I've never understood the use-case of Adnauseam. This just, essentially, allows the adbroker (e.g. Google) to get more money from the business putting up the ad. Unless every single person uses it, it's not going to stop business from advertising, it just makes the likes of Google get more revenue.

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phkahler 14 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>> This just, essentially, allows the adbroker (e.g. Google) to get more money from the business putting up the ad.

It lowers the effectiveness of internet advertising. When advertisers feel they're paying too much for the business the ads generate, they'll stop advertising in that way. That's probably the thinking anyway. A less generous stance would be: I hate advertisers so I'm gonna get back at them by making them pay more.

	▲	mminer237 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It would just cut the rates they'll pay to account for the erroneous clicks. I guess that might just be limited to defunding the sites popular with the really techy group of people that use Adnauseam and instead shift to niches with better effectiveness.

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digiown 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Assuming it actually works (which I'm not sure about), it increases the cost on the business putting up the ad (presumably targeting you). It acts as a small punishment to the business buying the ads I guess.

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gruez 14 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>Assuming it actually works (which I'm not sure about),

Which it probably doesn't, given that it uses XHRs to "click" on ads, which is super detectable, and given the proliferation of ad fraud I'd assume all networks already filter out.

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Larrikin 14 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Google wouldn't have gone out of their way to block it on Chrome if it didn't work.

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Lalabadie 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The other assumption here is that ad networks want to filter out all clicks but the most legitimate.

I don't think that's a very lucid assessment of how advertisers operate on the Internet. We all agree that they could take these steps. If AdNauseam doesn't look like outright fraud in the logs (which they don't if it's all distinct IPs and browsers), I don't think they want to cut it out from their revenue and viewer analytics.

	▲	gruez 14 hours ago \| parent [-]
		>If AdNauseam doesn't look like outright fraud in the logs (which they don't if it's all distinct IPs and browsers) You think ad networks don't have logs more sophisticated than default nginx/apache logs? XHRs are trivially detectable by headers alone.

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malfist 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It also pollutes the data collection on you by advertisers. If you're seemingly interested in EVERYTHING they have no clue about you.

	▲	mminer237 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I mean, you're also telling them almost every site you visit. That's strictly worse from a privacy perspective than blocking ads outright.

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culi 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Google is selling their data to advertisers. If you poison their data, you are making the thing they sell less valuable

As a user you still don't have to see the ads but you are also "fighting back" rather than just "hiding from" the advertisers

I think it's great

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direwolf20 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

When the advertiser is paying a bunch of money to Google for ad impressions but not getting increased sales, what will they do?

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rvnx 13 hours ago | parent [-]

Raise the price of their product you might have been interested to cover the marketing losses ?

	▲	direwolf20 13 hours ago \| parent [-]
		If they could raise the price they already would have

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martian0x80 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

it's actually the opposite, google adsense and every major ad-network will ban you or put a hold on your account if they think the ad impressions or clicks are automated, so this is a good way to get someone blocked from the ad-network

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dooglius 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I view it in the same vein as the thing where people waste scammers' time by pretending to be falling for it and being slow/unhelpful

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prophesi 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If that's the case, it makes it all the more curious as to why Google banned the extension[0] on Chrome.

[0] https://adnauseam.io/free-adnauseam.html