if you read the twitter thread we see that uber was spending 10x more money than they should have on ads simply because they weren't auditing where their money was going towards.

so there's evidence that people (incl uber, a market leader) do indeed spend money on ads even when it does nothing

I got 0.66x, as in $100M out of $150M. I likely missed something. Where did you see 10x?

$100M was labelled "fraud" in this example, but there was more waste uncovered in the remaining $50M that didn't get that label.

I thought that at first. But like the original post points out, Uber was spending a lot of money, not just in absolute terms but in percentage terms, and it wasn't working for them.

There's an allure to making something measurable and setting goals against it. Often, those goals take on a life of their own. That's what I am suggesting happened here, I guess.

Mobile games run on this. They have a target user acquisition cost and spend based on that. It seems to work for some very profitable companies. People shouldn’t try to over read into this. Businesses can’t run on irrationality for very long

Indeed. Mobile games. Perhaps the people who play mobile games probably would click an ad of another alike game or otherwise related content. They usually aren't mindful enough to prefer finding and choosing exactly what they need over just clicking an ad.

How do we not know that the spam is sent out by one sucker after the next that go until they realize it is not worth it?