It’s extremely difficult to measure the effectiveness of online ads and most companies have an incentive to inflate their numbers since they’re sold as a certain number of views/impressions.
Advertising is a scam for both those who buy it and the intended audience.
At the end of the day views/impressions don’t matter, people actually buying the thing is what matters. If no one is buying you can have a billion views and impressions but it wouldn’t even be worth £5. So then advertising companies would struggle to find buyers if buyers quickly see it isn’t worth it.
You think that in 2025 companies with large media budgets are buying digital ads and just saying “well fuck it maybe we’ll make money on it”?
They track EVERYTHING. From the impression to the click tot he purchase, and there are trackers and attribution platforms by the hundreds out there to help them understand what the ROI they’re receiving on those ads are.
Companies are buying ads because people are buying products.
Even if the site is 90% bots there are enough real people using the site to make buying ads profitable.
I suspect part of the reason for bots is to keep people on the platform. But if people start to realise which is probably going to become more likely as the number of bots rises and quality drops, then real people would start to leave or lose interest.
Could be short term engagement at the risk of long term platform health?
Whether it plays out with people leaving remains to be seen. It’s become such a busted out shell of its former self, I can’t stand it anymore, but plenty of people almost certainly feel differently.
Most of Reddit was bots interacting with bots a while ago already.
The site makes most of its money selling ads. The value of that ad space is based on user metrics.
Many users are now fake. They are actively hiding this fact.
Apropos of nothing, the company has a $34 billion market cap.
Why is anyone paying for adverts that no one will see though? Surely adverts only have value if it brings in sales.
Would be amusing to see the entire advertising market crash tbh.
It’s extremely difficult to measure the effectiveness of online ads and most companies have an incentive to inflate their numbers since they’re sold as a certain number of views/impressions.
Advertising is a scam for both those who buy it and the intended audience.
At the end of the day views/impressions don’t matter, people actually buying the thing is what matters. If no one is buying you can have a billion views and impressions but it wouldn’t even be worth £5. So then advertising companies would struggle to find buyers if buyers quickly see it isn’t worth it.
You think that in 2025 companies with large media budgets are buying digital ads and just saying “well fuck it maybe we’ll make money on it”?
They track EVERYTHING. From the impression to the click tot he purchase, and there are trackers and attribution platforms by the hundreds out there to help them understand what the ROI they’re receiving on those ads are.
Companies are buying ads because people are buying products.
Even if the site is 90% bots there are enough real people using the site to make buying ads profitable.
I suspect part of the reason for bots is to keep people on the platform. But if people start to realise which is probably going to become more likely as the number of bots rises and quality drops, then real people would start to leave or lose interest.
Could be short term engagement at the risk of long term platform health?
I’d imagine that’s exactly what’s happening.
Whether it plays out with people leaving remains to be seen. It’s become such a busted out shell of its former self, I can’t stand it anymore, but plenty of people almost certainly feel differently.
The amount of money bot views bring in shows that yes, they are just yoloing buying ad space.
Yeah.
To misquote a paper, “attention is all you need.” It’s like the motto of the 2020s.
From your lips to god’s ears
This timeline had been more “from God’s ass to our mouths.”
If you then train new bots on the generated content, the models will degrade yes?
If you look a lot of new posts, they are actually highly upvoted old posts. So bots probably stay the same.
The bots know what is bot content and what is not.
Actual users don’t.
Probably not. It’s way easier to generate bot content than to detect it. Unless they’re coming from the same group, but I find this unlikely.