They have been putting thousands of scam adverts on our website for some time. Think "you have been looking at xxx and must pay a $100 fine" type popup nonsense. Hosted on the following websites:
azurestaticapps.net
azurewebsites.net
herokuapp.com
ondigitalocean.app
digitaloceanspaces.com
netlify.app
Google doesn't allow you to block these domains, because they consider them "TLDs" (the scammers use a new subdomain every day eg abcdefg.herokuapp.com). The scammers get banned and return the next day with a new account and subdomain (repeat every day). Therefore we cannot stop them. It's bizarre and baffling. But Google Adsense had to go.
It doesn't practically matter whether the ads are from google. They're shown on a third party site, not using google won't get rid of them, only not using that site will (or installing an adblocker...). Users very reasonably blame the site, who have direct agency to remove the ads.
That seems fixable. When people include this JS garbage, have a header/title/etc stating that this is Google's professional opinion. Bake it into a library offering enough other features that a large number of people are inclined to use it.
- The big problem is that malicious ads are being displayed without appropriate attribution
- Add that attribution -- blame Google (or, supposing the ads are good, credit Google; a good header goes a long way toward swaying people's opinions)
- But it doesn't matter if a single website appropriately attributes Google's highest/lowest-quality ads. The last step (speculative and hand-wavy) is to incorporate that behaviour in some sort of software more people want to use. If you're fighting alone then you'll lose. If you can convince more people that appropriately crediting Google's advertising successes and blaming their malicious failures is advantageous, you'll (by definition) have more traction in the anti-megacorp-endorsed scams and other life-altering consequences.
Calls from law enforcement is laud and clear: BigTech is not doing enough to fight fraud, war and other crimes, they make money from criminals.
Nobody’s yet cared enough to sue them, or their managers at ICC yet. However, eventually an ambitious lawyer will try to make the case, especially if fraud and human trafficking continues to grow like it is.
Someone who has spent $100M+ on Google Ads explained to me that Google is doing everything possible to juice their revenue right now, in ways they've never seen before.
Seems like two things 1) Google is losing at AI and Sundar wants to mask this 2) AI is going to destroy their ad business and they want to get while the getting is good.
I think the 3.8 Flash release shows they are doing just fine at AI. Unlike OpenAI and Anthropomorphic, Google doesn’t have to release new models to capture VC sentiment every three months. They have the hardware, data and money. And when they release a model it’s very good.
They can be doing fine at AI models but not so well with AI revenue.
Although I am curious if they are not worried and playing the long game confident that their distribution will eventually help them catch up (and worst case they own some of Anthropic). But obviously Anthropic and OpenAI have their own distribution now too.
Nobody is doing well enough with AI revenue ATM (https://isaiprofitable.com/). At the moment it is probably more about market share of users, that is where the investment capital will need to be clawed back from when it starts to be called back (or replacement money will need to come from if the investment cycle simply stops giving generously).
I do wonder if the more they goose their ad business the faster it eventually falls. I know I am more and more reluctant to view many normal Web page ads at all and usually immediately click away the second a site gets annoying
I block ads because I don’t want my family exposed to scams, clickbait, and offensive content. If ads weren’t so annoying, I wouldn’t put too much effort into blocking them.
A large chunk of the population don't use Google to search anymore. They go straight for the GenAIs. That's got to be scaring a lot of managerial folks at Google.
Slide 65 of this (very nice) set of slides [1] broke down search vs genAI use to get information. "Mostly genAI was not breaking 25% in all age brackets... Curious to see how that will evolve
very HN take. Reality is 3.8 flash is good at what it does (being fast + cheap)... but that market is becoming very saturated and google is not competing at all at the frontier where major spend lies.
Today search results are a page full of ads. They can't get away with that unless they completely corner down the LLM market.
I forget the name but I see one LLM chatbox that looked like one of those old world news media websites plastered from top to bottom with jumpy obnoxious ads. It did offer some good models for free. I honestly might even consider using it if I could remember what it was called.
If they turned Gemini into that today I think people would just laugh, shake their head and close the app.
>Google is doing everything possible to juice their revenue right now, in ways they've never seen before
My experience confirms this: many years ago I had a website banned from serving Google Ads. They said my pages didn't have enough content.
Then a competitor started showing ads on the exact same type of pages where I had previously been able to serve them. So I tried getting my website approved again and -- surprise -- now I can serve ads again.
I don't think it's related to AI, at least not originally. To me this is about the slow death of display advertising. The arms race of ad blockers and ad blocker blockers and such has created a world where people hate display ads, especially because they require so much creepy data to even work in the first place.
AI probably would help their display ad business overall -- they finally just launched a "have Gemini create your ad!" feature, and I imagine having to hire a designer was a common blocker for SMBs.
everyone (on all sides!) is losing at AI and we'll see increasingly frantic attempts from all players to paper over the cracks as this extreme resource misallocation bites.
Every YouTube ad I see now is an AI-generated scam ad hawking everything from free electricity to anti-aging products to birdhouses hand-carved by an AI-generated senior citizen. I've seen some multiple times, days or weeks apart. Their advertising standards are a complete joke.
I've flagged an AI-generated add once that promoted a small device that could cool a hot room (many degrees celcius lower, very quickly, for very little energy and very little money and without external components), defying the laws of thermodynamics.
They said they investigated it and concluded it did not break any rules and no actions where taken.
There do exist "evaporative coolers", sometimes called "swamp coolers". The trick is that they require water and raise the humidity of their surroundings. But they tick all the boxes you listed - plenty of delta-t, extremely low power, no external tubes or parts.
It's not magic because it relies on the "fuel" of cool water to evaporate.
I can believe that, I'm just here to point out that some of the laws being not-broken are the laws of thermodnamics. You can cool a room cheaply with dry ice, for instance. There are tricks.
The whole idea behind scam sites marketing is to present an ad that knowledgeable people will find unattractive but gullible people will be lured into. Self selection keeps the based demographic from investigating the scam.
I've seen similar ads. For the ones I've seen the device isn't necessarily fake: it's just a swamp cooler. They're cheap and efficient if you're suffering in a dry heat.
ETA: the ads I've seen are still deceptive because they're claiming this is revolutionary new technology, which of course it isn't.
There's no standards. AdSense is sort of a paid social media of its own. You sign up and post a tweet, then those tweets get embedded to sites if AI clears it. The key difference between Twitter and AdSense is that you're supposed to be using the latter for your own financial gain.
And it just so happens that someone doing something for their personalized financial gain is a super strong negative indicator of everything.
The AI-generated video ads are getting really bizarre on YouTube. There's class of them that feature some AI-generated song with AI-generated animated characters. One song began with lyrics about having sex with a Jewish billionaire's wife and learning some secret (at which point I was able to skip the ad) and another is some grotesque looking creature singing about foamy urine.
Normally I have an ad-blocker and don't see any ads, but I happened to be using the YouTube app recently on my iPad so I was subjected to this insanity.
I guess scammer money is as green as anyone else's.
I loaded a stock web browser on VPN and checked Youtube looking for ads. Holy shit, it's all scams. Sample size of three, but not a single ad was a known company or a decent product.
Only my kids use the TV to watch YouTube, and in order to protect them from ads (it is illegal to advertise to children in my country), I block the ads using SmartTube which includes SponsorBlock. Since such is also advertising. Google is a rotten to the core company who's purpose is whitewashing scams and spying on private eyes. Whenever Google talks about 'security' I need to keep in mind their snake tongue definition of 'security' does not align with mine. Such as: combining security updates with (unwanted) new features, play 'integrity' (hurting non-Android devices), DRM not owning my devices (hello?! The pirated content is already available!), something such as manifest V3 which has a different purpose than the one they mention, and hard-coded DNS servers with device (Google Chromecast) refusing to work without.
I use other means when I must have access to content that is only on youtube. I'm not paying money into a company so happy to allow as much scammy crap as the adverts on there are full off.
every time I use the Internet on a computer without some sort of ad blocking, I am astounded to learn that there are still people who use the Internet without an ad blocker.
The Internet is unusable these days without ublock origin or a pihole.
Youtube Premium is so dodgy. It's already expense and even if you get it, they will default to a miserable 480p on Mobile, while you have 1080p60fps available.
You can change it manually, but it's a defeat of the entire purpose..they intentionally removed the setting to apply the max. quality available to all videos you watch, while already charging you a monthly subscription for the goddamn premium.
What a bunch of goo(gl)ns
This senior citizen doing stuff got me. I bought a pair of cow slippers because I thought he was making them from his farm in Australia. Turns out they use that same "character" to hawk multiple products.
We need strict liability on this front. Google is complicit. No newspaper or equivalent publication in the days before web ads would allow ads that are down at the level of scam that seemingly make up the modus operandi of Google today (and even the ads back then that did bend the truth a bit, overpromised, or showed products that didn't actually have any legitimate use, shouldn't really have been legal back then either. They just weren't big enough of a problem to worry about).
Liability is kind of wild and the fact that “the internet” washes it all away is wilder still.
In my state, which perhaps takes liability too far in the other direction, if I serve sober you a single beer, you proceed to visit a second bar, have ten shots of tequila in an hour, and kill a man driving home - I share equal liability as the tequila bar.
Perhaps there is a middle ground in this world where a firm that makes billions has to have some basic “Know Your Customer” systems to prevent abuse?
I have a feeling this is supposed to be mocking and showing that the liability might extend too far.
Either way, I agree with the literal interpretation. They should vet the ads they serve and are complicit in this mess if they serve ads through Google et al.
The water-injection system for your carburetor that the oil companies don't want you to know about!
-- paraphrase of an actual Popular Mechanics ad circa 1978
1) Google wants the most money, so they don't care to let dodgy ads thru.
2) There are more ads going out then can be reviewed, so they would rather have people report them, then they automatically reject the report until enough people report it, then an actual person may review it.
As to why Google doesn't use AI to review them? Google would rather use the AI in a way that makes them more money, than review ads and if AI decides to take them down then that's less money for Google.
(To be clear: I don't work for Google in any way, these are just my guesses)
I have reported so many of those dodgy, scammy, sexualized ads on YouTube, that YouTube/Google has removed the option to report advertisements from my account.
They don't care as long as they're getting paid and there's no immediate liability for them.
The funny thing is it used to be that people warned you not to go to dodgy sites as they were full of ads that were trying to steal your money or online identity.
It was mostly just scaremongering, but it never hurt to be careful.
Nowadays, Google will serve you those exact ads if you go to any major news outlet.
I've been on the same crusade, reporting all the scam/fake-ai/misinformation ads as possible, when a couple weeks ago they changed how you report. The ad will still play through as you're reporting it, and once finished reporting it still remains and you may see it again after a few swipes (YTShorts). It feels like they did this so they could get the money before removing it.
The web is becoming very hostile to ad blockers. I use a VPN and I've noticed more and more sites just being obnoxious with their popups and even just crashing the site completely in a loop (looking at you EuroNews)
It doesn't solve everything but the 'full' desktop version of the ublock origin plugin runs just fine in Android on Firefox. I can't even imagine using any other mobile browser now. I don't know what the situation is for iphone platform stuff these days.
There may be gaps every now and then in block lists of ad blocking solutions, but besides that, you are using the wrong ad blocker. abp is not to be trusted to reliably block all ads it could. It has a different mission than uBlock Origin.
I think section 230 immunity shielding from from any liability is also very motivating. Google was born into a world where companies had 10,000s of support personnel, today there are companies with over a million employees, they could easily human-review every single ad and they probably would if they weren't able to divert that cost into profits without consequence. AI makes it even easier and cheaper but... why bother?
Then there's the profits from scams, Meta is the only one with the stones to admit they like scam ads because they make up 10% of their revenue. I doubt it's a massive coincidence all the other big platforms are overrun with scams they do as little as possible to police.
Does section 230 shield them from ads they select for display? Ads are not randomly hosted by random people and if you visit a random page those people uploaded, you see them. Google selects the ads they want to show you on search results, before youtube videos, or on third party websites. There's no "we don't know what that might be" going on at all -- they are running sophisticated algorithms to optimize the impact of those ads. Is that still be covered under section 230?
As someone who advertised with them, they do seem to have an AI reviewer, and it also has false positives that no number of appeals seem to resolve. So in these cases you want to pay them money for good ads, but you can't because AI says no.
Adding friction to the process (on the advertiser side) means less money for Google: 1) due to the cost of implementing the checking, 2) because some legitimate advertisers will be falsely denied, 3) because the scam ads were still paying money.
Not adding the friction doesn't seem to come with any serious downside. One would expect that it would, e.g. due to publishers removing the most profitable properties from the ad network or governments legislating this out of existence, but that doesn't seem to happen.
So, given these incentives, the outcome is inevitable.
If Google had to pay a massive fine for every scam ad that gets through, or was liable for the damages the ads cause, etc. - or otherwise had a strong incentive - suddenly there would be enough resources to make sure every ad is reviewed, advertisers that push scam ads get fully banned on the first offense rather than being given second, third, and fourth chances, etc.
> 1) Google wants the most money, so they don't care to let dodgy ads thru.
They have literally destroyed their own reputation, and all the reputations of legitimate products that might appear along these scams. Do you think anyone would want their car, smartphone, or tax software appear next to actual credit card scams?
TV has standards for decency, and factuality, and might ban entire categories of ads (financial services) altogether.
> 2) There are more ads going out then can be reviewed
The "more than can be reviewed" might have been a logical conclusion in a purely human based workflow, even if you have the lowest cost per head click workers in like, an external contractor call centre type environment in Bangladesh.
As the author points out, the ordinary consumer class version of publicly available Gemini very accurately classifies the ad as malicious. I really doubt that there are THAT MANY unique new ads being submitted per day that they can't afford the compute to run them through a similar classifier.
this argument still adds nothing to discussion because companies clearly want to spend zero but earn everything, the only amount they are willing to spend is on lawyers working on shielding companies from any responsibility including obvious cases of negligence
Yes, and I've also seen the absolute shitflood of horrible ads. Every time I see somebody else's system that isn't running ublock origin or similar... They clearly are prioritizing the ad revenue over any actual "don't take a steaming dump on the Internet" ethical priorities.
In underregulated capitalism, the reason is very simple: because they get away with it. This is why they despise regulation; it enforces accountability. Want to advertise? Ensure the ads are legit. It doesn't work when you say 'we didn't know beforehand' when a significant percentage is scams. That is when you start to curate the content beforehand.
In any other normal market, the middleman would be held accountable. Big tech? Not so much. We seen the slap on the wrist regarding Microsoft at the start of the century/millennium. We can also witness the same with regards to the garbage coming from China, where China doesn't take responsibility. Learned from the best.
As someone who has worked for Google Ads, I should say that they do review ads with both AI and humans, and do spend quite a bit of money and energy on finding and stopping both bad-faith advertisers ("buy side", what we see) and bad-faith publishers ("sell side", more of a scam on the advertisers/google itself).
Is it enough? Probably not, based on this article. Are their policies strict enough? IMHO no way, considering Youtube left an ad up for "Ukranian women" in the early years of the war which wtf. But they certainly do try.
Like most businesses, the actual people involved are also well-intentioned, at least in the abstract; they wanted to make ads that sell products without annoying people. Obviously there's material conditions beneath and around all that, but we don't need to explain that part here ;)
> There are more ads going out then can be reviewed, so they would rather have people report them, then they automatically reject the report until enough people report it, then an actual person may review it.
If only there was a technology which could automate this... But we all know, AI is only used on users, not customers - and users get the two line perl script "AI" which says "We have reviewed your claim and decided to ignore it".
This is one major reason why blocking ads is now a safety issue. If you have a family member who, for whatever reason, might be fooled by this sort of ad, install an effective adblocker on all their browsers and uninstall/disable browsers that don't support an effective adblocker.
If you are reliant on ad revenue, you should be expressing your displeasure to google right now.
When Google broke the original uBlock origin and made people switch to uBlock Lite, I found out about the change because my grandmother called me in a panic. She saw an ad like the one in this article on her Facebook page and clicked it, then it was telling her to call Microsoft support because her computer was infected.
Like, Google removing Adblock directly caused that. Facebook allowing the ad caused that.
The ad led to malicious page that was also hosted on a Microsoft thing, and I ended up reporting it to them too. Microsoft at least promptly took it down within a half hour after I reported it. But these big companies have almost no incentive to stop this, and some of them directly profit off of these scams happening.
* Got me a "BearSkin" jacket from youtube's incessant advertisement.
* Signed up for a $250 subscription to "The Daily Beast" when she was watching youtube tv right before bed and probably subscribed when she meant to just view.
* Signed up for Norton Antivirus when she got a gif that looks like a popup that tells you have a virus and it opens to a Subscription Plan on her phone.
None of these things were things she particularly wanted, some she didn't even consent to, but a combination of paid promotion / advertisement / confusion about the UI is basically doing things against her will.
I literally got her Youtube Premium just so she stops seeing all the ads that are feeding on her. It is a problem.
> got her Youtube Premium just so she stops seeing all the ads that are feeding on her
I don't blame you for your solution but it is so sad that we have to basically pay protection money to Google now so that our loved ones don't get scammed and robbed while they are consuming addictive/slop content.
If you think that is bad... Recently I discovered that even a tiny website with moderate textual content basically forces adoption of cloudflare due to incredible (~2k request per second at times) scraping by bots.
It isn't even a shakedown, they are genuinely protecting you from others. But how did we get to the point on the web that this is needed?
Google can reply and confirm whether or not a report did anything?
I’ve never seen that. I report ads on YouTube all the time. I’ve reported ads for illegal drugs, illegal firearms, pornography, and all sorts of various scams. I’ve seen similar advertising to the example in this article, mimicking the phone’s UI. Ive reported them. I’ve never once seen Google reply to any of my reports to confirm what happened. I’ve always wondered, and since I continue to see the ads I just assume my reports go straight into a trash bin.
The illegal firearm ad I saw (more than a year ago, now) I was so shocked that I took screenshots and reported it multiple times. The ad advertised that the weapon was “easy to sneak through security” and “didn’t require an id to purchase” I saw the ad several times across multiple weeks. I reported it every time. I don’t think Google ever did anything about it. If they did, it took them weeks
There is am extremely pervasive trick where bots repost trending comments rewritten in AI very early in videos and boost their bot comments above the original, then if a bot lands a top comment the profile is suddenly switched to porn/scam links with a female model as the profile picture.
It's so common and so clearly reported by many people that I'm left to assume Google likes the engagement the profiles bring and chooses to leave them up.
I can recall one time I got feedback from Google that an ad had indeed been taken down, that was an Ukrainian women dating ad in Gmail which was not subtle at all about offering trafficked women. But that's some time ago.
Money. They make so much money from malvertisement that it doesn't make sense to remediate them. It's corporate greed and they've known about this since the 2010s, various campaigns have sprung up and have caused untold X amount of dollars in damages in breaches, and nothing changes. I've heard at least one FBI agent who had investigated cases related to malvertisement put Google up there with some of the worst ad networks.
This is it. The truth is Google's largest revenue sources are scams, fraud, and malware, and they wouldn't be in business without them. They're not going to remove all of their highest pay per click customers because it might harm society or something.
Just try to convince Google to remove "MapsQuest Driving Directions", a browser hijacking extension advertiser who clearly impersonates one of Google's competitors: It's an extremely high value scam targeting seniors (the folks who mostly look for MapQuest on... Google) and it makes them way too much money for them to stop it.
It's a network made by snake-oil salesman. People on Brazil yearns for passive-income, and they get told by a lot of influencers that dropshipping is what will give them their freedom.
Then you have thousands of people dumping fake ads about borderline fake products on Meta and Google. It's actually a hive-mind.
That's at least something. Last I was on a streaming service, they were very fastidious about not revealing who was behind a spammer's rotating "music labels", despite them by law having some kind of payment details for them.
I assume it is the same reason Facebook serves dodgy ads: it makes them money and they have had no liability for the material they choose to serve to users. There are a handful of types of content that could generate bad press (some sexual or racist content, for example), so they police those. But ordinary scams generate engagement and make them money, and since they are generally immune from liability for content under Section 230, there's no downside for them. I've always thought there might be an end-run around Section 230 where the algorithm is tuned to preferentially present fraudulent content, thereby implicating the company in the advertiser's fraud. But as far as I know, no one has tested that approach.
A lot of questions being raised today can be answered by the recently inverted power balance between users/customers and corporations. People have not yet internalized that old assumptions about how corporations fear losing customers are no longer valid. Consumers have become entirely docile and passive. Open hostility to consumers is now a norm. (Obviously regulation is also less powerful and less feared as well.)
Many large modern corporations are third-hand cars. The original owner had a purpose and an emotional investment in owning the car; for the second-hand owner, it became a practical thing; for the third-hand owner, it is often a liability.
If you are lucky, your third-hand owner still checks the oil and puts quality tires on it. If you are not, your third-hand owner pours customer relationships down the drain and doubles down on indiscriminate cost-cutting, alienating good people from the organization.
I don't think it is fair to pin this on Google - I get the worst ads on X. But something about how the X ad network works means that even when I report the ad, block the ad poster, etc. there is this army of alternate ad accounts that all show the same ad.
I was feeling very guilty last night as I was watching YouTube and getting 30s+ unskippable ad blocks every 10 minutes in some video. And the repetition and low quality were grating on me. I thought: being rich is never having to watch another ad. Why am I letting these ads own spaced repetition slots in my brain that could be filled with knowledge? Instead of learning, my mental energy is being taken up by psychological manipulation to purchase? The relentless repetition of the mind-numbing ad interspersed throughout otherwise educational content.
Being rich is owning the real-estate of my own mind. I sometimes feel like a digital serf in my own head.
As much I love a good old "Why don't you just ..." response that terrifically misses the point - in this particular case I was watching YouTube through their Apple TV app.
Now, there may be another "why don't you just ..." or "well, actually ..." response you have queued up, maybe some ramblings about a pi hole, or some anti-Apple hate, or some other solutioneering. Go ahead, tell me.
But it is the structure of incentive that forces this. The YouTube creators that make the content do need to get paid. And Google offers an option: Youtube Premium. That give both me and the creator what we want and (for the time being) removes the ads.
So either one is rich in time (doing whatever "why don't you just ..." hoop you expect me to jump through) or rich in money.
That is wrong on both accounts. I have little choice other than to watch ads since the structure of incentive that creates a marketplace like YouTube forces it on me.
I think about libraries and how the world would be if instead of a free public resource, you had to watch ads before you were allowed to take out a book.
It is just the case that in this modern social media world, if you want your ideas to spread you have to put them onto social media. And if I want access to those ideas I have to consume them through social media. There is nothing about that environment that is my choice, it is the environment that I find myself in.
And I have few choices to get around it. I can twist up into a pretzel trying to block the onslaught with more "why don't you just..." advice. Or I could pay to make it go away. Or I could just go off-grid and forego access.
And when you look close at the options, it becomes clear that sovereignty of my own mind has a price. Freedom of mind is not free in this modern world, if it ever really was.
You made the choice to use Apple TV, whatever that is. I just use... YouTube. In my browser. Do you not have a browser? It doesn't cost money.
You also have no obligation to watch ads for creators to get paid. They can also set up things like Patreon if they would like. The ads are very lucrative, and that's their choice. But you are free to make choices too, if you would like to.
It's not advertising anything, it's just a straight up scam exploit site. It uses exclusively stolen or fake accounts. The links are shown as "amazon.de" or similar but of course do not go there, no doubt just a bug X haven't gotten around to fixing just yet.
This is on the kind of level where if we had actual law enforcement for tech companies, the next time some X executive lands in Europe they would be in cuffs.
Somehow I would never assume that X would act "moral". Google on the other hands even few years back was generally acknowledged as a good actor which was once again corporate charade people would fall for. Including myself.
We had to hire a full time person to monitor and block click-trick "Continue" / "Download" scam ads on Google Ad Manager. With the amount of human training we did blocking these ads, google could absolutely solve this problem instantly. The ad creatives are nearly identical. We were seeing new ad accounts targeting our specific domain daily (ad account names like {sitename}339, {sitename}340, etc)
When we asked our reps, they dance around the question by saying they would "escalate to engineering" or some bs like that.
Google just makes far too much money to stop. My guess is that its >40% of AdX display revenue, based on the % of scam ads that come through ad manager.
Context: our site did ~$5m AdX revenue annually, mostly US audience. High CPM niche. This was ~7 years ago till 2 years ago when we sold the business, I would guess it's still happening based on ads I see browsing the internet.
As usual, "Google" here means the two individual human beings who together have a controlling interest in Google, Page and Brin. It may also mean some other people, but it certainly means them. To be clear, that's not to suggest that everything dubious about Google can be put on their shoulders. Some Google issues are genuinely hard to solve; some are deep enough in the weeds that they may plausibly never have heard of them or not have time for them. AdSense being a sewer doesn't seem to be one of those.
My father saw a similar ad and got worried. The ad said you need to update your pdf version immediately. He uninstalled the YouTube because he knew it was irregular and thought his phone was hacked.
This is include ads that impersonate google services, e.g. "your google translate has expired, upgrade to a new version". Reporting it to google is like yelling at a wall. Or worse, yelling at a wall after a few million years will slowly erode it due to the air friction.
Well, as others have said money. As far as I know ads are the domain of the FTC and FCC. Who's going to stop them from serving scammy ads? Not Carr, not the FTC commissioners.
As much as I personally disliked Susan Wojcicki, she kinda sort kept Youtube shenanigans in check. Yes, there were baity, inappropriate ads, but after she left it has gotten out of control.
Google signaled with "Lake America" they are playing along, and I don't think any real consquences will come of it as long as they keep pulling in billions and the QoQ keeps going.
There is a well known problem in the Netherlands where scammers will set up fake museum websites, like “vangoghtickets.co”. They don’t even collect the money - your card details are instantly stolen and used for some odd looking purchases in south east asia or something.
I’ve reported these multiple times. They always get to the top of search results via paid placement, and Google always responds to the reports saying they found nothing wrong with them, even when provided with detailed evidence of the fraud.
Because nobody is prosecuted for scam and malicious ads.
People at Alphabet and all website owners which use AdSense and showed scam and malicious ads must be arrested, prosecuted and sentenced jail time in order to stop this mess.
But it looks like all the countries are busy age restricting Internet instead. By age restricting, it means private information gathering which fuel ad companies more.
My understanding is, it's a multi-party cat-and-mouse game that never stops evolving.
The publishers (websites or apps owners) that provide free content to users need a way to support the free content, and typically it's either donation (like wikimedia) or ads. To most publishers, ads revenue is far more predictable. By right most publishers also would like the ads to be reliable and relevant to the users consuming their content, but that's usually a secondary concern, compared to the revenue.
The users viewing the content are often annoyed by the ads, but as long as the ads are not too intrusive, they usually tolerate the ads. If the users occasionally find ads are actually useful, that's great, but most of the time in my experience, when I click into an ad it's usually a mis-click, not because I'm genuinely interested in this ad.
The advertisers need a way to reach more potential customers. Most advertisers are honest players in the game with real products or services to offer to users, trying to find ways to maximize the impression, click-through and conversion rate by optimizing their creatives, targeting, and bidding strategies etc. But there are always scammers that try to cheat the game, showing dodgy ads to rip off users whenever possible.
Google as an ad-tech platform sits between these 3 parties, trying to show the most relevant ad from advertisers in a publisher's ad-slot to the user. But the system has evolved into a complex maze over the years that likely nobody knows the full picture any more. New legal requirements and regulatory policies and industry landscape shifts keep pushing the system to extremes. There are teams to fight ad spams, but there are also business goals to make more money to fund the AI initiatives. The scammers keep finding new loopholes in the system, and the teams fighting the scammers are often steps behind, due to limited resource and budget. End result is many dodgy ads keep slipping through the policy filters.
In an ideal world, ad-tech platforms should optimize for satisfying all 3 parties at the same time: publishers, advertisers, and end users, in addition to making money for themselves. But that's probably hard to achieve, given the dynamic nature of the world. AI can help fight scams, but AI can also help finding loopholes in the scam-fighting system. It's a sad state of the world.
I think the obvious answer is they aren't held to account by regulators. If a few execs were sent to prison for defrauding their users (and investors for taking on so much risk) things would change overnight.
Here's another one for you. If you search for any popular book on Google Play Books, you get a whole bunch of fake knock-offs alongside the real book. Sometimes, it is nearly impossible to tell which one is real.
And they, apparently, won't do anything about it.
A couple months ago I went searching for the book "Regime Change" by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, an NYT bestseller. The top search result at the time used the exact official cover art and author names, and was otherwise in every way indistinguishable from the real book.
I foolishly bought it and started reading. I quickly noticed that the text seemed like more of a mediocre college paper than a bestselling book. After a few pages I was like... wtf is this. Jumped to the end of the book and found an "Abort the author" section naming a fellow named Marcus Whitfield as the author.
I dutifully opened a ticket with Google suggesting that they should really remove this book. They refunded me, but told me they couldn't remove the book because their policy states that only the true copyright holder could request a take down, and I am not that.
WTF? I wasn't even claiming a copyright issue. I was claiming false advertising and fraud. I was claiming that Google Play's store was listing an obviously, maliciously fake book, selling it for real money, and that they should stop doing that. They take a 30% cut! How are they not doing even the most basic vetting of these listings? A human could trivially identify it as fake in 30 seconds and an AI even faster.
It appears that since then, the actual real book has risen to #1 in the search results (I think; it's hard to tell), and the exact listing that got me is gone, but there are still a whole lot of obvious fakes after it:
And if you search for any other popular book, you get the same thing.
(Of course, no real publisher actually cares about Google Play Books, because nobody uses it, so nobody files takedown requests, presumably. Also presumably no engineers work on it, and that's why it's a wasteland. What I don't get is why haven't they shut it down?)
LOL because they're greedy and they want the maximum profits for their shareholders and the board.
The same explanation applies to every big (greedy) corporation :-(
Have you seen what is happeing with Facebook marketplace? with Twitter ads? (no, it's not called X, it's still Twitter for some of us) have you seen apps on Play store and Apple?
All soulless, big, greedy companies do this and they don't care about us anymore :-(
Gezus… If you see my mother-in-law cellphone. It is impossible to use <period>. Full of ads crap that she probably installed by following ads… Remember IE toolbars?
I have a website with some adsense ads (that pay for the server).
I try blocking the most obvious scams by blocking the announcers but it's basically impossible because the same dodgy ones keep coming back with a new name.
Also hard because they're not always in a language you understand.
I don't think I should do all this work instead of the biggest ad company in the world just to earn 5€ per day, but I'm also not aware of any better alternative.
Man, Google is catching strays from all directions. I recently posted an article about their bot behaviour [0], only to be drowned in other more pressing issues.
To comment on this one: as long as there is no backlash from their real customers (those that buy ads) nothing will change.
More specifically a very large number of dodgy companies spend a relatively small amount each but in aggregate it's a lot of money.
Google has no interest in policing that because money and won't until they are forced to and since they are a transnational that's difficult since it requires multiple countries to do it with the added wrinkle that if you even hint at the possibility that just maybe you might consider doing something about US big tech you get immediate screaming from across the Atlantic.
And I suspect (would love some real data from scammy advertisers) that this is a bigger factor than most folks appreciate.
If you're a regular business that sells clothes or food or SaaS or insurance or whatever, online ads are a) not your whole customer acquisition system (you have regular marketing, word of mouth, maybe sales people, maybe brick-and-mortar brand presence, physical advertising, etc.) and b) not part of your expense sheet that you want to spend tons of time on.
The "b)" there leads companies to either overspend on stupid (but unlikely to be flagged) ads, or to try to keep their ad spend as low as possible for the highest reward, because they think of it like opex. After all, they have all the normal expenses of a normal business to worry about in addition to ad spend. Sure, there are outliers here who spend almost all their non-product money on online ads, but not most ordinary companies from Verizon to Dave's Local Auto Insurance to Safeway.
So "good"/ordinary advertisers aren't generating super high flag rates, but they're probably either a) spending lots of money without churn/support-needs risk or b) aren't spending that much ... compared to scam-ads-only businesses. Sure, google would prefer more upstanding customers in category "a)", but they're a near-monopoly and some of that growth is expensive to chase, while the scammers are beating a path to their door.
If you're a scam-ad business that produces malware or LLM-written gacha games or whatever, your product expenses are minimal and, if your business is lucrative, you can spend very large amounts of your balance sheet on ads for scam delivery channels. Tiny businesses in this area are likely to have whale-sized ad spends and a strong likelihood of growth (vertical as they get bigger/greedier, or horizontal as they keep spinning up new businesses to keep ahead of the law and bad press). I bet they punch above their weight ad-spend-wise, in other words.
You thought the unit economics of a SaaS business were good? Well, wait until you see the unit economics of a Play Store whitelabeled gacha game app with a credential stealer inside!
I’d love to know how much Google has made from accidental clicks since it started. I used to see my mum make a couple of mistaken clicks here and there on her computer; now on mobile it’s easily 10x worse. Sometimes because she doesn’t realize they’re ads, other times she tries to tap the X and it opens… It’s insane
I reported months ago that Google's continual growth rate in revenues from Ads should be heeded with caution - its not from AI/LLMs.
They are juicing and juicing and juicing their existing assets for all the cash flows they can generate! That's why the revenues keep growing. They did not go to such extremities in the past - and they probably strategically held back.
Meta is facing the same predicament btw - both entities claim the growth is coming from new AI investments. The amount of impersination/Scam ad's I've seen on IG is hilarious. That is a flat out lie its from investments they made pre-LLM hype + efficiency gains.
These days almost all Google search results return nothing but links to stuff that you can buy instead of useful information you were looking for. They do this because they think they can get away with it, they're the only game in town.
To me this signals a huge opportunity for other companies to dive into. If a new internet search company appeared that returned actual useful search results and clearly delineated ads (like Google used to) I would switch to it almost immediately.
The only way these companies are ever going to change their game is when people vote with their feet!
Kagi will never make it. Asking people money for search is a non-starter.
Also, I type in something in the search bar and...nothing happens. There's a pop-up below the search bar which tells me nothing is saved with a "Dismiss" button. When I press it I'm being directed to the homepage telling me to pay-up.
Kagi is such an amazing team, building a truly next-level product. It's hard to realize what you're missing until you experience a real search engine for the first time in decades. It's wonderful.
I'm sure if I submitted an app that on the iOS app store that mimicked a system warning that tried to scare people into giving me access, it would not pass the review process.
If instead I decided to embed a WebView and later changed the html to do the same I would likely get booted from the app store (afair Apple's very particular about serving remote content in PWAs, and changing said content, even under benign circumstances).
iOS seems to have less scareware and shady apps than Android anyways.
the app store is filled with scammy apps, its just a different flavour
I once got a crypto-wallet PK leaked by a fake wallet app impersonating another very known brand. Found out on reddit it was a fake... After a few months the real app came out but yeah...
Same with Meta. The latter knowingly makes a substantial revenue from those ads. Unless a government steps it to make advertising platforms liable, there will be zero incentive for change
I don’t think they want to nor is it good for them to long term. But I bet they’re institutionally incapable of avoiding it given the KPIs that drive the entire employment ambitions of many managers.
Ohhh, has anybody used AI to generate delicious statistics about how many ads served by various ad networks will get you hacked / violate the ad networks own policies?
It's more than that. The 10% is the scam ads that "won" the ad auctions. It doesn't include the effect of scam ads bidding up the market and increasing the price of non-scam ad wins.
(Could also argue that the scam ad that won the slot for 10 cents would have gone for 9 cents without the scam and Meta's marginal revenue was only 1 cent... but if every ad is 1 cent more...)
Same problem when you want to buy a home in a place where real estate became a means for money laundering or uninhabited store of value
> Could also argue that the scam ad that won the slot for 10 cents would have gone for 9 cents without the scam and Meta's marginal revenue was only 1 cent.
They're probably taking that into account in their 10% of profit coming from ads estimate.
There is a 3rd option: malicious stupidity / aka wilful ignorance.
Google is a collection of individuals, so it's very likely both sides of Hanlon's razor are true: a little malice from those in control, persisting a state of stupidity for those executing the process.
As others have pointed out, there will be resistance to improving a process that negatively impacts their bottom line. Incentives, dictate long term behaviour of organisations; whereas Hanlon's razor works better at an individual level IME.
Google's ad-serving is dumb as a rock. It seems to be based just on things it thinks you may be interested in, even when it should be 100% obvious that they are not things you are going to buy.
They should let people have more control over what ads they do and don't see.
If Google served me ads on stuff I was interested in (I'd be happy to tell them) rather than women's clothing, they I might buy it. I'm a guy - show me as many skimpily dressed women as you like, but I have no need for women's clothes! Try it once or a hundred times it you must, but maybe after the millionth non-purchase you'd think they might figure it out and use that screen real-estate to serve an ad for something that my purchase history or what they know about me indicates I might have some interest in!
Well, the advertizers want my money, which they are not getting - wrong ads.
Google wants the advertizers' money, who are really being scammed by Google if they pay every time Google serves an ad to me that Google presumably knows is not going to result in a purchase. I guess Google don't care - if they get paid for click-thrus and I occasionally do that, but never buy, then Google still gets their money.
I suspect this boils down to a cost/benefit tradeoff.
The cost of strictly enforcing stated rules for ads is felt immediately and fully by Google. It is concrete, measurable, and probably non-insignificant; the benefit is essentially goodwill from the narrow sliver of the web that is verbal about this. That is intangible, difficult to measure, even harder to assign a reasonable dollar value to (meaning the ROI could look negative), and the benefit would accrue to parties other than Google who might not even notice.
Keep up these efforts to name and shame. If Google won’t act on these things because it doesn’t make them money, because they are unregulated, or because they are lazy, they might because it still cuts their credibility and reputation. Especially here on HN where Google is no longer considered such a darling by developers and thinkers.
Google (Alphabet) is a corporation. Corporations follow the profit motive. Furthermore it's a publicly traded corporation. These follow the interests of their shareholders.
What does killing dodgy ads do for Google's bottom line? It's removing paying customers and driving down competition for (and therefore value of) ad space. What's the cost of dodgy ads to Google? The sites that use Google Ads will continue using Google Ads if they do nothing about the dodgy ads. The sites that don't use Google Ads won't be swayed to use Google Ads if they do remove the dodgy ads. Google is not held liable for serving dodgy ads so there's no direct risk associated with serving them.
Why should Google remove the dodgy ads? "Don't be evil"? That motto exceeded its shelf life before it was first publicly posted.
Hanlon's razor is nice and all but there's a difference between malice and amoral apathy. Corporations would sell shredded orphans as fuel if it made economical sense to do so.
It simply increases shareholder value more than if they we're removed. It will only ends when companies will be made at least partially responsible for damages they help to facilitate. Don't be evil my ass.
Youtube's bitcoin doubler scams are a great example of this... they run essentially the same videos over and over again, usually Elon Musk, Michael Saylor, or Steve Wozniak, occasionally Warren Buffet and a few others-- with some ticker or scroll telling people about a special promotion where whatever bitcoin you send them will be sent back doubled.
It takes basically nothing to reliably identify these videos. They're extremely heavily promoted with ads running on other videos. Google does nothing with them when reported. Google does not proactively remove them. And because, contrary to the documentation, youtube doesn't pull the verified flag from a channel when its name is changed, these scams go out on channels that look like official sources for the celebrities in them (they steal some random verified channel then change its name to SpaceX (official) or Microstrategy or whatever).
Google even got sued unsuccessfully by Woz and some of the scam victims-- and their response was pound the "S230 is an absolute shield for externally provided material" table and continue to do nothing about the fraud except rake in money from pedaling it. They haven't even fixed the verified flag issue.
(Shades of the same conduct were seen in the old viacom v. youtube case, -- users were reporting copyright infringements so they took away the button.)
I have sympathy for the S230 shield and consider it very important-- but the law is the absolute worst we're allowed to be. They are free to do better (and the CDA shield was designed to assure they can moderate without picking up liability).
Google's conduct is irresponsible, unethical, and may well cost us this important legal protection because if society's choice is liability for hosts OR the biggest and wealthiest companies do nothing while raking in money from even the most flagrant scams we're going to eventually choose liability with dire consequences for free speech.
It's especially ironic that the smaller sites and forums (like HN) would be hit especially hard by a narrowing of S230, but these forms reliably work hard to remove the worse abuse-- and are seldom the source of anything that truly offends the senses at least not for long. Companies like google that don't are ones that are so wealthy and powerful that they're almost intractable to litigate against even without S230 like protection. Loss of it would hurt them gravely but it would hurt everyone smaller more.
Google doesn't care because they figured out no one will hold them accountable any more.
The US regulatory authorities DGAF ever since Lina Khan exited the picture and the EU regulatory authorities might have the legal basis to hold Big AdTech accountable, but the EU is at the moment busy trying to fend off BS from the Trump admin, they do not have time and risk appetite (aka Trump retaliating on behalf of Big AdTech) left for scam ads.
They have been putting thousands of scam adverts on our website for some time. Think "you have been looking at xxx and must pay a $100 fine" type popup nonsense. Hosted on the following websites:
azurestaticapps.net
azurewebsites.net
herokuapp.com
ondigitalocean.app
digitaloceanspaces.com
netlify.app
Google doesn't allow you to block these domains, because they consider them "TLDs" (the scammers use a new subdomain every day eg abcdefg.herokuapp.com). The scammers get banned and return the next day with a new account and subdomain (repeat every day). Therefore we cannot stop them. It's bizarre and baffling. But Google Adsense had to go.
- Add that attribution -- blame Google (or, supposing the ads are good, credit Google; a good header goes a long way toward swaying people's opinions)
- But it doesn't matter if a single website appropriately attributes Google's highest/lowest-quality ads. The last step (speculative and hand-wavy) is to incorporate that behaviour in some sort of software more people want to use. If you're fighting alone then you'll lose. If you can convince more people that appropriately crediting Google's advertising successes and blaming their malicious failures is advantageous, you'll (by definition) have more traction in the anti-megacorp-endorsed scams and other life-altering consequences.
Nobody’s yet cared enough to sue them, or their managers at ICC yet. However, eventually an ambitious lawyer will try to make the case, especially if fraud and human trafficking continues to grow like it is.
Seems like two things 1) Google is losing at AI and Sundar wants to mask this 2) AI is going to destroy their ad business and they want to get while the getting is good.
Now their product strategy however…
Although I am curious if they are not worried and playing the long game confident that their distribution will eventually help them catch up (and worst case they own some of Anthropic). But obviously Anthropic and OpenAI have their own distribution now too.
Nobody is doing well enough with AI revenue ATM (https://isaiprofitable.com/). At the moment it is probably more about market share of users, that is where the investment capital will need to be clawed back from when it starts to be called back (or replacement money will need to come from if the investment cycle simply stops giving generously).
[1] https://readwise-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/media/wisereads/art...
I forget the name but I see one LLM chatbox that looked like one of those old world news media websites plastered from top to bottom with jumpy obnoxious ads. It did offer some good models for free. I honestly might even consider using it if I could remember what it was called.
If they turned Gemini into that today I think people would just laugh, shake their head and close the app.
My experience confirms this: many years ago I had a website banned from serving Google Ads. They said my pages didn't have enough content.
Then a competitor started showing ads on the exact same type of pages where I had previously been able to serve them. So I tried getting my website approved again and -- surprise -- now I can serve ads again.
AI probably would help their display ad business overall -- they finally just launched a "have Gemini create your ad!" feature, and I imagine having to hire a designer was a common blocker for SMBs.
That's good. I hate ads. I will fight them down until they are gone.
But I don't think this is the case here. Ads are still pushed down onto the people willy-nilly style.
They said they investigated it and concluded it did not break any rules and no actions where taken.
It's not magic because it relies on the "fuel" of cool water to evaporate.
YouTube adverts frequently contain fraudulent, misleading information. It appears that no law is being broken.
ETA: the ads I've seen are still deceptive because they're claiming this is revolutionary new technology, which of course it isn't.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cj6g41pzy41o
And it just so happens that someone doing something for their personalized financial gain is a super strong negative indicator of everything.
Normally I have an ad-blocker and don't see any ads, but I happened to be using the YouTube app recently on my iPad so I was subjected to this insanity.
I guess scammer money is as green as anyone else's.
I loaded a stock web browser on VPN and checked Youtube looking for ads. Holy shit, it's all scams. Sample size of three, but not a single ad was a known company or a decent product.
I use other means when I must have access to content that is only on youtube. I'm not paying money into a company so happy to allow as much scammy crap as the adverts on there are full off.
The Internet is unusable these days without ublock origin or a pihole.
You can change it manually, but it's a defeat of the entire purpose..they intentionally removed the setting to apply the max. quality available to all videos you watch, while already charging you a monthly subscription for the goddamn premium. What a bunch of goo(gl)ns
https://youtube.com/watch?v=f9MbhNJ5EIU
In my state, which perhaps takes liability too far in the other direction, if I serve sober you a single beer, you proceed to visit a second bar, have ten shots of tequila in an hour, and kill a man driving home - I share equal liability as the tequila bar.
Perhaps there is a middle ground in this world where a firm that makes billions has to have some basic “Know Your Customer” systems to prevent abuse?
Either way, I agree with the literal interpretation. They should vet the ads they serve and are complicit in this mess if they serve ads through Google et al.
1) Google wants the most money, so they don't care to let dodgy ads thru.
2) There are more ads going out then can be reviewed, so they would rather have people report them, then they automatically reject the report until enough people report it, then an actual person may review it.
As to why Google doesn't use AI to review them? Google would rather use the AI in a way that makes them more money, than review ads and if AI decides to take them down then that's less money for Google.
(To be clear: I don't work for Google in any way, these are just my guesses)
I have reported so many of those dodgy, scammy, sexualized ads on YouTube, that YouTube/Google has removed the option to report advertisements from my account.
They don't care as long as they're getting paid and there's no immediate liability for them.
Nowadays, Google will serve you those exact ads if you go to any major news outlet.
That's what I do and why I don't even know what brooklinen is.
Don't use that. Use Ublock Origin.
Then there's the profits from scams, Meta is the only one with the stones to admit they like scam ads because they make up 10% of their revenue. I doubt it's a massive coincidence all the other big platforms are overrun with scams they do as little as possible to police.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230#False_information
https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...
Adding friction to the process (on the advertiser side) means less money for Google: 1) due to the cost of implementing the checking, 2) because some legitimate advertisers will be falsely denied, 3) because the scam ads were still paying money.
Not adding the friction doesn't seem to come with any serious downside. One would expect that it would, e.g. due to publishers removing the most profitable properties from the ad network or governments legislating this out of existence, but that doesn't seem to happen.
So, given these incentives, the outcome is inevitable.
If Google had to pay a massive fine for every scam ad that gets through, or was liable for the damages the ads cause, etc. - or otherwise had a strong incentive - suddenly there would be enough resources to make sure every ad is reviewed, advertisers that push scam ads get fully banned on the first offense rather than being given second, third, and fourth chances, etc.
They have literally destroyed their own reputation, and all the reputations of legitimate products that might appear along these scams. Do you think anyone would want their car, smartphone, or tax software appear next to actual credit card scams?
TV has standards for decency, and factuality, and might ban entire categories of ads (financial services) altogether.
The "more than can be reviewed" might have been a logical conclusion in a purely human based workflow, even if you have the lowest cost per head click workers in like, an external contractor call centre type environment in Bangladesh.
As the author points out, the ordinary consumer class version of publicly available Gemini very accurately classifies the ad as malicious. I really doubt that there are THAT MANY unique new ads being submitted per day that they can't afford the compute to run them through a similar classifier.
More than can be reviewed for the time and money they’re willing to spend.
Even before AI, they absolutely could’ve done it.
In any other normal market, the middleman would be held accountable. Big tech? Not so much. We seen the slap on the wrist regarding Microsoft at the start of the century/millennium. We can also witness the same with regards to the garbage coming from China, where China doesn't take responsibility. Learned from the best.
I would say it's just because there's no incentive to do anything unless a huge media storm breaks out or something.
turning a blind eye to this stuff probably makes them good money
Is it enough? Probably not, based on this article. Are their policies strict enough? IMHO no way, considering Youtube left an ad up for "Ukranian women" in the early years of the war which wtf. But they certainly do try.
Like most businesses, the actual people involved are also well-intentioned, at least in the abstract; they wanted to make ads that sell products without annoying people. Obviously there's material conditions beneath and around all that, but we don't need to explain that part here ;)
If only there was a technology which could automate this... But we all know, AI is only used on users, not customers - and users get the two line perl script "AI" which says "We have reviewed your claim and decided to ignore it".
If you are reliant on ad revenue, you should be expressing your displeasure to google right now.
Like, Google removing Adblock directly caused that. Facebook allowing the ad caused that. The ad led to malicious page that was also hosted on a Microsoft thing, and I ended up reporting it to them too. Microsoft at least promptly took it down within a half hour after I reported it. But these big companies have almost no incentive to stop this, and some of them directly profit off of these scams happening.
Not me.
Is that because I stuck with Firefox?
* Got me a "BearSkin" jacket from youtube's incessant advertisement.
* Signed up for a $250 subscription to "The Daily Beast" when she was watching youtube tv right before bed and probably subscribed when she meant to just view.
* Signed up for Norton Antivirus when she got a gif that looks like a popup that tells you have a virus and it opens to a Subscription Plan on her phone.
None of these things were things she particularly wanted, some she didn't even consent to, but a combination of paid promotion / advertisement / confusion about the UI is basically doing things against her will.
I literally got her Youtube Premium just so she stops seeing all the ads that are feeding on her. It is a problem.
I don't blame you for your solution but it is so sad that we have to basically pay protection money to Google now so that our loved ones don't get scammed and robbed while they are consuming addictive/slop content.
It isn't even a shakedown, they are genuinely protecting you from others. But how did we get to the point on the web that this is needed?
I’ve never seen that. I report ads on YouTube all the time. I’ve reported ads for illegal drugs, illegal firearms, pornography, and all sorts of various scams. I’ve seen similar advertising to the example in this article, mimicking the phone’s UI. Ive reported them. I’ve never once seen Google reply to any of my reports to confirm what happened. I’ve always wondered, and since I continue to see the ads I just assume my reports go straight into a trash bin.
The illegal firearm ad I saw (more than a year ago, now) I was so shocked that I took screenshots and reported it multiple times. The ad advertised that the weapon was “easy to sneak through security” and “didn’t require an id to purchase” I saw the ad several times across multiple weeks. I reported it every time. I don’t think Google ever did anything about it. If they did, it took them weeks
And since, as this article points out, Google does not need reports if they actually wanted to block such ads, it seems completely pointless.
It's so common and so clearly reported by many people that I'm left to assume Google likes the engagement the profiles bring and chooses to leave them up.
Just try to convince Google to remove "MapsQuest Driving Directions", a browser hijacking extension advertiser who clearly impersonates one of Google's competitors: It's an extremely high value scam targeting seniors (the folks who mostly look for MapQuest on... Google) and it makes them way too much money for them to stop it.
90% of the ads I see on YouTube are obvious scams. Many from untraceable shady overseas organizations.
You can see the data if you report them. It's always some unheard of outfit out of Hong Kong or Brazil. I want to know who is funding this.
You don't need to be Kreskin to figure this one out.
It's a network made by snake-oil salesman. People on Brazil yearns for passive-income, and they get told by a lot of influencers that dropshipping is what will give them their freedom.
Then you have thousands of people dumping fake ads about borderline fake products on Meta and Google. It's actually a hive-mind.
That's at least something. Last I was on a streaming service, they were very fastidious about not revealing who was behind a spammer's rotating "music labels", despite them by law having some kind of payment details for them.
If you are lucky, your third-hand owner still checks the oil and puts quality tires on it. If you are not, your third-hand owner pours customer relationships down the drain and doubles down on indiscriminate cost-cutting, alienating good people from the organization.
I was feeling very guilty last night as I was watching YouTube and getting 30s+ unskippable ad blocks every 10 minutes in some video. And the repetition and low quality were grating on me. I thought: being rich is never having to watch another ad. Why am I letting these ads own spaced repetition slots in my brain that could be filled with knowledge? Instead of learning, my mental energy is being taken up by psychological manipulation to purchase? The relentless repetition of the mind-numbing ad interspersed throughout otherwise educational content.
Being rich is owning the real-estate of my own mind. I sometimes feel like a digital serf in my own head.
See the headline of this article for Exhibit (I've actually run out of letters in the alphabet) why adblocking is a moral imperative.
Now, there may be another "why don't you just ..." or "well, actually ..." response you have queued up, maybe some ramblings about a pi hole, or some anti-Apple hate, or some other solutioneering. Go ahead, tell me.
But it is the structure of incentive that forces this. The YouTube creators that make the content do need to get paid. And Google offers an option: Youtube Premium. That give both me and the creator what we want and (for the time being) removes the ads.
So either one is rich in time (doing whatever "why don't you just ..." hoop you expect me to jump through) or rich in money.
I think about libraries and how the world would be if instead of a free public resource, you had to watch ads before you were allowed to take out a book.
It is just the case that in this modern social media world, if you want your ideas to spread you have to put them onto social media. And if I want access to those ideas I have to consume them through social media. There is nothing about that environment that is my choice, it is the environment that I find myself in.
And I have few choices to get around it. I can twist up into a pretzel trying to block the onslaught with more "why don't you just..." advice. Or I could pay to make it go away. Or I could just go off-grid and forego access.
And when you look close at the options, it becomes clear that sovereignty of my own mind has a price. Freedom of mind is not free in this modern world, if it ever really was.
You also have no obligation to watch ads for creators to get paid. They can also set up things like Patreon if they would like. The ads are very lucrative, and that's their choice. But you are free to make choices too, if you would like to.
That is an active choice, not forced in any way.
> The YouTube creators that make the content do need to get paid.
There are better ways, and we would all be better off except for the small group of greedheads benefiting from the chaos
The ad supported internet is dying. Good riddance
https://imgur.com/a/HZwfyNH
It's not advertising anything, it's just a straight up scam exploit site. It uses exclusively stolen or fake accounts. The links are shown as "amazon.de" or similar but of course do not go there, no doubt just a bug X haven't gotten around to fixing just yet.
This is on the kind of level where if we had actual law enforcement for tech companies, the next time some X executive lands in Europe they would be in cuffs.
When we asked our reps, they dance around the question by saying they would "escalate to engineering" or some bs like that.
Google just makes far too much money to stop. My guess is that its >40% of AdX display revenue, based on the % of scam ads that come through ad manager.
Context: our site did ~$5m AdX revenue annually, mostly US audience. High CPM niche. This was ~7 years ago till 2 years ago when we sold the business, I would guess it's still happening based on ads I see browsing the internet.
As much as I personally disliked Susan Wojcicki, she kinda sort kept Youtube shenanigans in check. Yes, there were baity, inappropriate ads, but after she left it has gotten out of control.
Google signaled with "Lake America" they are playing along, and I don't think any real consquences will come of it as long as they keep pulling in billions and the QoQ keeps going.
I’ve reported these multiple times. They always get to the top of search results via paid placement, and Google always responds to the reports saying they found nothing wrong with them, even when provided with detailed evidence of the fraud.
People at Alphabet and all website owners which use AdSense and showed scam and malicious ads must be arrested, prosecuted and sentenced jail time in order to stop this mess.
But it looks like all the countries are busy age restricting Internet instead. By age restricting, it means private information gathering which fuel ad companies more.
The publishers (websites or apps owners) that provide free content to users need a way to support the free content, and typically it's either donation (like wikimedia) or ads. To most publishers, ads revenue is far more predictable. By right most publishers also would like the ads to be reliable and relevant to the users consuming their content, but that's usually a secondary concern, compared to the revenue.
The users viewing the content are often annoyed by the ads, but as long as the ads are not too intrusive, they usually tolerate the ads. If the users occasionally find ads are actually useful, that's great, but most of the time in my experience, when I click into an ad it's usually a mis-click, not because I'm genuinely interested in this ad.
The advertisers need a way to reach more potential customers. Most advertisers are honest players in the game with real products or services to offer to users, trying to find ways to maximize the impression, click-through and conversion rate by optimizing their creatives, targeting, and bidding strategies etc. But there are always scammers that try to cheat the game, showing dodgy ads to rip off users whenever possible.
Google as an ad-tech platform sits between these 3 parties, trying to show the most relevant ad from advertisers in a publisher's ad-slot to the user. But the system has evolved into a complex maze over the years that likely nobody knows the full picture any more. New legal requirements and regulatory policies and industry landscape shifts keep pushing the system to extremes. There are teams to fight ad spams, but there are also business goals to make more money to fund the AI initiatives. The scammers keep finding new loopholes in the system, and the teams fighting the scammers are often steps behind, due to limited resource and budget. End result is many dodgy ads keep slipping through the policy filters.
In an ideal world, ad-tech platforms should optimize for satisfying all 3 parties at the same time: publishers, advertisers, and end users, in addition to making money for themselves. But that's probably hard to achieve, given the dynamic nature of the world. AI can help fight scams, but AI can also help finding loopholes in the scam-fighting system. It's a sad state of the world.
And they, apparently, won't do anything about it.
A couple months ago I went searching for the book "Regime Change" by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, an NYT bestseller. The top search result at the time used the exact official cover art and author names, and was otherwise in every way indistinguishable from the real book.
I foolishly bought it and started reading. I quickly noticed that the text seemed like more of a mediocre college paper than a bestselling book. After a few pages I was like... wtf is this. Jumped to the end of the book and found an "Abort the author" section naming a fellow named Marcus Whitfield as the author.
I dutifully opened a ticket with Google suggesting that they should really remove this book. They refunded me, but told me they couldn't remove the book because their policy states that only the true copyright holder could request a take down, and I am not that.
WTF? I wasn't even claiming a copyright issue. I was claiming false advertising and fraud. I was claiming that Google Play's store was listing an obviously, maliciously fake book, selling it for real money, and that they should stop doing that. They take a 30% cut! How are they not doing even the most basic vetting of these listings? A human could trivially identify it as fake in 30 seconds and an AI even faster.
It appears that since then, the actual real book has risen to #1 in the search results (I think; it's hard to tell), and the exact listing that got me is gone, but there are still a whole lot of obvious fakes after it:
https://play.google.com/store/search?q=%22regime%20change%22...
And if you search for any other popular book, you get the same thing.
(Of course, no real publisher actually cares about Google Play Books, because nobody uses it, so nobody files takedown requests, presumably. Also presumably no engineers work on it, and that's why it's a wasteland. What I don't get is why haven't they shut it down?)
I try blocking the most obvious scams by blocking the announcers but it's basically impossible because the same dodgy ones keep coming back with a new name.
Also hard because they're not always in a language you understand.
I don't think I should do all this work instead of the biggest ad company in the world just to earn 5€ per day, but I'm also not aware of any better alternative.
To comment on this one: as long as there is no backlash from their real customers (those that buy ads) nothing will change.
[0] https://blog.miloslavhomer.cz/how-google-sees-your-site/
Google has no interest in policing that because money and won't until they are forced to and since they are a transnational that's difficult since it requires multiple countries to do it with the added wrinkle that if you even hint at the possibility that just maybe you might consider doing something about US big tech you get immediate screaming from across the Atlantic.
And I suspect (would love some real data from scammy advertisers) that this is a bigger factor than most folks appreciate.
If you're a regular business that sells clothes or food or SaaS or insurance or whatever, online ads are a) not your whole customer acquisition system (you have regular marketing, word of mouth, maybe sales people, maybe brick-and-mortar brand presence, physical advertising, etc.) and b) not part of your expense sheet that you want to spend tons of time on.
The "b)" there leads companies to either overspend on stupid (but unlikely to be flagged) ads, or to try to keep their ad spend as low as possible for the highest reward, because they think of it like opex. After all, they have all the normal expenses of a normal business to worry about in addition to ad spend. Sure, there are outliers here who spend almost all their non-product money on online ads, but not most ordinary companies from Verizon to Dave's Local Auto Insurance to Safeway.
So "good"/ordinary advertisers aren't generating super high flag rates, but they're probably either a) spending lots of money without churn/support-needs risk or b) aren't spending that much ... compared to scam-ads-only businesses. Sure, google would prefer more upstanding customers in category "a)", but they're a near-monopoly and some of that growth is expensive to chase, while the scammers are beating a path to their door.
If you're a scam-ad business that produces malware or LLM-written gacha games or whatever, your product expenses are minimal and, if your business is lucrative, you can spend very large amounts of your balance sheet on ads for scam delivery channels. Tiny businesses in this area are likely to have whale-sized ad spends and a strong likelihood of growth (vertical as they get bigger/greedier, or horizontal as they keep spinning up new businesses to keep ahead of the law and bad press). I bet they punch above their weight ad-spend-wise, in other words.
You thought the unit economics of a SaaS business were good? Well, wait until you see the unit economics of a Play Store whitelabeled gacha game app with a credential stealer inside!
I reported months ago that Google's continual growth rate in revenues from Ads should be heeded with caution - its not from AI/LLMs.
They are juicing and juicing and juicing their existing assets for all the cash flows they can generate! That's why the revenues keep growing. They did not go to such extremities in the past - and they probably strategically held back.
Meta is facing the same predicament btw - both entities claim the growth is coming from new AI investments. The amount of impersination/Scam ad's I've seen on IG is hilarious. That is a flat out lie its from investments they made pre-LLM hype + efficiency gains.
To me this signals a huge opportunity for other companies to dive into. If a new internet search company appeared that returned actual useful search results and clearly delineated ads (like Google used to) I would switch to it almost immediately.
The only way these companies are ever going to change their game is when people vote with their feet!
Also, I type in something in the search bar and...nothing happens. There's a pop-up below the search bar which tells me nothing is saved with a "Dismiss" button. When I press it I'm being directed to the homepage telling me to pay-up.
I'm sure if I submitted an app that on the iOS app store that mimicked a system warning that tried to scare people into giving me access, it would not pass the review process.
If instead I decided to embed a WebView and later changed the html to do the same I would likely get booted from the app store (afair Apple's very particular about serving remote content in PWAs, and changing said content, even under benign circumstances).
iOS seems to have less scareware and shady apps than Android anyways.
I once got a crypto-wallet PK leaked by a fake wallet app impersonating another very known brand. Found out on reddit it was a fake... After a few months the real app came out but yeah...
(Could also argue that the scam ad that won the slot for 10 cents would have gone for 9 cents without the scam and Meta's marginal revenue was only 1 cent... but if every ad is 1 cent more...)
Same problem when you want to buy a home in a place where real estate became a means for money laundering or uninhabited store of value
They're probably taking that into account in their 10% of profit coming from ads estimate.
Sometimes simple answers are not only elegant, but capture the essence of a problem.
Simple as that.
Because Google is an adCompany. It will not do anything about ads - quite the opposite, it has fought down ublock origin. Everyone sees that.
There is a 3rd option: malicious stupidity / aka wilful ignorance.
Google is a collection of individuals, so it's very likely both sides of Hanlon's razor are true: a little malice from those in control, persisting a state of stupidity for those executing the process.
As others have pointed out, there will be resistance to improving a process that negatively impacts their bottom line. Incentives, dictate long term behaviour of organisations; whereas Hanlon's razor works better at an individual level IME.
They should let people have more control over what ads they do and don't see.
If Google served me ads on stuff I was interested in (I'd be happy to tell them) rather than women's clothing, they I might buy it. I'm a guy - show me as many skimpily dressed women as you like, but I have no need for women's clothes! Try it once or a hundred times it you must, but maybe after the millionth non-purchase you'd think they might figure it out and use that screen real-estate to serve an ad for something that my purchase history or what they know about me indicates I might have some interest in!
Dumb as a rock.
It's like the whole purpose of ads, they're not trying to sell you stuff you need - they want your money.
Google wants the advertizers' money, who are really being scammed by Google if they pay every time Google serves an ad to me that Google presumably knows is not going to result in a purchase. I guess Google don't care - if they get paid for click-thrus and I occasionally do that, but never buy, then Google still gets their money.
2023: $32B
2025: $91B
2027: $300B (projected)
2029: $400B (projected)
“I’m happy to go bankrupt rather than lose this race” -Larry Page
Because you're using an application which presents those ads to you.
Avoid Google/Alphabet application as much as is possible, and you'll see a lot less / none of this kind of ads.
It looks like you're using their YouTube client. Try NewPipe:
https://newpipe.net/
there are no ads with NewPipe.
That is it. They don't do it because it goes against their interests. Google is a scummy company doing scummy things. There is very little else to it.
The cost of strictly enforcing stated rules for ads is felt immediately and fully by Google. It is concrete, measurable, and probably non-insignificant; the benefit is essentially goodwill from the narrow sliver of the web that is verbal about this. That is intangible, difficult to measure, even harder to assign a reasonable dollar value to (meaning the ROI could look negative), and the benefit would accrue to parties other than Google who might not even notice.
It's not like they face any consequences for being party to fraud. Laws are for poor people.
more like why company still want to receive money ????? is more correct term
Don't be Evil
I have the same question regarding “why is Workday’s resume parser so shit?”
What does killing dodgy ads do for Google's bottom line? It's removing paying customers and driving down competition for (and therefore value of) ad space. What's the cost of dodgy ads to Google? The sites that use Google Ads will continue using Google Ads if they do nothing about the dodgy ads. The sites that don't use Google Ads won't be swayed to use Google Ads if they do remove the dodgy ads. Google is not held liable for serving dodgy ads so there's no direct risk associated with serving them.
Why should Google remove the dodgy ads? "Don't be evil"? That motto exceeded its shelf life before it was first publicly posted.
Hanlon's razor is nice and all but there's a difference between malice and amoral apathy. Corporations would sell shredded orphans as fuel if it made economical sense to do so.
They'll act if someone threatens to sue otherwise Google doesn't give a shit as long as they get paid.
:)
Ask me another.
It takes basically nothing to reliably identify these videos. They're extremely heavily promoted with ads running on other videos. Google does nothing with them when reported. Google does not proactively remove them. And because, contrary to the documentation, youtube doesn't pull the verified flag from a channel when its name is changed, these scams go out on channels that look like official sources for the celebrities in them (they steal some random verified channel then change its name to SpaceX (official) or Microstrategy or whatever).
Google even got sued unsuccessfully by Woz and some of the scam victims-- and their response was pound the "S230 is an absolute shield for externally provided material" table and continue to do nothing about the fraud except rake in money from pedaling it. They haven't even fixed the verified flag issue.
(Shades of the same conduct were seen in the old viacom v. youtube case, -- users were reporting copyright infringements so they took away the button.)
I have sympathy for the S230 shield and consider it very important-- but the law is the absolute worst we're allowed to be. They are free to do better (and the CDA shield was designed to assure they can moderate without picking up liability).
Google's conduct is irresponsible, unethical, and may well cost us this important legal protection because if society's choice is liability for hosts OR the biggest and wealthiest companies do nothing while raking in money from even the most flagrant scams we're going to eventually choose liability with dire consequences for free speech.
It's especially ironic that the smaller sites and forums (like HN) would be hit especially hard by a narrowing of S230, but these forms reliably work hard to remove the worse abuse-- and are seldom the source of anything that truly offends the senses at least not for long. Companies like google that don't are ones that are so wealthy and powerful that they're almost intractable to litigate against even without S230 like protection. Loss of it would hurt them gravely but it would hurt everyone smaller more.
In fact, these days ads have the opposite effect: A repetitive ad turns people off from EVER checking out that product.
F Grammarly and ClickUp etc. I've never tried those products but I have disgust for them thanks to their ads.
The US regulatory authorities DGAF ever since Lina Khan exited the picture and the EU regulatory authorities might have the legal basis to hold Big AdTech accountable, but the EU is at the moment busy trying to fend off BS from the Trump admin, they do not have time and risk appetite (aka Trump retaliating on behalf of Big AdTech) left for scam ads.