Get the top HN stories in your inbox every day.
passwordoops
ForkMeOnTinder
It's even worse: the incentive is to police the creators, not the advertisers. Youtube will bend over backwards for advertisers whose "brand safety" team doesn't want their product to appear next to a swear word, and demonetize/strike/etc those creators. But the ad content itself isn't policed nearly as relentlessly.
TazeTSchnitzel
You'd think that creators making people want to use the site would be important, but unfortunately YouTube is a monopoly and is addictive, so content is more or less fungible from Google's perspective. If you aren't viewing ads on creator A's content, you'll probably be viewing them on creator B's content instead. It's not like other streaming services where there is real competition and losing particular content would make people go to competitors.
dspillett
> You'd think that creators making people want to use the site would be important
YouTube's audience size and advertising metrics have long since gone through the point where individual creators or groups of them matter little. If a creator walks off the platform there are more who will fill the place, in search of potential monetisation, so youtube will still have somewhere to hang adverts off. An advertiser leaving is harder to replace than a content provider.
eBay has a similar flip some years ago: they realised that there was more value caring for buyers needs than sellers: sellers swarm in attracted by the number of buyers and are difficult to put off for long as there are often few other options, buyers need to feel safe to hand around.
vkou
> You'd think that creators making people want to use the site would be important,
The economics of supply and demand disagree with you.
A lot more people want to be creators, than there is money in the ecosystem to support them.
If you want to hold platforms responsible for scams being advertised on them, you're going to need to rewrite a lot of law.
bambax
> YouTube is a monopoly and is addictive
Youtube is indeed a monopoly -- but it's not actually addictive. Since they started this war against adblockers I have found that I can perfectly live without it.
When I absolutely would like to watch an informative video (for example, about how to fix something on my bike, etc.), I first try to open the video in a private window (with ublock on); if that also doesn't work I try to use yt-dlp.
But I have completely stopped mindlessly watching videos that are not the result of a search.
There's nothing necessary about youtube.
rollcat
True, and it's so ironic when the situation reverses...
Of the ads that recently slipped through my adblockers, one was a xenophobic piece of Hungarian propaganda against illegal immigrants. It was shown in the middle of a Minecraft video (a game without binary gender); that was made by a disabled person; to people living in a city where ~50% of the population was born elsewhere. Google does have all of that context, and yet this is what their ad selection algorithm picks.
This is one among many reasons why I have absolutely zero moral reservations about blocking YouTube ads. (inb4 ad money: I do support creators directly, as my budget allows.)
kmeisthax
Google doesn't care about the context, they care about who pays the most for the ad. Hungarian fascists have deep pockets[0] and are willing to spend shittons of money to make you watch lies about immigrants[1]. Most of that money is wasted, but if they can radicalize even one out of a million viewers, they won. So they pay loads for it.
Yes, this is the same math that scammers run on - because fascism is a scam category, alongside advanced-fee fraud, refund scammers, and fake tech support companies. Your grandpa thinks the immigrants are invading the country for the same reason he thinks he needs to wire $10,000 to the 'bank' of a Nigerian 'prince'.
also
> It was shown in the middle of a Minecraft video (a game without binary gender)
For the same reasons as above, the creator of Minecraft went from "I don't want gender in my game" to "all women are evil", because he isolated himself in an LA mansion and read nothing but Twitter. He also had a girlfriend he broke up with. This makes you vulnerable to being fed bullshit that agrees with you - in the same way that expecting a UPS package might make you vulnerable to clicking a fake UPS text that steals your login info. Either that, or Notch was a trans inclusive radical misogynist[2] the whole time!
Now, let's say you're a scammer. Your 1-in-a-million odds suck - but what if you could pay more money to find more vulnerable people to send texts to? Like, even if you went from paying $1 CPM[3] for 1-in-a-million odds to $10 CPM for 1-in-ten-thousand, which is mathematically identical, you still get an advantage because less people can see what you're trying to steal. Targeted advertising lets you do this[4], and for unrelated reasons, legitimate advertisers will pay more to target their ads to a smaller but more lucrative cohort as well. So Google inherently makes more money the more they build out tools for scammers to do their scamming.
You are perfectly in the right to block ads. I pay for YouTube Premium but I won't yell at anyone who uses uBlock Origin.
[0] To be clear, we don't know exactly where the money comes from, though I can guess either Russia or Saudi Arabia
[1] The core irony of fascism is that the most efficient way to demonize the other is to point out that the other also has a fascist wing. e.g. in America, Christofascists yell and scream that we need a Muslim ban to keep Islamofascist terrorists out.
[2] See also: James Somerton
[3] Cost per French thousand
[4] If you read between the lines I'm accusing Google for the last decade of democratic backsliding.
kazinator
Youtube puts ads for investment funds in the middle of videos for three-year-olds.
mrweasel
I do wonder, clearly there is a perverse incentive for YouTube to be less strict with ads, but is it also a question of availability? I've been paying for YouTube Premium, so haven't seen ads in a while, but before that I noticed that there was almost no variety in the ads. You just got the same three or four ads on repeat.
What I'm wondering is: Does YouTube not have enough quality advertisers? You'd think they'd turn away the scammers, because actual business doesn't want to be on the same platform as some shady "buy/sell gold" or similar. If they don't, is that because there's no money, or not enough honest business buying ads in a sufficient amount? Or is it that YouTube just makes more on the scams?
phatskat
A channel I follow does ad reads in the middle of the show, and as such had to say “Say-bay-Day” when advertising a CBD product because YT would demonetize the video if they just pronounced it as one would pronounce “See-Bee-Dee”.
It’s wild that they couldn’t advertise a sponsor but YT allows scam ads to roll before their videos
fallingknife
In the Youtube economic model the advertisers are the customer and the creators are the vendors (the viewer is the product), so that actually makes sense and isn't really any different from any other business. The customer is king, and if a vendor pisses off a customer, that vendor is gone.
anticensor
Viewers are actually feudalistic subjects that are taxed and employed for free or litkle.
varelse
[dead]
mywacaday
When the Irish Tánaiste (US VP equivalent) and former Taoiseach (President equivalent) has to go to court and looses when he tries to find out from google who is advertising using his identity you know the whole think is a sham that has to be protected at all costs, https://www.irishtimes.com/crime-law/courts/2023/12/06/tanai...
idlephysicist
> has to go to court and looses[sic] when he tries to find out from google who is advertising using his identity
I believe from the article that you linked that the case is still before the High Court and so he has not lost yet.
I wonder would the case have been better made as an instance of identity theft?
Also while you are accurate in saying that the Tánaiste is equivalent to the Vice President in U.S. terms, because they are the deputy head of government. The same being true with respect to Taoiseach. I would like to point out that they are not the same positions. While the U.S. President is commander in chief of the U.S. military, the Taoiseach is not the command in chief in Ireland – that falls to the Uachtarán (the President).
Tánaiste = Deputy Prime Minister
Taoiseach = Prime Minister
Uachtarán = President
klvino
In contrast. A third party created a bogus profile of a global brand and began releasing unfavorable content as though they were the brand. The global brand leveraged their relationship with Google to shutdown the profile (which could be labeled as satirical). Google went on to provide the private account and contact info of the third party posting. It was discovered the third-party was a subcontractor/vendor to the global brand. The global brand shut down all work with the party and had them black-balled in their industry.
The Irish gov't wasn't spending enough ad dollars for Google to care.
tremon
I'm sorry, but this is unparseable to me. Who did what now?
smcin
Does either of you have a link, or screenshot? Hard to tell otherwise whether it was a scam ad promoting financial products online, or satire (that sounds dubious), or both.
bluGill
There is incentive, but they don't realize it. I know that online ads are often enough scams, so I won't buy anything from those ads. I do have to take effort to ensure that they don't effect me anyway (hint from basic psychology: they do, but I can make that effect less). If they did some work to ensure ads were not scams - I've seen ads for a number of interesting things that I intentionally did not buy because odds it was a scam was too high.
InsomniacL
> I know that online ads are often enough scams, so I won't buy anything from those ads.
I'm exactly the same. I will try to go directly to websites instead of clicking on adds from search results to avoid the PPC charge too.
Takennickname
You are almost irrelevant to the conversation. The scammers only need 100 people to believe them from the potentially millions of people who view their ad to make it profitable.
You are not grasping the scale of the matter.
TremendousJudge
GPs argument is the opposite of this: it's not about the scammers, but about the legit brands. The same way Pepsi doesn't want to get their ads shown over somebody discussing STDs or something of the sort, they probably also don't want to get their ads shown next to scams, since it makes the product kinda seem like a scam by association.
benterix
Well, I guess it might change. I witnessed an exchange between two women, one was saying she would consider buying something after she saw an ad on Instagram, the other one laughed, "but you know ads on Instagram are scams, don't you"?
So my guess is that even though scammers are still finding victims, the side effect is that more and more people are mentally equating ads with scams and the whole "industry" loses - both big brands ("is someone impersonating them, just like they usually do with famous people?") and small ones ("I've never heard of them, it's probably scam like the rest").
ivanbakel
You're missing the GP's point. They're claiming that scam ads pollute the ad marketplace and drive away engagement. Why click on an ad, or even pay attention to it, if there's a good chance it's a scam? And why would advertisers pay for ads if consumers are not engaging with them?
Thus, Google has an incentive to keep the ad space free of scams - it makes Google users more valuable to advertisers.
staunton
Most people believe they themselves cannot be influenced by ads "at all". If they were right, nobody would bother making ads.
sumtechguy
My brain still has advertising campaigns from 40+ years go in my head. That junk sticks.
tremon
And you can prove this, how?
If the people making ads can be influenced by ads, why would they ever stop making them? It works for them, doesn't it?
bluGill
which is why I said I take steps to avoid the influence, but not that I'm not influenced.
dspillett
> They're all like that.
Yep. I stopped bothering to report obvious scams on Facebook as any response I got was they didn't breach any standards (for others I got no response at all), yet I've had a comment removed because calling someone a numbskull was unduly rude/aggressive/whatever (I forget the exact complaint given).
For a while I added comments details why it was so obvious the scam posts were scams, but this has little effect as my comment would be quickly drowned out by the many “I got mine OK!” and “thanks!” comments that are presumably placed by compromised accounts. It also backfires: commenting, even to point out the scammyness, is interaction – that interaction tells the recommendation algorithms that I might want to see more of that sort of thing or worse that my friends/family would also.
mavamaarten
For Facebook though, I understand why they want the scammers to continue using their platform. Every scammer that uses facebook is an active user, which is a KPI they very much want to keep high.
ASalazarMX
Twitter is the same. As an exercise in atrition, I've reported dozens of evidently fake accounts pushing the same scam ads (miracle cures and crypto investments mainly), not a single response aside from "We received your report".
In my experience, Twitter was more responsive to reports (even if still wanting) before Elon Musk bought it.
1vuio0pswjnm7
There was a time before people called websites "platforms". A time before gigantic websites full of thousands of other people's uploaded files, where the websites are used for surveillance and advertising delivery. The operators of these mega websites, posing as so-called "tech" companies, argue they are providing a valuable "service" to web users, valued at a price of zero dollars. Truly they are only interested in providing a service to advertisers. If advertisers stop paying, the operators will be forced to scale back the surveillance as it's too expensive to host peoples' files for free. If people are paying for their own hosting, like they pay for internet access, then third party websites cannot claim ownership to access logs for peoples' files and other metadata that is useful for advertising.
ChadNauseam
If they were only providing a service to the advertisers, why would non-advertisers use their site, and even sit through ads?
Wool2662
Because they have enough money and data now to just obliterate any kind of serious competition. They only need to keep providing minimal value to actual users. That's why.
ren_engineer
between the scam ads and their war on adblock it really seems like Google is scraping for every penny they can
iteratethis
Yep, it's a high interest rate phenomenon. Investors want to see profitability.
But it's also a problem unique to trillion dollar companies: finding growth. If you have a money printer of $280B per year, how do you find growth that moves the needle?
For new product development, you'd need to launch a product that brings in revenue of say $20B, otherwise it's just not that interesting.
Imagine how hard it is to launch a new product like that? If you'd have a billion users (which is absurdly hard for a new product), you'd then need to monetize them for $20 per year per user. In a saturated competitive environment where users don't want to pay.
Hence, the more common strategy is to turn some dials on the existing money printer. Just increase ads.
That's why FB's Metaverse bet wasn't crazy at all. You make $100B+, social media is stagnating, and you need a huge new revenue stream. They don't really exist. You have to go crazy on big bets.
marcosdumay
> it's a high interest rate phenomenon
Well, it's more of an interest rate change phenomenon.
All companies are currently overvalued by absurd amounts, but the computer-related ones have it dialed a few dozen notches above "absurd". Things became this way because of the zero interest rate (and the expectation that it was permanent), but it's not sustainable anymore.
mr_mitm
Why do they have to grow, though? Can't they just be profitable? They can just pay out dividends like coca cola, no?
ploum
Well, that’s the definition of a private company, isn’t it?
It would be naive to think a company could behave otherwise in the long term.
cardosof
>The reply was it didn't break any policy.
What is the policy, as long as you pay and don't do anything outright offensive, it's all fair game?
sligor
The problem is that big companies don't want to broadcast their serious ad along scam ads¹. That is a serious treat for Youtube revenues.
¹ At least I wouldn't if I was doing ad campaigns of a big company, but maybe I'm naive...
bluGill
The scams are a risk for some lawyer in some country suing YouTube. They bring in a lot of money now so YouTube is not interesting in policing them, but they are a risk that they will suddenly go away for legal reasons. which is why I don't understand why YouTube doesn't police them now - between the potential loss in court and the big companies staying away there is a lot of risk to YouTube.
Note too that if YouTube would police scam ads better they would have a better message to various countries that laws and legal action is not needed at all. Right now I'm shocked the EU hasn't put in place harsh laws about ads - if YouTube would police their own ads they could have a slightly less harsh policy in place and thus make it not worth while for the EU to pass the harsh law they don't like.
givemeethekeys
They definitely police the platform. They make sure that anyone who uploads content that threatens ad revenue is appropriately disciplined.
JanneVee
As it turns out there is a whole category in YouTubes ad system for Get-Rich-Quick schemes, as detailed out in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkhGJUTW3ag&t=1031s (timestamped at the relevant time).
Just today I saw my elderly father click on a YouTube ad link for a crypto scam copying Swedish televisions web layout he was reading it and I saw it at the corner of my eye. He has adblock installed, he disabled it because of the terms of service popup by YouTube. What is he supposed to do, create a google account and get premium instead? How about having safe ads so he doesn't have to figure out YouTube premium?
verdverm
> What is he supposed to do, create a google account and get premium instead?
I just put my parents on my family plan, you should consider it, it's a very low price for the peace of mind, plus they love not having ads
JanneVee
So basically I'm supposed to pay protection money? Yeah, I don't give into extortion...
verdverm
You can see it as extortion or...
Paying for a product instead of being the product.
Huge quality of life improvement. How is it different from paying for Netflix and similar?
caskstrength
You are not a shopkeeper being extorted for protection money, you are a (unwelcome) shop customer demanding things you don't want to pay for while being free to go to another place.
alyandon
Last I checked (at least here in the US) - the family plan requires all family members to be living in the same physical household and there is some sort of geolocation check that enforces that rule. I'm divorced and my son goes back and forth between my and his mother's house so I can't upgrade to the family plan and put him on it.
gitaarik
You are paying Google because they will otherwise allow your parents to be scammed by their adds?
abracadaniel
Even with adblock, I've had hijacked channels end up as the top search result. Most recently with the last SpaceX starship launch. Trying to find the livestream, I just searched SpaceX and the top hits were all fake channels with lots of subscribers, hosting the actual livestream, but with a big QR code to a crypto scam overlaid. It happens every time, with the same things, and has been reported many times. There's no way they don't know about it.
Vrondi
Install uBlock Origin on Firefox for him. Educate him not to click ads. Ever. If you emphasize long enough that clicking an ad can lose him his bank account and entire identity, it can sink in. I've spent years on this with my parents. "Yes, Dad, YouTube is out to get you, because they want money from advertisers, and they are happily selling your safety to advertisers."
alacode
I'm in my early 60's, I guess when I was young I'd have called me elderly. I however, have been a technologist since I was around 9 years old, got it from my Dad. I'd say most my age even if not into technology aren't averse to it or unaware of it. But, there are definitely some elderly who really don't get technology at all and there are some in their 20's who are the same way. Those individuals need to be protected. The onus should be on the corporation more than the individual; not solely on the individual.
TheRealPomax
No, the onus should be on the law, because corporations will do nothing "for th greater good" if they're not forced to do so. The onus is on the individual to help other individuals around them that need it, and on the individual to petition their law makers to do what needs to be done.
Putting the onus on the corporations is the one thing that's guaranteed, with a long and storied proven track record, of not working.
hotpotamus
> What is he supposed to do, create a google account and get premium instead?
Yes? I've mostly quit watching YouTube (and really a lot of media) because the shear amount of it and the number of predatory dark patterns have just gotten to be too much for me (it's possible that I'm overly sensitive in some way). But if it's important to him, then maybe it's worth paying some money for the experience. Personally I'm trying to get back into reading/audiobooks.
JanneVee
So I should just give up, have a talk about media habits with my parents and if they don't want to change, just hand YouTube the money? You freely admit that it is designed to be this bad and by giving them money actually just rewards their shitty behavior. I gave an example of a video showing how creators on YouTube can select which ads to show. Get-Rich-Quick is a category, YouTube could just take the decision to not carry those ads anymore and enforce violations as harshly as copyright strikes.
j-bos
Youtube clearly provides a valuable service one that is unique in world (moat or not). If you're concerned about rewarding bad behavior (scammy ads) doesn't it also make sense to factor rewarding good behavior (videos by anyone* on any topic imaginable)?
almost
yellow_postit
Wanted to point out that “Just take the decision to not carry those ads” isn’t as easy when you’re at YT scale. Not excusing them but I think we all understand the challenges of content moderation at scale for organic content — now amplify that for paid content where the incentives get even thornier.
Yes YT should invest more in review and policy work — but it’s a forever expanding cost with no silver bullet.
I appreciate there’s a least a price and option for ads-free.
hotpotamus
> So I should just give up
I really do try not to be the perpetual downer here, but Google has nearly unlimited resources including psych PhDs on staff to influence peoples' behavior and I assume executives with black holes where their souls would normally be who are trying to satisfy that void with money, but can never do so.
I guess the best I can say is that it's about picking your battles.
throwawayffffas
> What is he supposed to do, create a google account and get premium instead?
Go watch something else, somewhere else, another site, or you know tv or something.
zerr
Ad blocker can block that popup...
alargemoose
Yes, but as of the last couple months. YouTube and ad blockers have been in a constant cat and mouse game where YouTube blocks users with an AD blocker from viewing content at all, until your ad blocker updates with new rules to circumvent that blocking. Trivial for you and I maybe, but less so for someone the GP described as “elderly”
Balgair
> He has adblock installed, he disabled it because of the terms of service popup by YouTube.
JanneVee
Yeah if it is updated chrome plugin which Google of course delayed update on.
GaryNumanVevo
Twitter actually has some of the best ad oversight, almost entirely by accident too.
Community Notes (formerly Birdwatch) lets users flag tweets that are misleading. Since Ads on Twitter are just normal tweets, they can be fact checked.
Twitter's average ad quality has plummeted recently, but most of the scam ads I see have a massive user-added disclaimer outlining how it's a scam. I wonder how this affects the click through rate for these ad placements?
mrtksn
There's no day I go without a phishing attempt by ad on Twitter. The only time I've seen community note on ad is about some game that is apparently quite different from what it is on the ad. IIRC that game is notorious for this and has become a meme.
machdiamonds
It's definitely not by accident, it would be very easy to turn off community notes for tweets flagged as ads.
IG_Semmelweiss
I've been thinking about this for a while.
I've seen many of these community notes - how exactly do these work ?
Is a community note borne out of "most upvoted" replies to a particular tweet ? If so, how does it go from a simple upvoted reply, to a "community note" ?
iteratethis
You need to sign up to become a community notes contributor. Then you can add notes, and if enough people from a diverse set of other contributors find it helpful, the community note will publicly appear.
It's one of few things at Twitter that work shockingly well and reliable. I've never seen an obvious partisan community note. Other networks should embrace this.
cactusplant7374
> It's one of few things at Twitter that work shockingly well and reliable.
Elon doesn't think so. I would expect it to change soon.
TheCaptain4815
If twitter survives, community notes could usher in a golden era of truth on the internet imo. On a recent podcast w/ lex friedman, Elon explained how Community Notes works and it's pretty ingenious.
In short, from what I understand, each community notes contributor is vector mapped based on their biases/contributions. Now, the only way for a community note to appear is for contributors who typically disagree with each other (based on their vector mapping) to both sign off on that note. I'd imagine in the future (or maybe it's enabled now), these contributors would be "power ranked" so a newbie contributor couldn't community note a member of congress or something.
As Elon said, this will lead to hoardes of people leaving twitter because they cannot handle community notes.
voxic11
Basically if you are in good standing on the platform you can apply to be a contributor and if accepted you can submit and rate notes. The note which actually appears to everyone is selected out of the contributor submitted notes using some algorithm which is open source.
> To find notes that are helpful to the broadest possible set of people, Community Notes takes into account not only how many contributors rated a note as helpful or unhelpful, but also whether people who rated it seem to come from different perspectives.
https://communitynotes.twitter.com/guide/en/about/introducti...
nomel
Paper explaining it in detail: https://github.com/twitter/communitynotes/blob/main/birdwatc...
It's somewhat adversarial, with the idea that if people who have disagreed in the past agree on a note, then it's probably true.
mjcl
I think the scammers are starting to get wise. I've seen over 50 different accounts running the same ad copy for some car solar defrosting gadget. There's just too many ads for any single one to get a published note and if one does they can delete the individual post.
berkes
> but most of the scam ads I see
So it doesn't work. If it worked, you'd see no, or very little, scam ads.
GaryNumanVevo
Yes, that's why I said accidentally. Community Notes wasn't intended to be a spam filter for ads. It's not able to get tweets/ads taken down, only place a large disclaimer below any fraudulent advertisements.
iteratethis
I think when an ad is fact-checked and fails that test, it should become hidden. Even better would be to block the advertiser from the network or even seize their ad spent.
wongarsu
Not everyone agrees with every fact-check, even for objectively verifiable facts (which is the minority of all things claimed). Even Mythbusters have done things where I think they clearly reached the wrong conclusion. Having large consequences attached to the result of a fact check sounds like a recipe to alienate everyone.
If you say something obviously untrue there are already laws against fraud and false advertisement. For anything with less burden of proof, a note below your ad that adds context seems adequate
j-bos
Seems like best of both worlds for scam ads with notes to still appear. The scammers keep paying the platform, user's learn how to spot scams via the notes, and the platform makes money.
GaryNumanVevo
I think it's a great idea, for obvious reasons it will never be implemented.
thrillgore
It works until Elon has to step in.
segphault
I routinely see ads for fake medical treatments that they refuse to take these down when I report them despite the fact that the ads obviously violate Google's policies. So many of the ads on YouTube are for things that are obviously sketchy that when I see a new product I'm not familiar with for the first time in YouTube ad I just assume it is a scam.
It's crazy because YouTube has probably more information about the sort of products that I actually want to buy than probably any other company besides Shopify. About a quarter of what I watch are literally just product reviews. They have a ton of high-intent purchasing signal for reputable products, and instead they are showing me ads for trash. I know it doesn't have to be this way, because Instagram somehow manages to show me highly relevant ads for stuff that I've actually gone on to purchase after discovering there.
AlexandrB
> They have a ton of high-intent purchasing signal for reputable products, and instead they are showing me ads for trash.
This shouldn't be surprising. Ad placement is based on who pays to be placed in front of certain audiences. It doesn't matter if you're really into hi-fi amplifiers if no hi-fi company placed ads for that audience segment or if the hi-fi companies were outspent by boner pill salesmen.
Google is not optimizing for relevance but for revenue.
I_Am_Nous
All the more reason for me to block ads. If relevance were the optimizing metric, I might see ads for things I'm truly interested in, but if YouTube is only showing me the highest paying ads and it doesn't care how relevant those ads are to me, they are just noise I need to ignore or block.
Especially when they are mostly scams and trash paying to be in front of my eyeballs. I have no desire or obligation to be propagandized, tricked, or misled by bad ads just so I can watch a video I actually am interested in.
delecti
> despite the fact that the ads obviously violate Google's policies
There's no contradiction here. Google's policies exist primarily in service of keeping their platforms safe for advertisers. The ads aren't placed on other ads though, so there's no reason for them to stress much about maintaining the same quality in their ads as the content being monetized.
As for targeting, they're just optimizing for CPM. If advertisers for scammy junk pay more than advertisers for things you might like to buy, then you get what you see now. There's always another mark for the scams.
dylan604
Your ad could follow another ad which might be scammy. If the concerns about an ad appearing next to controversial content that they do not want to be associated with is legit, then why would that not be a concern for following scammy ads as well?
kjkjadksj
Product reviews are useless these days. Every single one they give a glowing review because there is this fear of alienating the manufacturer and not getting future product to review. I haven’t seen an actual critical review in years probably. They are all these ads with a layer of separation to fool you.
freeAgent
Yeah, it used to be bad enough. Now it’s terrible. Almost no reviews can be trusted now because the market power of reviewers has been eroded to the point where producers can and do treat any individual reviewer, and all of them in aggregate, as extensions of their own marketing departments. The powerless “reviewers” let this happen because if they go against the grain, they’ll be blacklisted and become even more irrelevant. I’m extremely selective these days about whose advice I place any trust in. I’ve found that I frequently wait on new products until they e been in real people’s hands for a bit and then search for their complaints.
hotpotamus
I literally saw an ad that was telling me than an average penis is too small to please my partner. I watched just long enough to confirm that was the message because I could not believe it was that blatant, so I assume the pitch coming was some sort of penis enlargement scam, but I just couldn't watch farther. I don't have any real insecurity in that area, but I can imagine that in my younger days it could have been effective, and I imagine that it can be extremely effective on many men.
Google has come quite a long way from "don't be evil".
matteoraso
I've gotten a few ones that told me that vision problems have nothing to do with your eyes. It said that the problem was entirely neurological, and if you keep trying to hide from the issue by wearing glasses, your family would put you in a nursing home. No, I'm not kidding. The "cure" they were selling was some sort of vitamin, which was certainly untested and unregulated. Truly awful stuff.
kidsil
It's striking how history repeats itself. Just like TV and newspapers eventually faced regulations to prevent scam ads, the internet has been in a similar bind for at least a decade. The principles of law should extend to all mediums, yet it seems we're at a stalemate with federal regulations adapting to the digital age. This should've been handled back in 2012.
1905
While KimDotCom was getting raided in New Zealand for "piracy", Youtube knowingly used pirated music and film media to grow its site
crowcroft
It baffles me how often behaviour that any 'traditional' media company would get slapped down for is just common practice in 'digital' media.
'Digital' isn't new anymore, but somehow it avoids growing up.
amne
What do you mean slow to adapt? We have transcended straight to cookie banners!
Sanzig
It may be extreme, but I think we need to pass legislation to make advertising networks civilly liable for fraud facilitated by their services. Google will change its tune quickly when it's their wallet on the line. As a bonus, this also provides a restitution path for victims (most of these frauds are run overseas, so the perpetrators are out of reach of the justice system).
graphe
AdBlock tried gently with "acceptable ads". https://getadblock.com/en/acceptable-ads-faq/
I don't mind the antagonistic method today since I will NEVER accept the idea that an ad is acceptable. The law you propose would help weaken advertising and that would make me happy. Apple killing targeted ads also made it worst.
Sports gambling also makes the environment worst.
fwn
For some reason, the acceptable ads program from eyeo led them to allow some of the worst, chumboxy paid content - as far as I remember.
Coincidentally, the effort was paid for by the very same companies that ended up on the whitelist. From the outside, at least, this gave the impression that the whitelisting was simply paid for and covered up by a fig leaf process.
I haven't checked in a while, but that program always struck me as deeply problematic.
Today, that no longer matters, as ublock origin has emerged as a time-tested, no-compromise, user-choice content blocking solution.
calamari4065
And that's why most people switched to uBlock.
The acceptable ads was a pay to win thing and very quickly devolved into exactly the kind of cesspool you'd expect
wredue
Google would respond by removing your country from using YouTube.
Then it would be up to your country to call their bluff. Who know whether they would or not. Google held out for longer than I thought they would on the Canada link laws. Ultimately, Google would give in and reopen YouTube, but how long would it take and would people give up YouTube for several months while wait for governments to battle Google facilitating fraud?
bluGill
As importantly, would peertube (or others) grow enough? Content is the biggest problem I have with peertube, so if Canada was forced out of youtube content providers might jump to peertube in large enough numbers that I can as well.
marbu
I reported about 5 such ads just this moth, all clear financial scams impersonating well known people and companies in Czech republic (where I live), only to be told that youtube checked my claim and that the add in question doesn't break any youtube policy.
Obviously nothing is forcing Google to deal with this in any way. But I wonder how could that work out for Google in the long run.
YurgenJurgensen
The more legitimate reasons for adblockers (such as "I don't want to risk falling for scams."), the worse their anti-adblocker efforts look.
omega1
The same thing happened to me. Ads from Kazakhstan impersonating a Czech state-owned energy company etc. And almost every day there is an article in the news about how older people have been caught and lost their savings.
marbu
In my case, it was either from Kazakhstan or the US.
zigzag312
So Google is then knowingly participating in financial scams? Looks like grounds for a lawsuit.
Nextgrid
Google is not alone in promoting such scams and being complicit of crime. The law doesn't apply to big companies though, so they can keep doing so and profiting off it.
zigzag312
DMCA takedowns are proof that law applies to big companies too. Unfortunately, they only respond to lawsuits it seems.
Victims of these scams should sue Google, Meta and any other big company knowingly participating in these kind of scams.
throw310822
> Obviously nothing is forcing Google to deal with this in any way
Really? I mean, they're getting paid by a scammer who uses provably fake and deceptive content to prey on its victims; they have been alerted to the situation, they claim they reviewed it, and that they think it's fine. What could go wrong?
marbu
Yeah. This is why I doubt it's a good strategy for Google in the long term. Sooner or later, someone will be finally pissed off enough to go after this practice (either a government or another big US company).
That said, there seems to be no legal way for a big Czech company to go neither against Google or the scammers, otherwise this would have been already resolved. CEZ (one of the companies being impersonated by the scammers here) made a press release about this almost 2 years ago (references are in Czech):
https://www.cez.cz/cs/pro-media/tiskove-zpravy/klamave-rekla... https://www.cez.cz/cs/podvodna-reklama
throw310822
Thanks. I still don't understand how is it possible that suing youtube doesn't work after having reported the ads and having been told that they're fine. You basically have a written statement from the company that incriminates them.
bitcharmer
Seems like the only policy is that it makes money. If it does then everything's ok.
klvino
YouTube isn't the only Google property knowingly allowing scams, Google Maps has some interesting activity if you dive into it. A "policy", regulation, or law only matters if it is enforceable and enforced.
The digital platform policies are relatively meaningless, subjective enforcement, appeasement measure for advertisers. You will not see the needle move on video as fraud until the commission model for talent fees and use rights change for digital. A talent fee commission model results in industry tracking of creative content in order to route talent fees to actors and musicians. It is a secondary layer of tracking with funds attached that forces a platform to respond when illegal use of image and identity is reported.
neop1x
The Google search results are the same. When searching for driver's license preparation, ads appear offering the purchase of a driver's license without any tests.
celestialcheese
It's not just Youtube, it's across all of Google Ads.
We had to hire someone to review ads in Google's ad transparency center. Every day they find dozens of new domains, with the same creatives - all those fake button "Continue"/"Download" click-trick ads.
The same process every ad. Report to google, block on google, and send to a third party ad security company. The volume didn't start going down until we hired that third party ad security company to do blocking post-auction. Google continues to let the exact same creatives come through, just with different domains/ad accounts. Their models can handle this, they just choose not too.
Seeing the CPMs these scam ads pay, it must make up a big portion of a reportable revenue source for google, where blocking would hurt their numbers for the quarter.
DebtDeflation
Not just Ads either. Have you used Google Shopping? Huge number of fake websites selling stuff. During Covid when you couldn't find a bicycle for sale anywhere, Google Shopping would yield dozens of sellers with websites that were just created a few days prior with tons of bikes for sale at great prices, all a complete scam.
ak_111
I keep getting an ad which claims to be the "Tesla of heaters" it even shows the tesla logo when they say this. If anything I am surprised that Elon is not suing them (youtube) just for fun (given the problems he is having with ads).
If anything it would be an easy way for him to publicly show that scammy ads are a global problem and not just an X issue. Although I think it can be solved in a nanosecond if there was enough will.
Arie
Got that one as well a bunch of time with 2 fake dutch inventors. Reported it, got denied because Youtube thinks it's fine to promote a scam like that.
tivert
Got a link to the ads?
raphman
Replied to you elsewhere but this might be a German version of the ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WorrpfjAYdc
anilakar
...nor scammy AI generated videos. This morning I came across a bit clickbaity and alarmist netsec video in my feed. Watched it for a minute before I started to wonder why the otherwise completely natural voice said "asterisk" between all sentences. Then I realized it was narrating a markdown bullet list.
neop1x
The amount of fake and useless generated videos exploded after Google removed dislike numbers.
NietTim
Youtube just doesn't care. It took them over 3 months to take down ads that used video of forced confessions of Belarusian protestors.
Money, money, money.
Get the top HN stories in your inbox every day.
They're all like that. A whole back I reported an obvious real estate scam using Wayne Gretzky and some Blue Jays player (I'm in Canada). The reply was it didn't break any policy.
When ads are the primary source of revenue, there's zero incentive to police the platform