Hacker News
points by peterbecich 2 days ago | 0 comments
These companies were profitable on higher quality ads in earlier years. Does this drop in quality indicate the ad well has run dry, so to speak? Or the demands for revenue are greater, necessitating a drop in standards?
[–] mirashii 2 days ago
Are we sure they were higher quality? They estimated in 2024 that 10% of their revenue was from fraudulent ads or ads that should be banned based on their own rules.

https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...

This is nothing new, profiting off of fraud and abuse has been the name of the game for all the big advertisers from the beginning.

[–] peterbecich 2 days ago
My vague recollection from 10 or 15 years ago was higher quality ads.
[–] mirashii 2 days ago
I commented in another thread recently that almost 15 years ago on a high traffic site we were full of obvious scam ads, tons of fake world of Warcraft clones with busty characters asking you to play, tons of you’re the 1 millionth visitor click here to claim your prize, download buttons. Even the occasional penis enlargement pills and stuff would come through. I really think even if the scale is maybe amping up, things weren’t much better 20 years ago, the web was just smaller, fewer people were paying attention, and the folks who were there had grown up learning to spot that stuff from the beginning.
[–] hsuduebc2 2 days ago
I doubt it. Advertising there is pretty expensive and you don't really have a choice today if you want advertise something. They just don't care, they are greedy mfs.
[–] FireBeyond 2 days ago
Yeah, anyone expecting Zuck to give a fraction of a shit is hopelessly naive.

This is the man who, after Facebook literally canary in a coal mined one of their own employees - let him be jailed as a "test" to see whether Zuck or any exec would be arrested like threatened, then let him stay a little longer because they could "get some good PR out of it", then when the guy came to the US after his release and was meant to meet Zuck, he couldn't even pull himself off of his phone, was led away by a flunky asking "who was that, anyway?".

Or when told by both his team and anyone in Myanmar (including the government) that they intended to use data from a Facebook feature to crack down on dissidents, which has historically included jail, torture, and execution, decided "well, it's a really cool feature - we're not going to turn it off".

To think he cares about "misleading ads" is laughable. They don't care about ads selling illegal drugs or hinting at selling CSAM.

I think it is hard to imagine someone in tech with as non-existent a moral and ethical compass as Mark Zuckerberg, and that's saying something.

[–] specialist 1 day ago
Yup, Zuck is a moral cripple.
[–] api 2 days ago
Scams might be more profitable than legitimate businesses.