Junk websites filled with AI-generated text are pulling in money from programmatic ads
More than 140 brands are advertising on low-quality content farm sites—and the problem is growing fast.
Is this the beginning of the end, if the advertisers stop spending money then what's the incentive for tech bros? Are we heading back to y2k internet where people made things just because.
We can only hope.
That would be cool. Like good ol’ times.
Nowadays people share information on Instructables or Hackster without any (visible) incentive.
It would be nice if they start sharing info in just plain HTML, with inline styles and low quality GIFs.
I wonder what the "apex" for all of this is - as in, when do we hit critical mass and the advertisers pull out of this nonsense dumpster fire that is the current internet.
Surely, at some point, if the advertisers know they're advertising to no one aside from bots on websites that host fake content, then they will pull out and the service providers will have to try and actually make the internet "usable" again? Perhaps I'm being too generous.
If they had brains they'd have stopped funding the seo abuse trash fire that the net has been for the last 10 years already. If they're still here now they're never gonna leave.
As long as advertising metrics show positive ROAS (return on ad spend) then businesses will keep throwing money at it regardless. Even when some do drop out the ad cost will drop (due to the pricing model used) and ROAS will go back up for everyone else.
Google has now also the consequences of the scam they are running with ads in YouTube. I really hope that internet marketing dies and websites go back to having a purpose different from ad impressions
Soubds like if advertisers pull out we'll see the internet just move to subscription/pay per use based models. Unless they can sell your data like social media you will probably have to pay for entry.
Bot websites filled with bot ads, paid for by bots with bot money because they are viewed by many bots.
Google has been filled with automatically generated SEO spam like that for at least 5 years, maybe much longer. ChatGPT generation is just the latest tech and is better at writing something that sounds legitimate. It still is fairly noticeable on many sites though.
I actually thought about setting up one of these myself, just to see how much money I could make off it.
![[HN] Junk websites filled w AI-generated text pulling in money from programmatic ads](https://lemmy.uhhoh.com/pictrs/image/1f5c985c-2b15-4ab3-9d7f-433146eb9deb.jpeg?format=webp&thumbnail=196)