I often wondered if this strategy could work with email/phone scammers as well?

Have an LLM write positive email responses, stringing them along as long as possible.

Imagine the Nigerian prince of scams... instead of getting 0.1% response rates that he can work on, he gets 99% responses of encouraging replies stringing him along. He would drown in false positives.

On the other hand, the Nigerian prince of scams would probably just use his LLM:s to take care of the answers, and we'll have email storms of LLM:s stringing along LLM:s.

If not illegal, what if it's used as justification to further lock down browsers and operating systems? Apple makes a ton of money selling traffic to Google and has a vested interest in preserving the effectiveness of targeted advertising.

> the whole industry which I'd love to see disappear.

For what alternative? Paying money to each website to access it?

BTW Google had another go at forcing Treacherous Computing on people. This time it's a reCAPTCHA successor, which requires the user to scan a QR code using a Google/Apple owned phone.

The entire internet ad business has never made sense to me. Have you ever clicked any of the links? The landing pages were always confusing and not at all designed for you to engage with them.

I used to think, okay, I guess they don't care about visiting their sites and just want to get eyeball impressions to stay relevant in the cultural zeitgeist.

Then I learned how ads worked in the print industry, where it is assumed in the calculation that every magazine changes hands through at least twenty people who all look at all ads. So maybe everyone was just already used to getting screwed over paying for ads.

Then there's the fear of missing out angle. People paying for ads don't know whether it makes a different, but are too scared to find out. I also once read about a small business that took that risk and found out not paying for internet ads made no difference whatsoever.

Maybe it's time for an entire country to decide to just straight up outlaw all internet ads for a couple years and force everyone to find out what happens.

It was generally believed that "pivot to video" was entirely fraudulent.

What's happening now is the retreat from the open internet; users are either taking the Google AI search summary as gospel and not clicking through, or just going to chatgpt by themselves. Traffic from actual humans to non-FAANG pages is falling.

Open web display inventory is a mess. Nearly entirely fraudulent. Every person in the supply chain for open web display inventory, sometimes even including the Chief Marketing Officer of the firm purchasing the ads, is incentivized to turn a blind eye to fraudulent impressions. Fraud is ultimately paid for by shareholders and owners.

This is because everyone in the supply chain is paid per impression, so they don't have any real incentive to root out (or even discover/report) fraud unless the buyer is leaning on them to do so. An unsophisticated firm looking primarily at reach and impressions as key performance indicators sees those KPIs inflated by fraudulent impressions, so even the purchaser isn't really incentivized to discover fraud in those instances. And if you suddenly decide you do care about fraud after not caring about it previously, you're faced with the prospect of having to report to your stakeholders that the metrics you've been giving them have been bullshit for years.

If you're looking at conversions as your key performance indicator then you do care about fraud and will lean on your ad buyer to discover and reduce it, or else just avoid open web display inventory entirely and buy exclusively on platform properties like LinkedIn or Instagram.

There have been various efforts to reduce fraud for a long, long time. Obviously nothing so far has really comprehensively worked. But there are some people in the industry who do make their money and earn their reputations as fraud-fighters, and they continue pushing new solutions. If the fraud problem for open web display inventory could actually be solved it would probably result in a bonanza for anyone positioned to capitalize on a fraud-free supply chain, so some people are incentivized to chase the dream (or at least convince others that they're earnestly chasing the dream).

A good marketing business model would probably be “I’ll only show your marketing material to my other customers, since they are evidently likely to fall for marketing material.”

I wonder if it is just the first internet-native generation getting older and getting into decision making positions. People with built-in ad blockers in their brains.

Or it could be “AI” clicks, who knows?

> If that's the case, what is making them catch on now?

Perhaps the threat that "AI" will soon be the only "eyes" that see (and subsequently ignore) their online adverts?

Back when 90% of ad spending was wasted, they still made money from the 10% that resulted in sales. That expectation was built into the CPM/CPC, and hence the ad budget.

With the amount of bot traffic I'm seeing these days, I would guess that the waste ratio is more like 99% now. That means a 90% reduction in conversions for the same ad budget. Surely someone is feeling the difference.

> What was always surprising to me was how the advertisers just went along with the scam.

Talk to them. They can't resist the temptation of throwing in a few bucks (whether that is $20, a few hundreds or a few thousands) into the online advertising casino whenever it's a slow day in the office.

Then Meta will tell them that their ad reached 40 000 people or Google will tell you that your website had 3000 more clicks, but you don't see any increase in sales and think that you'll do better next time.

Or if it's a bigger business with a dedicated team advertising. Of course they're not going to tell the boss that it's bullshit and doesn't increase sales - then they'll loose their jobs!

https://archive.ph/PIrQi

The article is about email marketing. Some company has a proprietary algorithm that purportedly detects whether a click is legitimate based on 8y of development and data collection.

It’s definitely a race against the growing capabilities of the models in use and one that will be very difficult to win which is why there has been a significant push toward verification across the Internet—not because of the children, but because of the revenue.

"Please drink verification can" (Black Mirror)

Presumably a verified click is a click traceable to an attested human identity through your government's soon-to-be-implemented "KYC to use a computer or smartphone" policy.