Junk websites filled with AI-generated text are pulling in money from programmatic ads
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.
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.
"...wasting massive amounts of ad money."
I don't see this as a problem.
130And our time. I’m sick of googling something and getting nothing out these fluff pieces with little or no real information. It’s made Google near useless for entire subjects. Try searching for troubleshooting on anything Apple for example.
83This is why you need to add reddit to the search.
Which is sad as hell.
8Or the fun variant where you intentionally search for something in your native tongue because you want results relevant to your country and get badly translated articles that nowhere inform you that they are translated.
6Yes, but remember you're not Google's customer so ... win-win for them
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Permanently Deleted
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Programmatic ads placed on programmatic content boosted by programmatic view bots.
More seriously, this is ridiculous. Websites are junk because they are filled with programmatic ads in the first place.
80Eventually, 99% of the internet will be bots talking to each other.
30It was over 50% in 2017. So, it much be much higher now.
23
Dead internet here we go! 
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@L4s I’m still - and always have - wondering who clicks on all this shit. No ad makes money without a “conversion” into some sort of sale. I believe it’s all a circlejerking of various add companies scamming each other. At some point this useless well of crap must dry out. And now even the content is complete and utter nonsense… so nobody is going to even look at it. how’s that supposed to hold up
63I work at a repair shop, and we had a customer come in that said, "I like to click on the ads sometimes. Is that why I keep getting viruses?".
44We've been asking ourselves this about email spam for several decades now.
I think we're vastly overestimating human intelligence. There's obviously enough completely clueless people out there that will buy what these spammers are selling.
19Morning radio show I used to listen to talked all the time about the crap they bought off Instagram and tiktok ads. Like, ALL THE TIME. My ex and her family also bought a fair bit off of those sort of ads. Some type of people are just susceptible to it and others aren't.
8I'm not normally in favor of the death penalty, but I think we need public executions for spammers.
2I heard it said that spam is intentionally badly written because they don't want people who can figure out it's a scam to actually click the links.
2
The irony of tagging and asking a bot this lol
14They're on Mastodon. Mastodon replies work by tagging.
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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.
14I 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)7
I think you are underestimating the power of low cost high volume advertising. Throw enough poo at a glass wall and some of its going to stick. This isn't going away, it's getting worse.
7Some ads are paid on a "per view" basis rather than per click
6When the sites are bot built like the ones described here its just a matter of Large Numbers. Create a thousand permutations of porhub and if they all only get a few thousand views a day in total you've made some money.
7
I see it all the time when I'm searching for answers on the web. Ngl I look up a lot of stuff for C# and C++ and if you use Google (and even DDG) you'll always fine a couple of these. Google likes to put them up first. You can tell by the language in the article and the stripped down content on the page. I always end up backing out and I have ad-blockers but they still get the click.
1
Soon the entire internet will just be bots shit posting back and forth.
56TBH i feel like some social media would even profit of this.
17You mean that you believe that bots trained on text written by humans wouldn't be just as bad as the real thing?
You sweet summer child...2
How do you know it isn't now? (see: Dead-Internet Theory)
12
Oh no :( Won't somebody think of the poor advertisers???
41It affects me, the user, because I have to sift through garbage sites, because advertisers pay to keep those garbage sites online. So I think it's a problem worth discussing and addressing.
21
Bots making websites and filling it with bots so advertising bots will buy ads that will only be seen by bots
35The internet as we know it is going to change dramatically very soon. Probably for the worse in the short term, but I do hope something better emerges from the ashes.
34If Lemmy is an early indication, I suspect the proletariat will make our own internet. With blackjack and hookers.
29And enormous compute capacity and volunteer hours.
13
The internet has been dying and changing for the worst for a long time.
Websites trying to be a one stop all on one site that keeps you there are 90% of web traffic these days.
Having multiple bookmarks for multiple sites for individual reasons are the small user basis.
Sites like Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, tik tok and YouTube etc are the majority of web useage. Gone are the days of forums for bespoke interests.
Discord as a closed ecosystem with none threaded or web searchable topics.
Ad ladden shit hole news sites. Click bait shite etc are the norm.
Gone are the days of enjoyabls fun to explore web surfing.
29I feel Lemmy is the new .. eh forums golden age or something. Anyone will quickly be able to fire up an instance, I mean anyone can fire up a community today already!
We have been spoonfed dopamine triggers since Facebook came around, before that you'd be on the internet because you actively wanted something. I hope that's coming back.
Grr /old rant off :-)
7
What happened to reddit will probably happen on a much larger scale to the entire internet. First the enshittification destroys everything and then a new thing will emerge that much more resembles the old internet. Google's Web Environment Integrity could be the last nail in the coffin and speed up the change significantly.
11is going to change dramatically very soon
Again?
3The internet, or the web? Me and the other gopher/Gemini weirdos are gonna be fine.
3
I’d like to help. What’s the best way to create a garbage site to make money off these advertising scums? I’ll give the money to planned parenthood.
27I think it's just gonna land on the consumer in the end. More expensive to advertise? Better raise the prices so our bottom line is still nice and fat
2
Fuck the whole advertising industry
22This just increases the importance of human-driven filters like Lemmy (and Reddit while it's still relevant), as well as StackExchange for the subset of topics it encompasses.
21Cue the world's smallest violin. Not sure how this is any consumer's problem lol.
Maybe, just maybe, advertising needs to become more carefully selected and regulated rather than the clown fiesta it has been since the dawn of the internet where Google and friends want to 'set and forget' and milk money for eternity.
But you know the reaction won't be sensible lol, instead we will get an AI arms race of AI adverts vs AI advert reviewers.
19Haha, imagine having to solve a captcha for closing popups, so the content provider can prove to the advertisers that their shit was watched by a human.
And when that finally fails, we'll have to auth to every website with a crypto key to prove that we're a valid human data point.
17Isn’t this what OpenAI is doing with World Coin?
It appears that there’s already a black market for the verification tokens
7Don't give them ideas.. this is some next level evil shit. The AI bot reading this will implement it.
4We?
Fuck no.
3
Surely we'll see a new Ad crash soon. The entire internet seems to be run on ads and sponsorships which doesn't sound stable to me.
17The irony that this story was posted by a bot…
16I feel like this is the ad-equivalent of the sub-prime mortgage situation, pre-crisis. With mortgages, you had loans that no individual bank or bank manager would want, and then you had an automated process that obfuscated the individual loan details and produced financial products that could be sold as high quality. In the ad world, it's the same thing. You have these websites that nobody would buy ads from, individually, but somehow, through an automatic process offered by Google and friends, the worthless product becomes valuable.
15The more direct problem for people in general is that finding what you're looking for has become even more of a "needle in a haystack" problem than it already was.
The indirect problem is that if genuine content creators can't get much out making content (not necessarilly money: for many simply the satisfaction of seeing how many people liked their content is incentive enough) because viewers are much more dispersed due to the AI-rewritten info cloning sites, then there won't be much new info for the cloners to copy in rewritten form, which is maybe fine for "questions already answered 1000 times" but won't be for questions or tutorials about new stuff.
15Sounds like a good gig while it lasts. Half a mind for a weekend project it seems
14Reminds me of the Bing search rewards points a while back. A bunch of people I know were scripting searches and cashing in points until they got caught lmao
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Even the porn?
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"Junk websites filled with AI-generated text"
And here I thought this was going to be a headline about Reddit.
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3It still could be.
2
so what's the problem? it's a good thing that ads get served to sites that I don't visit
12It's making search engines useless, for one thing.
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The fact the ad industry doesn't have people veto the platforms they advertise on is a negative aspect of modern society. I see no issue with this going down. I'm far more lenient to capitalism when they produce sponsorships and financially aid events.
10Exactly what I expected to happen with the rise of AI. I would laugh, but the completely senseless CO2 that this shit is causing is just sad.
6Just let it burn. The internet has gone to shit anyway.
6Keep the Reddit-slamming to appropriate fo--- wait. This is about OTHER junk websites with AI-generated text. Carry on.
6I've been seeing a lot of "passive income" b.s. coming from YouTube. They're tutorials, or at least shorts that point you at tutorials on how to build a site that effectively scrapes the web for news about a topic and uses LLMs to essentially rewrite articles about a topic in a new style.
It's just automated journalistic copying. Not new, but now done entirely by machines. In the past, news stations would regurgitate content from eachother all the time, especially for fluff pieces. This is just that, but without any actual people involved. Some of these tutorials claim to be able to produce upwards of a thousand dollars a month in passive income per site, or something like that.... Usually the person describing the scheme confesses that they have dozens of these sites running and no longer need to actually work.
It's the digital version of being a landlord. You squat the domain, steal the content, serve it up to unsuspecting people, and rake in the profits.... All without lifting a finger, or doing anything that actually helps anyone.
We all knew this was happening, people are getting upset about it because the news media did it first, and now these folks are taking their jobs!
How dare they.
I briefly considered it, but I don't want to contribute to the downfall of the internet as something that's useful.... So I'm not going to be doing this. It did give me a good idea to essentially replace myself with an AI at my workplace, I'd just be doing the actual work but for any communication, I'd just plug in the original email and a few keywords about the solution, let the AI do the typing, then just review/edit the response and send. It would save me hours of time daily...
5Robots are making money from robots for humans. I don't see an issue.
5I haven't played assassins creed odessey in quite a while and I googled how to get olive wood in the game quickly.
The first 3 sites were filled with garbage AI generated tips. Like it looked passable at first glance but only 1 of the 5 tips were even possible. They suggested I use an axe to cut down trees which isn't possible in the game at all. There was also a lot of repeating of the search phrase.
3This is why I'm upset when I see everyone talking about leaving reddit and deleting their history.
I don't even search for things without "reddit" in the search terms because literally every site is garbage now and everything that shows up in the first page or two of Google is just SEO boosted garbage.
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It's been this way for ages, though it was mechanical Turk created text and stolen content.
I don't really mind adverts, like when I see a creator I like doing a raid shadow legends bit I'm happy to see that they're making money from a shitty game rather than me having to pay.
And I know the established wisdom is that they track everything you do and say but honestly half my adverts are for things that make no sense to me like tampons and investment services, I really think them saying how well they know the user is just to get a advertiser money and isn't really as true as we fear. Not that I think it's a good thing but it's so trivial compared to everything else happening in the world Iv don't really care
1I like this
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