This is why, despite being a huge fan of their engineering, I'm leery of Facebook and Google and any advertising-based tech company in the long run. The incentives to block fraudulent, malicious and even simply ineffective ads are just not there.
Google stopped that practice then... or it might not have! We'll never know since, apparently unlike silly little Meta, it has been much more careful about not having any kind of incriminating internal documents or correspondence being preserved for discovery.
I've had a hint that the ad industry was rotten for a decade+ when in a prior life I saw our regional head of marketing casually throw stats on the whiteboard showing something insane like 30 - 50% of ad clicks on all major platforms being fraudulent. She was cynical but also jaded to the fact that, despite being widely known and accepted in the industry, it wasn't clear if things would ever improve. Shocked, I followed the ad industry and such reports for a while, anticipating a crash. Glad I didn't bet on it, because the crash never came.
Unfortunately, there is so much money in this that it seems nothing will happen.
Anybody remember this? https://consumerwatchdog.org/uncategorized/google-shells-out...
Google stopped that practice then... or it might not have! We'll never know since, apparently unlike silly little Meta, it has been much more careful about not having any kind of incriminating internal documents or correspondence being preserved for discovery.
And in any case, it could fall back to the much more lucrative business of anti-competitive manipulation of the ads market: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2...
I've had a hint that the ad industry was rotten for a decade+ when in a prior life I saw our regional head of marketing casually throw stats on the whiteboard showing something insane like 30 - 50% of ad clicks on all major platforms being fraudulent. She was cynical but also jaded to the fact that, despite being widely known and accepted in the industry, it wasn't clear if things would ever improve. Shocked, I followed the ad industry and such reports for a while, anticipating a crash. Glad I didn't bet on it, because the crash never came.
Unfortunately, there is so much money in this that it seems nothing will happen.