Comment by ookdatnog

> The uncomfortable truth: most of us in tech understand that today's advertising systems are fundamentally parasitic.

While my opinion on ad tech has been negative for years, over the past couple of years I've come to realise how much this business model depends on outright crime to survive.

If you have YouTube ads on any device, you probably noticed (at least in my country) that a large fraction of ads are for either extremely low quality products (such as shitty mobile games, apps of dubious value that probably exist mostly to gobble up your data, or just shady IRL products), or outright scams of various kinds.

In one case I saw an obvious scam ad that impersonated a famous person in my country. I reported it to YouTube, and got back an email a while later that said that the ad did not break any of their rules and my report was dismissed.

Some weeks later I read a news article that reported that that exact scam had scammed some old people out of large amounts of money.

Perhaps I shouldn't have been, but I was genuinely surprised that my report had been dismissed. While I already thought YouTube is to blame in serving users scam ads, I had naively assumed that YouTube doesn't want to serve scam ads, it's just hard and expensive to filter them out systematically.

But no, they want to serve scam ads. Even when they get pointed out they refuse to remove them. A dollar paid by a scammer is just as good as a dollar paid by someone trying to advertise a real product. And they're not liable for the scam, so why would they care?

But surely that's too simplistic. Even a complete sociopath would understand that having your website/app overrun by scam ads will tarnish its reputation over time, or invite more aggressive regulation. So these long-term risks don't seem to be worth it. Unless, of course, scams are a very significant fraction of ad revenue.

So this is my hypothesis: scams ads provide a very significant fraction of advertising revenue on at least YouTube, and possibly most social media, perhaps to the point where the business model would not be viable without them.