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You had huge click farms back in the days. Today the fraud is perhaps more obvious. YT has served me the same 20 min ad 200+ times over the last few weeks. I l
by econ 5d ago
You had huge click farms back in the days.
Today the fraud is perhaps more obvious. YT has served me the same 20 min ad 200+ times over the last few weeks. I let the entire thing play 10 times and 50 times didn't press skip for the first minute (or the view doesn't count) It's so annoying Ive reduced video watching by 80-90%
The idea they have someone pay for this in the hope I will buy the product?
Or do people really intentionally run campaigns like that?
- DANmode 5d ago> It's so annoying Ive reduced video watching by 80-90% This is the opposite of resourcefulness - unless the videos were a distraction, not a real goal of yours. PS Genuine question: where is the fraud in a 20 minute ad? Steve Balmer explaining his take on how local governments of the US work was a hilarious ad offering on my non-adblocked device the other day - I’m struggling to see vectors for fraud.
- econ 5d agoI couldn't imagine someone running campaign like that intentionally but it's apparently cheap to do so. 20 minutes of my time is apparently worth 3 cent. Those 5 hours watching the same ad again and again probably cost the spammer 2 euro. It's not fraud, more like a cheap ass dystopia. It's some how worse than HP and MS combined. > ..unless the videos were a distraction, not a real goal of yours. You are not wrong but all work and no play... I will seek entertainment elsewhere. My apologies in advance HN :-)
- sethops1 5d agoThese bug me so much. Those 20+ minute ads do nothing but piss me off. I have to grab the remote or switch tabs or whatever to get past them. To the point where I'm on the verge of adding YT to the permanent block list along with Facebook, Instagram, X, etc.
- xp84 5d agoSerious question: Do you watch a lot of YouTube? Why not just cough up the $16 for YouTube Premium? Creators actually do get paid more for Premium users' views than they do from adsense. You get to see none of these ads that piss you off. Look, I run UBlock Origin myself. But that's because there's zero other way to look at any Web content without going insane with videos and other garbage popping all over the place, and even when sites have memberships, I use too many distinct ones anyway, and the memberships may not remove the ads and junk. But when it comes to sites like YouTube that let me choose between "ads" and "non-ads" experiences... I guess I'm just saying I see a ton of ROI on the $16.
- calmworm 5d agoI don’t use YouTube at all but I can still answer - Because $16 will become $20, $30, $50 … and then they will begin to show ads again anyway.
- fragmede 5d agoYou won't pay for something because of inflation? How do you survive, since everything's affected by inflation? Ever buy gasoline for a car or a transit pass? rent? food? What else can't you pay for because they price will go up in the future?
- mitxela 4d agoI don't get this commonplace logic. Why make the decision on the possible distant future? You can always just cancel when that happens.
- mitxela 5d agoThose work. You'll remember that brand if you ever need that product.
- econ 5d agoI could call them, tell them I see their ad, ask questions then call again and again and again and again. I just read one may call a company as often as one wants.
- dd8601fn 5d agoWell… I’ll remember that I never want to give Liberty Mutual a single dollar. I was never going to give any of the woo-woo secret health nonsense hucksters any money, though.
- Anon1096 4d agoBefore the ad, you had no brand awareness at all of Liberty Mutual. Now, you know their name enough to call them out specifically in a Hacker News comment. Your propensity to buy has improved a lot just based on that fact, regardless of whether you consciously want to avoid them now.
- dd8601fn 4d agoI did know Liberty Mutual. I had business with them. Now I know them and I’m fucking annoyed that they exist. My “propensity to buy” has not improved. You can save yourself the trouble of repeating more century old marketing truisms that aren’t. We’ve heard it all before, and it isn’t insight.
- calmworm 5d agoIs this a typo? 20 min ad?! I don’t use YouTube.
- Choco31415 5d agoI’ve seen the intro to an audiobook be used as an ad.
- econ 5d agoSometimes they put one at the start then again 1.5 min into a video and again around 4 minutes. If I don't skip them I may not even remember what the video was about.
- tonyedgecombe 4d ago>Or do people really intentionally run campaigns like that? Isn't that what you see on free to view TV. The same ads over and over.