zlacker

It's pretty simple: this has to be wreaking havoc with Adsense - depleting ad budgets, artificially inflating CTRs, and giving website owners revenue they didn't earn. This extension also exposes website owners to unfair Adsense bans for generating high numbers of invalid clicks, which can cost them two months of revenue that is almost always withheld when Google bans a site. So by using this you could be costing someone (your favorite blogger etc.) their livelihood.

If you are going to block ads, block them. Don't click on them.

>>downan+(OP)
Were there really enough people using this to cause such an impact?

>>siegec+T
I don't know, but I certainly wouldn't want to be a favorite site of even one AdNauseum user. Adsense is very sensitive to stuff like this, especially in higher CPC niches.

>>downan+(OP)
How can the Adsense distinguish whether it is AdNauseum clicking or the human clicking?

>>siegec+T
If someone creates a plugin with the stated goal of screwing up your clients' analytics to discourage them from paying you, do you really wait for it to work before you remove it from your platform?

>>siegec+T
There is one more now. I completely forgot to install this until I saw this story this morning.

>>abhv+a3
They probably can't, since it's an extension and thus uses the user's browser, IP, cookies etc (Adsense does use mouse tracking and other techniques that will likely flag these clicks as suspect, requiring additional analysis). Therein lies the problem. It appears to them as if someone is going and clicking on every ad, or is using an automated headless browser to click on ads. That can easily get you banned. Google doesn't care about who is doing it, they only know that it is happening on your site, and as a result will treat your site as a threat to the Adsense network.

>>siegec+T
I've been using it for a few months and more recently took to installing it on public computers and telling anyone who would listen to use it. Just put it on my Mom's computer a day ago. I alone had it on a dozen machines or so.

>>downan+c1
Why not? On the short term, you get more income from ad revenue. Who knows what the effect on the long term is going to be.

>>downan+P3
How about clicks from browsers that have this plugin installed are just not counted? That sounds simple enough.

>>Fnoord+H5
You would be banned - very fast. You would never actually receive the money since Adsense pays out on a two month delay. They are very good at identifying this type of activity and the webmaster is the one that pays the price.

>>ryanhu+O5
They could certainly do that in this case, but they are probably trying to send a strong message to would-be developers of similar extensions. One is a nuissance; a thousand would be much more difficult to chase down and block.

Also, if these developers really wanted to, they could distribute it directly from their site and dynamically generate the extension, packaged with a unique identifier, for each download. This would make it effectively unblockable. So simply identifying an install of this specific extension is not a solution.

>>downan+78
Well, if that’s true, within of months, half of websites will have to search for a new ad network, and we might get a chance at less intrusive ads.

>>kuschk+H9
... Or, more likely, they will switch to an ad network with more obnoxious, or dangerous ads. Google, Microsoft, and their ilk are a fair bit better as ad networks then some of the less scrupulous players.

Yes, the large networks occasionally serve dangerous ads. But by far and large, they have better standards then most of the fly-by-night ad networks.

>>abhv+a3
The extension clicks every ad on a page. This is almost certainly extremely atypical and could be detected.

>>ac29+8d
Seems like there's room for an arms race here, where you tune the extension to only click on some ads, and ultimately approximate legit user behavior as Google keeps cracking down.

>>hedora+p3
Yeah after hearing about all of this I'm now a new happy adnauseam user! :)

>>ryanhu+O5
How can they tell if the browser has this plugin installed?

>>vkou+zb
Or, even more likely, they’ll actually switch to direct negotiations with the advertisers themselves, through more open and manual brokering platforms.

>>kuschk+2i
This model works for buying advertising space on ESPN, or in a print magazine, but not on the internet. Economies of scale, need for targeting, the inability to force unskippable 5-minute-long streams of ads on users...

There's a reason why everybody uses ad networks.

>>vkou+gj
I’ve done all this myself before – even when running a small Let’s Play site with a few friends we negotiated with publishers directly for advertising, and managed to get quite good deals.

I’m not sure why you think this is so complicated or impossible.

>>downan+P3
> (Adsense does use mouse tracking and other techniques that will likely flag these clicks as suspect, requiring additional analysis). Therein lies the problem.

Actually, Google does track all of this stuff already:

http://adage.com/article/digital/inside-google-s-secret-war-...

Google could decide to just ignore IPs that host users that display this behavior pattern. But yeah, it's "easier" to just ban the offending Chrome extension.

>>downan+(OP)
Neither you nor Google has any right, morally or legally, to tell me what to do with the content that Google willingly served to my personal property (my computer). Once those electrons cross that boundry from <Google's property> to <my property> they lose any and all control (although of course in reality they try their damnedest to retain it).

If Google wants to wholesale block all IPs that cause them a problem with click fraud that's their prerogative, but manipulating the electrons that very safely reside within my own private property and then turning around and continuing to serve me ads is something straight out of a Dickens novel and I shudder to think of what happens after the second chapter.

>>pdeuch+HY
Of course you can do anything you want. I'm just telling you the potential repercussions, which include destroying someone else's livelihood. If you are OK with that, fire away. But if everyone did the horrible/harsh things that they are legally entitled to do in this world, we would be in a very bad place.

>>downan+021
If your income stream relies on millions of random internet strangers gracefully letting your code live rent free on their own personal devices then you have nobody to blame but yourself. That is assuming that sending GET requests to a public internet endpoint is a "horrible/harsh" thing to do...

>>pdeuch+Ul1
Right, just like a DDoS attack is just "sending get requests to a public internet endpoint".

>>icebra+Qf
Let's make AdN a thing like privoxy, where it runs on the network and does all of this outside of a browser, and for all clients on the network.