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Junk websites filled with AI-generated text are pulling in money from programmatic ads (www.technologyreview.com)

submitted 1 year ago by L4s to c/technology

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Junk websites filled with AI-generated text are pulling in money from programmatic ads::More than 140 brands are advertising on low-quality content farm sites —and the problem is growing fast.

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[–] Dran_Arcana 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

It's been a while since I've interacted with google ads, but if memory serves, by default, the dashboards don't (or can't) break down sales per site, it's mostly impressions per category of ad deployment. "Clickthrough rate among banner ads on news websites" etc. It wouldn't surprise me if the same makers of these spam websites also run bots that click the ads and prop up those metrics that 99% of advertisers don't drill down through beyond surface level. Advertisers probably see clickthrough is good on a deployment and just assumes sales come from those.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

I remember years ago someone from a niche industry commenting on this.
He was saying that the week they all had a big conferences, the click-throughs dropped by 95% (implying his competitors were clicking his ads to cost him money)