[alistairSH]

It'll be a marginal effect, but fake clicks impacts the ad buyer, which then impacts their financials and pricing.

The only winner here is the scammers running the fake affiliate sites on which these sticks are "clicking". Or, am I missing some facet of this enterprise?

[frollogaston]

What this misses is the person buying the TV stick doesn't care about the impact on the ad market. The bigger problem is residential proxying, because their IP will end up getting used for something bad.

[hnav]

most residential proxying these days is used by the purveyors of AI

[inigyou]

And what does that cause? More captchas?

[snickerbockers]

Probably, but in the worst-case scenario you could unwittingly become an accessory to a felony if the proxy is used to access CSAM. Especially if the proxy ends up caching files.

[inigyou]

Has that ever happened?

Is Mullvad an accessory to downloading CSAM if someone does that?

[ssl-3]

Another winner is the person who gets to watch cheap digital TV, without putting together a usable antenna and limiting their reception to the broadcast channels that are nearby.

I mean: They just pay the money, plug the thing in, push some buttons, and: TV happens. Right?

[cryzinger]

You really don't want fraudulent clicks ("invalid traffic", per industry lingo) coming from your home network, because any publishers (apps and websites, per normal-people lingo) who use tools designed to block invalid traffic might start flagging legitimate traffic from your network.

[frollogaston]

Can confirm. I used to use Ad Nauseam (Firefox extension that clicks all ads), eventually stopped when I was getting captcha'd left and right.

Also, visitors on my wifi started getting strange ads. Yes I threw off the algo, but I'm a guy with wife, I'd rather get car ads than like divorce lawyers + gay dating sites.

[picofarad]

I use ad nauseam and pihole and I get nonesuch.

[snickerbockers]

Theres the question of whether or not the fraudulent advertisement clicking is using enough traffic to inconvenience or impose fees upon the user but otherwise I agree with you and am tempted to buy one just to fuck with advertisers.

Backdoors and spying are also a problem in theory except at this point you can't even trust "legitimate" companies on that front so it's a moot point.

[acdha]

> otherwise I agree with you and am tempted to buy one just to fuck with advertisers.

How that actually works in practice is that your favorite sites make less money and your IP gets a bad reputation so you CAPTCHAs or outright blocked. There’s no “sticking it to the man” here, just contributing to the frictional grind making the internet worse for ordinary people.

[snickerbockers]

You are drastically over-estimating how much fondness I have had for the web ever since social media companies and search providers colluded to drive everybody into their walled-off fiefdoms.

[inigyou]

My IP changes more than once a day. If Google captchas my whole ISP, good for them, hopefully it drives people away from Google.

[DennisP]

They make less money, but they also notice lower conversion rates on ads, which might make them rethink their strategy.

(IP reputation keeps me from doing it though.)

[elzbardico]

Frankly, I pay for most of the things I care about in the internet nowadays. Substack, Medium, newspapers, youtube premium, manning books, safari books. TV streaming.

The ad supported web is, with very few exceptions, useless.

[snickerbockers]

If all they did was shove banner ads for boner-pills in my face like they used to 25 years ago I wouldn't mind and I might even turn off adblock. The problem is that modern advertisements on the internet are spyware at best and a malware vector at worst.

It's arguably fraudulent to even refer to it as "advertising" at this point, clearly that's just a cover to give them an excuse to sell data to silicon valley corporations that are unironically named after fictional devices used by sci-fi/fantasy villains to manipulate people.

[elzbardico]

They can stop paying for obtrusive ads where either they make everyone's life worse or get defrauded, save money using only ethical advertising and use this saved money to improve the quality of their products or pay their workers a little better.