These numbers are legitimately shocking.

    • atzanteol
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      9 months ago

      But bots are typically posting propaganda and spam. Why would they be clicking on ads and driving traffic to other sites?

      • BolexForSoup@kbin.social
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        9 months ago

        A bot account is wasting impressions (the thing appears on your feed regardless if you interact with it - that’s an impression). Those are part of advertising budgets and impact your ROI on ad dollars, not just clicking through. Which means people are getting fewer click through per impression, which means they are wasting money putting their ads/sponsored content in front of non-people who are never going to click through. Edit: This also potentially messes with any data they are getting about their audiences such as demo and location given the sheer scale.

        Imagine you pay for a billboard that is priced because of how many cars drive past it only to find out that 75% of the cars are self driving deliveries with no passengers.

        • atzanteol
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          9 months ago

          Ah - shit I completely missed that it was “impressions” being fraudulent not “clicks”. Thanks!

          • BolexForSoup@kbin.social
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            9 months ago

            Happy to help! Yeah they’re basically saying “we had 100 people come see your store!” and it was really only 25, meaning it severely diluted the value of impressions for advertisers.