Back in the early 00s clicks on Mesothelioma were something like $24 a click because anyone who could spell it probably has it and is looking to sue.

“Mesothelioma Lawyer” was still one of the highest cost clicks when I was working in ad tech about 2 years ago. IIRC the cost was north of $50

As a script kiddie I made a pretty penny keyword stuffing that on my network of ad-infected web proxies.

Before Google banned much of the advertising on the category, some addiction treatment keywords cost north of $300 per click. “Drug rehab Las Vegas” was my favorite, because if they didn’t use a tight keyword match, they would get charged for people trying to find the Rehab pool party.

Yes. As an experiment, I tried running a Google Ads campaign for my https://chezmoi.io open source project bidding on "dotfile manager". Twenty clicks cost me $20. I terminated the experiment quickly.

Google keyword planner tool shows cpc (cost per click) for keywords. For an online gambling keyword it shows me 14.97€ (for one click). There are other industries with cpc's of 80€ and more.

Is it enough just to click on the link?

There surely are browser extensions that click on every link, just to make the companies pay, and make advertisers look even shitter.

No, it's got to be a real person intentionally clicking the link, and very large teams of skilled people work exclusively on figuring out which clicks fall in this category. Cursor movement patterns, delay time, whether the link was actually rendering on the display when it was clicked, IP address, cookies, signed-in identities, previous click patterns, location, all of these things and more factor in. When people talk about Google hoovering up data, it is in large part for this purpose.

Sounds like a good use of AI, if not one of the best! Let’s train an AI using real humans and have it click these links. Run the client in an P2P network so multiple can contribute to this.

If ads are no longer profitable, then this should sink both the online advertising market as well as Google.

Clickfraud has been around forever and teams detecting clickfraud have also been around forever. Automation that impersonates human users is not a new idea.

Yes I’m well aware, yet AI hasn’t existed for as long as clickfraud and we both know at some point a program with enough sophistication will look like a human.

Lemme guess, you’re in ads?

Sometimes. The "intent" scenarios can be pretty valuable.

"I need a lawyer in ___ right now". That lead can be worth a lot.

"Looking to buy a new car today", etc.