“35-50% of clicks on Reddit Ads are fraudulent”

Re:“35-50% of clicks on Reddit Ads are fraudulent” by atian on Friday October 09, 2020 @02:04PM (#24732628)

Let’s not first assume intent. There are tons of scrapers running on Reddit. Reddit ads are presented inline rather than iframed/complex load behavior like Google Ads. Also browser extensions, browser behaviors (which smartly preload pages, prefetching) all cannot differentiate a Reddit ad url vs a regular link.

Reddit makes it much easier for any web traffic to follow through to ads. The issue is that Reddit doesn’t have a mature ad network infrastructure team to care about filtering traffic to better standards.

Given that only 50% are jokingly fraudulent, I’d say they’ve already done an OK job and aren’t booking an order of magnitude more of the web’s typical random traffic.

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Re:“35-50% of clicks on Reddit Ads are fraudulent” by ufmace on Friday October 09, 2020 @03:56PM (#24733771)

If it's all scrapers, why would somebody build a scraper that bothers to click ads? And if you wanted to scrape Reddit, why not use their public API instead?

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Re:“35-50% of clicks on Reddit Ads are fraudulent” by Scoundreller on Friday October 09, 2020 @03:37PM (#24733590)

As long as it’s constant between ads, the scraper effect should all be a wash in the end, no?

Ad buyers will pay half as much for double the traffic when half of the traffic is bots.

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Re:“35-50% of clicks on Reddit Ads are fraudulent” by ffpip on Friday October 09, 2020 @11:06PM (#24736432)

> all cannot differentiate a Reddit ad url vs a regular link.

Every ad links to alb.reddit.com . Every post links to *.reddit.com .

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