• ChunkMcHorkle@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    As an advertiser

    I have a serious question for you, if you have a moment. Do advertisers have any way of knowing what percentage of the views they’re paying for are actual humans, and what are bots?

    Because it seems to me that this is an excellent scam on a corporate level: Reddit ditches users and mods in favor of bots interacting with bots, the number of accounts and views don’t dip dramatically, and Reddit, Inc. continues to pull in all that sweet advertising revenue because there’s no way for advertisers to know the difference for sure, or the ratio of bot to humans on the site or in a sub with any kind of precision.

    I’d appreciate your thoughts on this, because I’ve been pondering this for a while but do not have any knowledge of advertising metrics, or what would stop a dishonest/bad-faith board like Reddit’s from doing this to some degree just because they can.

    • bleph@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Not an advertiser but they generally know % of views (“impressions”) to clicks (called click through rate) and percentage of clicks that turn into sales (called conversion rate).

      For that reason, I don’t think they’re trying to get rid of human users completely, just the “troublemakers”.

      I think they want to lead the “silent majority” users into a bot advertorial content hellscape where they control all the levers of power and everything is for sale.

      • ChunkMcHorkle@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Thank you, I think you’re right. Interesting you mentioned click thru rate though, because another commenting advertiser here on Lemmy noticing weird shit with Reddit lately brought that up, saying his click through rate was good but then when he looked into there were many immediate abandons, and someone else explained that’s because people were getting tricked by the ads that look like posts and immediately backing out once clicked.

        I’d be happy to find the comment for you but I have no idea how to find shit here yet, lol. I’ll look; if I find it I’ll edit this comment with a link.

        EDITED TO ADD I think this is it: https://lemmy.world/comment/644214 (see the other posts by the same guy also if you’re interested, like this one https://lemmy.world/comment/652045 and https://lemmy.world/post/837198)