I always just assumed it was a form of “dark pattern” meant to try to stop people from leaving their website once they’ve entered (e.g., coming from a different site, you can’t just hit backspace or click back to immediately exit their site. You’re stuck now).
I think that’s right for a website where you accidentally clicked an ad and now it’s trying to convince you you have a virus and you need to download their virus to remove it. Or maybe for an ad pop-up where annoying you might increase the chances that the content makes it into your brain.
But for a news website i have trouble seeing the logic.
Any page that makes their revenue through ads do everything they can to maximize engagement, and that means keeping them on your website as long as possible. So any little thing they can do to that end, they will.
They also get paid off of this, the advertiser pays for those impressions.
Advertisers can’t switch because they can’t not be present on big platforms. The whole ad industry is just companies scamming each other and the consumer.
I always just assumed it was a form of “dark pattern” meant to try to stop people from leaving their website once they’ve entered (e.g., coming from a different site, you can’t just hit backspace or click back to immediately exit their site. You’re stuck now).
I think that’s right for a website where you accidentally clicked an ad and now it’s trying to convince you you have a virus and you need to download their virus to remove it. Or maybe for an ad pop-up where annoying you might increase the chances that the content makes it into your brain.
But for a news website i have trouble seeing the logic.
Any page that makes their revenue through ads do everything they can to maximize engagement, and that means keeping them on your website as long as possible. So any little thing they can do to that end, they will.
News websites get revenue via ads. This makes people load the same page again, loading the ads again.
I’d have expected ad providers to catch on pretty quickly that there’s cheating involved, no?
Nope. They just hear back about number of views and how it influences the shoppers and brags about how it works.
I honestly think it’s mostly the idea of advertising that keeps it running as an industry.
Like Facebook juicing their video viewership and recent news about Google using off screen ads in their views and impressions numbers.
They also get paid off of this, the advertiser pays for those impressions.
Advertisers can’t switch because they can’t not be present on big platforms. The whole ad industry is just companies scamming each other and the consumer.