Hell if I can find my old login, so I'll just make a new one.fillerup wrote:i've read that many companies, even smaller ones, are being issued refunds from google because of fake traffic, presumably generated by this addon. so if anyone is being hurt financially it seems to be google and not website owners.
while i personally don't use the addon (happy with ublock origin), i must implore you to reevaluate your stance on this matter
You've read incorrectly. They're not being issued refunds because of this addon, they're being issued refunds because google is being it's shit self, and sold ad lines to circular webfarms. Short summary of that: A site that publishes something, then it gets sold to site B and x-linked to a dozen other sites. Site A then use the "referer" as the site count and say "look at all this traffic!" Which means they're paying more for ads. Advertisers themselves are pissed off at google because, google despite having been caught letting this happen advertisers is only refunding 3-9% of the false click-through rate. The absolute worst that this addon does is poison the clickthrough rate, which the developer gives an A-OKAY if it's something that they support. Like tracker poisoning. The real problem with advertising is click-through-farms.
But you're right, this doesn't hurt advertisers. This doesn't hurt small websites either. It hurts the ad-networks, and the biggest ad-network around right now is adsense & affiliates(google) with 70-80% of the total marketshare. The reason this is all becoming a thing is because of what google has been pulling the last 5 months or so on youtube. That being outright blocking of well...anything, and cutting off revenue streams to well pretty much anyone. Youtube sayz: Win9x apps are inappropriate, no monies for you. https://twitter.com/lazygamereviews/sta ... 3214863360 Youtube sayz: https://twitter.com/GeekVariety/status/ ... 5743014912 non-political talk with industry people? No monies for you. This mainly started with the absolute bullshit from the WSJ lying through their face and pewdiepie.
This is a new phase of a consumer and creator revolt against google and youtube, to cut off their funding for being absolute shit stains. The situation is far more complex then moonchild understands, but if you spend time in non-tech circles there's a lot of angry people at google for hurting content creators.