The night before this story was published I was pondering what percentage of Youtube ads I was watching were scams -- not 100%, but it was higher than 50%. Which raises questions about semi-legitimate looking items might actually be soft scams or some kind of funny billing stuff going on.
What percent of the global economy is scams? Sure, the investment manager charging 1% a year to put all of your retirement savings in ETFs that also charge 1-1.5% a year funneling money in to companies being raided by executives and employees isn't a scam scam, but it is a massive mis-allocation of resources and probably more damaging than some dumb item purchased from a Meta ad that never showed up. Same for recently legalized (in the US) sports betting.
The startling thing is AI is being applied at scale to make this crap more pervasive. 10% scams? Meta would like advertisers to use their generative AI tools to create image and video ads of non-existent products.
Best thing we can do is delete all phone apps and only access online media from behind firewalls that block all ads and tracking. Windows is dead. Apple is transitioning to an adtech company. Linux is the only option.
I don't relate with this at all. I get ads for normal insurance companies, uber eats, air bnb, and gacha games to name a few. None of them are scams, so I can't understand understand why so many people on hacker news complain about scams.
Do you live in a region with barely any ad inventory?
Uber Eats opaquely inflates the base price of the food so that even when they advertise a low (or zero if you've paid for 'Uber One' to give you zero delivery fees on 'eligible' deliveries, whatever that means) delivery fee, you're still getting charged significantly more compared to picking up the food yourself. Call me crazy, but I would expect the delivery fee to be the difference between the cost to have something delivered and the cost to buy it outright.
Gacha games are famously deceptive and exploitative.
Airbnb has a good justification for keeping the location private, but it's typically pretty hard to get an idea of the value you're getting for your dollar until you actually arrive on site and discover just how functional the HVAC/kitchen actually are and how good the location actually is.
While you might not classify any of the three as "scams", they're certainly classic 'low-rent' advertisements for things that take advantage of information asymmetry to convince customers to pay more than they would be necessarily willing to if what their money got them was actually clear.
"Algorithms". Even if your region has plenty of ad inventory, Google's micro-targeting can mean even people in the same household see wildly different subsets of the ad inventory. You could just be lucky and aren't in any of the micro-target "demographics" scams want (or at least, can afford) right now.
Micro-Targeting is one of the worst mistakes of the entire advertising industry and we'll be probably dealing with its consequences for a while to come.
I don't see scam video ads on YouTube but pretty much all article/info sites like cnbc or weather are filled with garbage, possibly also served up by Google.
What percent of the global economy is scams? Sure, the investment manager charging 1% a year to put all of your retirement savings in ETFs that also charge 1-1.5% a year funneling money in to companies being raided by executives and employees isn't a scam scam, but it is a massive mis-allocation of resources and probably more damaging than some dumb item purchased from a Meta ad that never showed up. Same for recently legalized (in the US) sports betting.
The startling thing is AI is being applied at scale to make this crap more pervasive. 10% scams? Meta would like advertisers to use their generative AI tools to create image and video ads of non-existent products.
Best thing we can do is delete all phone apps and only access online media from behind firewalls that block all ads and tracking. Windows is dead. Apple is transitioning to an adtech company. Linux is the only option.