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by doodlesdev 1217 days ago
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.

1 comments

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.
Google claims this because their entire business model relies on people believing it but is it actually true?
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.
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.
They get quite a bit more than this: look at what's sent with an ad request some time!