[shortrounddev2]

I work for an adtech company and we recently discovered that we were serving ads to some users using ad blockers, but the impression tracker endpoint had bbeen blocked. We decided the best course of action is to just submit our bidders domain to whatever lists we can (easylist, ublock, whatever).

My project manager wanted to try just changing our endpoints periodically to evade the list. I said to him "You fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders. The most famous is 'Never get involved in a land war in Asia,' but only slightly less well known is this: 'Never go up against a software pirate or ad blocker when privacy is on the line!'

[lrvick]

I run AdNauseam to click as many ads as possible randomly simulating ad-addicted humans, just to waste as much money of adtech companies and ad buyers as possible. This year I caused something like $10k to likely be paid for ads to be delivered to my computer that I sent to /dev/null and never saw.

I see no way adtech will reform unless conversion rates plummet to the point that the business model becomes unsustainable.

Genuine question: If millions of people ran automated ad-clicking bots, how would your industry survive?

[martin-t]

Out of curiosity, how do you feel working on something that is zero-sum (does not produce positive value for society, only changes where the money goes)? Would you change jobs if a positive-sum job became available?

And to risk being seen as preaching, have you read https://drewdevault.com/2025/04/20/2025-04-20-Tech-sector-re... ?

[shortrounddev2]

I work in retail media. There is a large difference in the kind of value we capture - rather than creating incentives for annoying or addictive behavior, we only show advertisements on ecommerce pages. If you are seeing our ads, you already have the intent to buy a kind of product, but the kinds of ads we show are trying to convince you to buy a specific brand of product.

Perhaps you searched "laptops". You see a handful of results, and at the top a banner says "Dell XPS - 20% off!"

Have we manipulated you in any way? Have we lied to you? The fact that a laptop is 20% off is valuable information to a user who might consider price in their purchase. What we sell is not advertising, but real estate on your screen

Am I in love with what I do? No. But we dont engage in the kind of advertising market described in the OP's article. What we do is the equivalent of a grocery store putting products on the end cap of an aisle and getting paid extra for the valuable real estate

[ndriscoll]

If you're taking money from X to try to push people to buy X instead of saying "our honest opinion is that Y is the best-value product and we recommend it" and putting that front and center, it's safe to say that you are manipulating people. The non-manipulative use of that real estate is showcasing high value products such that you feel it reflects well on your business to point them out. If they were organically there already, they wouldn't need to pay you.

[nrds]

This is the worst kind of advertisement.

Other ads just take up screen space and bandwidth: they displace more useful uses of these scarce resources, but they don't cause any direct harm. By contrast, ads targeting people in the market for a good or service actively displace quality signals. In doing so they make quality uneconomical and thus destroy it. They make the world a worse place.

[porridgeraisin]

The reason behind the banner reveals to us the incentives that drive the way the whole system functions, which in turn decides the quality of the majority of advertisements.

If the reason is "because they paid us to" then it leads to the absolute horror show we all see these days.

And no, papering over this issue by maximizing click-through rate along with revenue in your optimisation problem does not cut it. The only advertisements I will accept are those that dont have any weird incentives backing them. Example that is OK: shopkeeper recommending dell laptops because his previous customers have given good reviews for it. But if the shopkeeper takes even a bottle of wine from a dell salesman, oops, I'm blocking that ad.

In my "analysis", approximately zero advertisements in the internet today run the way I accept them. This can mostly be attributed to the fact that google/meta run most of the ads and they definitely take money from merchants:).

It logically follows from this that I need to use an adblocker everywhere.

Same goes for all of marketing and sales: all forms of deceit (something that we are taught as kids to be morally wrong) that are normalised today. Entire trillion dollars companies' primary product is deceit.

It is possible to do these things without deceit, but the tragedy of the commons dictates that the deceitful win.

[bee_rider]

That seems less evil, at least in the sense that it doesn’t require staking people and collecting dossiers about their personal information.

I’m surprised your business model doesn’t completely dominate over the social media algorithmic nonsense. I’d expect people who searched for something to be actually interested in it.

[shortrounddev2]

It actually does, in a way. Amazon.com (not AWS) doesnt make any money on product sales - it makes almost all of its revenue from sponsored products. Walmart as well makes a huge percentage of its money from promoting products.

My company operates only on small ecommerce sites. Because we have a huge catalog of products, advertisers can come to us and launch a campaign, and we can automatically deliver across dozens of sites. We can connect small ecommerce sites to large advertisers so that they dont need first party relationships with those advertisers. The way I see it, we are helping smaller retailers be more competitive against Amazon by helping them squeeze more blood from the stone, as we like to say in advertising.

What keeps me up at night is who our customers are. Among our advertisers, we sell ads for alcohol. While those who see our ads generally already have high intent to buy alcohol in the first place, I know from family history that even the slightest temptation can put an alcoholic back at step 0. We dont run too many of those but im still struggling with it

[martin-t]

> Amazon.com (not AWS) doesnt make any money on product sales - it makes almost all of its revenue from sponsored products

So you see, it is exploitative. Amazon has an advantageous position thanks to its brand name and it allows it to extract money from companies who want their product sold which in turn is extracted from customers. Meanwhile if a better (in terms of quality/longevity/cost) product existed, it would be unable to compete without also being forced to advertise. It has to spend money on ads which would be better spent improving the product (or making it cheaper in the complete absence of advertising).

EDIT: Btw, I do appreciate the honesty. There are absolutely different levels of severity of anti-social / anti-consumer behavior - the exploitation I pointed out has lower severity but a higher scale/prevalence and your alcohol example is a good example of low scale/prevalence but high severity.

[charcircuit]

Connecting people with goods or services they may find valuable provides a positive value to society.

[martin-t]

Products should compete on their cost vs value for the customer, not on which is better known.

Yes, advertisements make customers aware of a particular category of product but by pushing one specific brand instead of the whole category. I would OK with advertisements which push the whole category, that is positive-sum.

But currently we have an arms race where you have to invest in ads to compete with other products of the same category and that is zero-sum. Inter-category competition should be based on quality/longevity/cost.

[charcircuit]

>I would OK with advertisements which push the whole category, that is positive-sum.

This doesn't get rid of people buying what is most well known. In fact without the possibility of being exposed to more niche options people will just go with the incumbents. Advertising allows new competitors in a space to be able to acquire customers based off their value for customers instead of being a wellknown thing.

[martin-t]

They'd still be exposed to other options, through friends, reviewers, comparisons websites, etc.

Ads mean the brand with more money wins. It is completely orthogonal to value/cost.

You can in theory get investors to fund ads for a new brand but it just increases the upfront cost. Organic growth is no longer possible. And who benefits most are the already rich.

[charcircuit]

Popular options will have more words of mouth, more reviews, appear on more comparison websites, etc. The incubants have a massive advantage through those paths.

>Ads mean the brand with more money wins. It is completely orthogonal to value/cost.

Why? A better product will be able to achieve a better ROI on ad spend. This means that they can afford to spend more per ad than their competitors meaning they will win all of the ad auctions compared to the brand with the most money.

[ndriscoll]

Yes, honest retailers that find good products to offer create value. People who take money from sellers to give fraudulent recommendations do not.

[immibis]

These ads don't do that. They primarily connect scammers with victims.

[cm2012]

It produces a lot of value when products are actually used as opposed to unused

[ndriscoll]

It's easy to find plenty of counterexamples: cigarettes, Teflon pans, soda, cheap children's clothing with elevated lead, etc. And that's before we get into crypto scams, MLM schemes, etc.

[cm2012]

Sure, bad products are bad. So shouldn't promoting good products be good?

[ndriscoll]

Sure, but if you're taking kickbacks to promote something, it's a near certainty that's not what you're doing.

Like in this thread you have people asking what about retailers that take money for product placement, or how will people find products without ads? It's apparently inconceivable that retailers spotlight actual high quality products that they believe in and they do some industry research into what they should carry and actually stand by what they're selling instead of treating their customers like suckers to be sold.

[martin-t]

No, it produces money, not value, and not for society but for the company which spends on advertising instead of spending on improving the product.

Meanwhile this forces other brands in the same category to also spend on advertising even if they have a better product, thus increasing the cost.

[cm2012]

Every single human endeavor since the beginning of time has had to balance making something vs selling it.

[martin-t]

Sure. And some have the slider set all the way to selling. And that's wrong. As a society, we tolerate it because we have limited energy to fight it and because the good people are all busy making stuff.

[genewitch]

import more land fill

[freeopinion]

And then you keeled over while your project manager went on about their business?

[moritzwarhier]

Maybe they lost sleep over it, thinking

  Wait, these people are clearly not just saying: Do Not Track me, they're also saying: Don't show me ads!
  Which is a demand that any ad-tech company must take very seriously! We can't ignore the privacy implications of our ad networks. We better avoid any such privacy concerns and comply with the user's expressed priorities.

[shortrounddev2]

That's exactly how the meeting went. The CTO agreed that the best thing we can do is help comply with user's wishes about ads and privacy as best we can, so we are in the process of adding our domains to the block lists of common ad blockers

[freeopinion]

I'm beginning to suspect there isn't even a princess in your version of the story.