[werds]

no marketer optimizes for clicks, they optimize for conversions.

so unless this bot is going to go onto the advertisers site and purchase something, which can then be attributed back to the viewed impression, then this will just be ignored by ad tech like any other bot click

[doodlesdev]

That's exactly why the extension works. Imagine paying for advertisements thousands of dollars just so that people keep autoclicking to cost you a few cents out of spite. The advertiser loses money but doesn't get conversions, Google gets the advertisers money but loses them as a customer in the long term. If everyone did this then the model would become unsustainable and we would be finally forced to find an alternative.

Whether that's the right to solve the issue or not is another matter altogether, but the fundamentals of this extension are sound.

[jefftk]

You're missing that ad networks can detect and exclude these spammy clicks. And on many networks advertisers can choose to be charged on a per-conversion basis.

[meghan_rain]

Google claims this because their entire business model relies on people believing it but is it actually true?

[jefftk]

I used to work on ads at Google, and knew folks who worked on invalid traffic detection. They seemed to spend most of their time on much more subtle sorts of problems, so given how simple AdNauseum is I'd be surprised if they had trouble filtering it out.

[bigape911]

Curious how they can detect this. All the see is a GET request with your ip and ua. Perhaps if they see too many they can flag your ip.

[jefftk]

They get quite a bit more than this: look at what's sent with an ad request some time!

[lethologica]

It’s still costing them per click though, is it not?

[jefftk]

Not necessarily: all ad networks try to filter out spammy clicks before billing, and some advertisers work on a cost-per-action [1] basis.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_per_action

[htrp]

fb/google for the most part won't give you cpa... they will let you set cpa targets (which often miss horrobly) but still bill you by the click.

[marginalia_nu]

I sometimes click ads, go through almost through the entire funnel, but bail at the last minute. It's very funny.

[temp2022account]

Same, so many "root@localhost" or "[e-mail]" sign-ups purely because I've seen automated marketing systems get setup and understand how easy it is to flag a flow as "Oh yeah they're about to buy something, give the source $" before confirming an action.

[bigape911]

So you just have a lot of time on your hands

[marginalia_nu]

Nah it just takes a few minutes. Solid entertainment, costs nothing.