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Posted by iamflimflam1 13 hours ago

Why is Google still serving dodgy ads?(www.atomic14.com)
749 points | 338 commentspage 6
mococa 9 hours ago|
Gezus… If you see my mother-in-law cellphone. It is impossible to use <period>. Full of ads crap that she probably installed by following ads… Remember IE toolbars?
gdevenyi 9 hours ago||
People still see ads?
codingjoe 11 hours ago||
Same with Meta. The latter knowingly makes a substantial revenue from those ads. Unless a government steps it to make advertising platforms liable, there will be zero incentive for change
Waterluvian 12 hours ago||
I don’t think they want to nor is it good for them to long term. But I bet they’re institutionally incapable of avoiding it given the KPIs that drive the entire employment ambitions of many managers.
rectang 13 hours ago||
Ohhh, has anybody used AI to generate delicious statistics about how many ads served by various ad networks will get you hacked / violate the ad networks own policies?
mike_bob 10 hours ago||
No surprise under a republican controlled government, the FCC considers this type of behavior "good for business".
prettyblocks 10 hours ago|
strange assertion as this has been an ongoing problem from day one.
poisonborz 13 hours ago||
Meta knowingly earns 10% of its _overall_ sales from scams. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/06/meta-reportedly-projected-10...
Scoundreller 12 hours ago|
It's more than that. The 10% is the scam ads that "won" the ad auctions. It doesn't include the effect of scam ads bidding up the market and increasing the price of non-scam ad wins.

(Could also argue that the scam ad that won the slot for 10 cents would have gone for 9 cents without the scam and Meta's marginal revenue was only 1 cent... but if every ad is 1 cent more...)

Same problem when you want to buy a home in a place where real estate became a means for money laundering or uninhabited store of value

vintermann 12 hours ago||
> Could also argue that the scam ad that won the slot for 10 cents would have gone for 9 cents without the scam and Meta's marginal revenue was only 1 cent.

They're probably taking that into account in their 10% of profit coming from ads estimate.

Marol 6 hours ago||
Cloaking.

Google bans people, but mostly the innocent ones. If you're running blackhat, you've built a setup that gives you very good avoidance, and the bans are calculated into your sheets. The reviewer and the system sees something else than the customer clicking the ad. And even if they get banned, they will just burn a cc and domain and then get back to printing after a few hours.

While a legitimate business never suspects it can get banned, and when it does, the process is Kafkaesque.

Our case: a month of back and forth on the appeal, no success. The best we got was a suggestion to read the TOS and check whether we had any "brand affiliations" we don't have in real life. Previous replies were pasted slop. We don't have any affiliations, and we still have no clue what they were talking about. Meanwhile our conversion rate on other ad platforms was decimated by us constantly changing stuff to please the Google reviewer.

MiroslavPokorny 4 hours ago||
Because they get paid ?
8cvor6j844qw_d6 12 hours ago|
I've seen suspiciously more malicious ads on older users phone (e.g., click to update Chrome ads) especially in-app ads.
hsuduebc2 12 hours ago|
You can target by specific system or even a version. This is simply google tolerated malicious behavior because it brings them revenue.
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