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  • Hacker News
  • Reading all the comments, it seems quite bleak to advertise. How do indies and SMBs reach audience these days then?
    by Oras
  • The standard advice I've always read: Get active in the niche for your app/game, be it a subreddit, a discord, tiktok or whatever.
    by ketzu
  • Influencers sometimes have very niche / local audiences
    by thomasmarcelis
  • The general problem of how to advertise a small business has never been solved.

    I see ads for some local pizza places, as they've learned that can work for a delivery business, but most restaurants have no ads. They don't know of anything that works.

    by nitwit005
  • Usually brands collaborate with influencers on tiktok, instagram, facebook, youtube.

    I’ve found that younger users tend to instinctively swipe away from flashy interstitial ads on tiktok/reels, but are far more likely to be engaged by a talking head influencer reading the same script.

    When you advertise via parasocial word-of-mouth, you don’t even need to link your app in the post, as users are likely to take the time/effort to search for your app on the app store.

    Unfortunately, the ad platforms/exchanges don’t really profit from these types of brand/influencer collabs.

    by dyllon
  • Word of mouth. Make things that work well, people want, and stand out - and they will spread by themselves. I block 100% of advertising on all platforms I use, yet somehow never have difficulty finding things when I want to find them. And that often includes stuff from very small providers. Search + reviews, and so on are a million times more useful than advertising. And getting a hundred or so early users/testers/etc to seed those reviews/etc is trivial in modern digital times.

    The world itself would almost certainly be a much better place without large scale/centralized advertising. I think the argument about it providing product discovery for hidden gems is nonsense. In reality it's mostly just crap, artificial demand creation, and behemoths trying to maintain brand image.

    by somenameforme
  • This will always remind me of the post I made 10 years ago, with Facebook ads being 100% robots...

    With a small budget, in 15 years I never managed to get any positive ROI on any online platform I tried advertising on.

    [0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/marketing/comments/4smisl/facebook_...

    by XCSme
  • The article summary says:how a bot farm gets paid"

    But that's not in the article and I don't get it: what's in it for these bot networks, how do they get paid?

    by kabes
  • exactly! the article fails to provide any non-obvious behavior of Google Ads
    by 0trip
  • I host a page, put google ads on it, hire you to generate bot clicks on said ads. Google pays me, I pay you. Some poor sucker somewhere pays google.
    by nikanj
  • My guess is they own accounts which show the ads, so they get paid for showing ads. This is similar how those "get free money" apps work, they own Ad account and get paid when you view/click that ad.

    Another theory is since lots free games have where you can earn in-game currency for viewing ads, the bot farms might be abusing this method.

    by MyMemoryfails
  • this is unfortunately very common - I kept running very small ads regularly over many years (~10 years by now) and the % of bots has been steadily increasing, and Google doesn't really have any system to report those reliably to them. In fact, it's contrary to their incentives to investigate & fix these problems - unless they feel some pressure from competition...

    From time to time, Google ads sales reps call me and are trying to convince me to increase the ads spend. I complain about bots, and none of them had any suggestion on what I can do to appeal it etc. I mean I can appeal on some specific instance, once - but there's no process to communicate back to Google the cases where I'm 99% certain about bots on regular basis.

    And these bots get increasingly more sophisticated. They used to just click on ads. Then they started installing the app. Then running the app once and do nothing in it. Then they started tapping on the app screen & actually try to go through some initial app steps. When they do it in a spiky way, it's easy to detect them. But when they do it through some distributed device farms, below noise, it's very hard.

    by yalok
  • "Bots? In my ecosystem?"
    by shepardrtc
  • Your post led me to install your app and play through 10 puzzles. The post doesn’t even show the app!

    What’s the name for this sort of marketing?

    I really like the interface you’ve built for completing the puzzles. Very clean - it’s very nice to not be bombarded at every screen.

    by pseudonymidy
  • Knowing your audience, and captivating them at grassroot level or in an unexpected place, without making it feel scummy (sometimes)?

    Guerrilla marketing.

    by DANmode
  • Thanks very much - really means a lot that you enjoyed it, we put a lot of effort into making it.
    by nickabe
  • I'd say "Content marketing" [1]

    1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_marketing

    by tough
  • I've suspected that google has been turning a blind eye to ad fraud for a few years now. In the early-mid 2010's, ad fraud wasn't nearly as common.

    And it's absolutely not the case that google can't detect ad fraud - in fact they are VERY good at detecting it when they want to.

    by rybosworld
  • You had huge click farms back in the days.

    Today the fraud is perhaps more obvious. YT has served me the same 20 min ad 200+ times over the last few weeks. I let the entire thing play 10 times and 50 times didn't press skip for the first minute (or the view doesn't count) It's so annoying Ive reduced video watching by 80-90%

    The idea they have someone pay for this in the hope I will buy the product?

    Or do people really intentionally run campaigns like that?

    by econ
  • What is the incentive for the bot owners? Why do the bots download and install the apps? It has some (very small) cost to them, and I don't understand the value for them.
    by legonigel
  • Could be black-hat vulnerability scanners and so on.
    by mitxela
  • upping the clickthrough rate on a low quality property to get paid for fake ad impressions?
    by blitzar
  • likely they run an ad intelligence operation which requires them to click to see where the ads lead
    by bliteben
  • Have to do the install to get paid for the ad click, right?
    by toast0
  • One reason: It helps makes the bot accounts look more legit. It's why Facebook bot accounts like random legit pages.
    by rationalist
  • I once did this by accident and without a bot farm. It was very lucrative.

    What I did was create a game with an action button. Then I served ads right next to the action button. I didn’t realize people would miss click on the ads at a high rate, but they did. They fat fingered it, clicked the ad, I got paid.

    I looked into it after a couple weeks because my click rate was crazy high.

    by codazoda
  • The bot owner is also providing "ad space" to Google. Author pays Google to show the ad. Bot owner gets paid by Google to "display" that ad and for conversion. The bot themselves aren't getting paid for installing the application.

    In a normal scenario, the provider of ad space would be a website or an application. Google would pay the owner of that space. On Youtube, that would be an ad served by Google paid to the channel owner.

    by Sayrus
  • Google ads are a con. Meta ads are a con. If someone tells you you’re just not doing it right yet, they’re probably trying to sell you something.
    by dave_sid
  • Guess why we are getting “age verification” everywhere, lobbied by Meta.

    It is not to protect the children.

    by miohtama
  • Company I work for sees significant real, profitable traffic from them. I’m sure we’re losing some proportion to fraud, and we have a very experienced guy full-time on ad management, but money in vs money out is working very nicely for us.
    by petesergeant