ericyd 5 hours ago

> in production traffic only very few (<1%) ads are actually clickbait

That's a fascinating claim, and it does not align with my anecdotal experience using the web for many years.

  • vajrabum 3 hours ago

    Not quite the same thing but some non-negligable percentage of ads I see on Facebook are outright scams which purport to be selling musical instruments at a 'markdown'. First guitars supposedly from the Sam Ash bankruptcy sales linking to an obvious fake site and more lately 'free' giveaways of high end Gibson acoustic guitars. When I've reported them I got the feedback that it didn't violate community standards, but my insta account got perma-banned when I posted the original of a song on youtube from 1928 on a thread which started with a cover from 30 years ago. That was considered spam.

    • galaxyLogic 3 hours ago

      Smart scammers should know that peopel know if something is too good to be true ("free Gibson} etc), it is probabaly fake. But people keep clicking, for what it's worth.

      • adgjlsfhk1 2 hours ago

        it's the opposite. scammers want the people that are gullible enough to go for "free"

        • throwaway1004 an hour ago

          This is a narrative I've heard many times, with very little evidence to back it up. An alternative and more accurate view is that, as the world came online, people became exposed to the very low-effort scams, representative of criminal elements from around the world, which befuddled most due to their child-like naivety. None of those confused individuals would fall for it but they require an explanation. Someone came up with a theory that it's actually a stroke of 4D genius and it stuck.

          edit: ok, I bothered to look this up: Microsoft had a guy do a study on nigerian scams, the guys who wrote Freakonomics did a sequel referencing that study and drew absurb unfounded conclusions, which have been repeated over and over. Business as usual for the fig-leaf salesmen.

  • ajb 4 hours ago

    I had that reaction as well, but consider: clickbait is such because it takes more work (emotional or logical) to reject it than an ad which is merely not relevant to you. Thus, your (and my) recall of ads is probably biased towards clickbait, and we overestimate its prevalence.

  • vFunct an hour ago

    That usually means you tend to visit trash sites. Higher quality sites have higher quality ads. In fact, for the highest quality media, people actually PAY for ads. See things like Vogue September issue or technical shopping magazines, which earn value for being 90% ads. People used to buy local newspapers because of the ads as well.

  • andrewmcwatters 2 hours ago

    Ad company says ads are good, water is wet, news at 11.

trhway 22 minutes ago

Reminds how the winners of the 2001 Andrew Ng’s Data Centric AI competition analyzed resulting embeddings separation to choose training data.