a thing anymore (nowadays we're all directed by social news, Facebook, etc. Few of us visit specific sites), why not abuse the users that do come by.

A principal web design facet in the past was the notion that you pre-size all of the elements, such that the content layout is static. This basic facet has largely disappeared -- despite being monumentally simple -- and the only rational explanation is that moving content is profitable.

And for sure it is a terrible long term strategy. But the problem is that it's a tragedy of the commons -- your ad payout on most networks is based upon the group norms, not on your own site norms. So if everyone else is click tricking users, your own per click payment drops, so the only viable solution is to join the race to the bottom.

[wodenokoto]

It's interesting to think about whether it is engineered to be like this, or if it is just that poor webdesign did better in the metrics important to managers (clicks) than metrics important to UX.

[geocar]

Actually the Myspace video ads are being sold as video (6-8$CPM on exchanges; I've seen it as high as 18$CPM to advertisers), so there's no expectation that they click.

Of the traffic I observed, I was able to (in a few hours) classify 80% of the traffic as fraud. I don't think there were any legitimate users on these sites except ad network operators verifying whitelists and agency teams showing off how much myspace traffic they were buying.

[joshuab2893]

Hey I'm one of the authors of the article. Can I pick your brain a bit? jbrustein at bloomberg dot net.