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Re:Google News Growth Hack Exposed by CaveTech on Sunday May 04, 2014 @05:12PM (#7695825)
This could be what we consider "cloaking" in the ad industry. Ads containing legitimate content are submitted, but when a user clicks it, a risk assessment is done based on the users information (ip/location/js enabled/saving cookies etc).

If it's determined that you're unlikely to be a crawler or a person affiliated with the host site (google employee in this case) you're served a "Blackhat" ad, which is generally worded much more aggressively and against the TOS. High risk users are redirected to "Whitehat" pages which follow the TOS and generally don't attempt to actually convert a user. These high risk users are considered dead clicks.

A few years ago this was an insanely profitable industry on Google Adsense, but they've cracked down a lot. The new major space for this type of advertising? Facebook.

Re:Google News Growth Hack Exposed by rafaelm on Sunday May 04, 2014 @06:20PM (#7696068)
Facebook cloaking is pretty huge right now. Even more so now that they've started cracking down hard on affiliate ads. Still, everyone knows that when you are cloaking it's just a matter of time before your account gets banned. FB is getting harder to cloak everyday. (Not that I do any advertising on FB, it's too stressful.)