How are so many fake ads allowed on YouTube?

Here is another I have seen,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BK0zRsCcsBs

Elon Musk deepfake talking about some AI garbage, but the interesting thing about this video is that:

- There isn't a product being promoted per se.

- The channel running this ad doesn't have any links on its channel.

- The company practically doesn't exist that is running the ad.

And I have seen a few others while going through Shorts, so it's definitely something that is either hard for them to monitor, or they haven't yet bothered to look into it in-depth.

Google makes money, so they are happy to look away. The scams (e.g. Mr Beast fake video) are identical so it would be trivial to automatically kick them from the platform. The crypto bro's ads are also pretty much identical.

The crypto bro ads are hilarious and it looks like they all use the same platform. I wonder if all of them are part of a ponzi scheme in which someone sells a course to sell crypto courses.

Something I do, which is a bit silly, is to click the ad just to burn money from the scammers.

The worst part is that reporting these as a scam just results in Google replying with the boilerplate "we did not find that this ad violates our terms of service" almost invariably. As it's Google, I am basically just assuming this is because of greed and Google are profiting off the ads so they have no incentive to take them down.

As far as I can tell, fraudulent ads are legal in the US, but this is not true of all jurisdictions; UK viewers can report fraudulent ads to the Advertising Standards Agency.

https://www.asa.org.uk/news/like-comment-and-comply-youtube-...

(not that this does very much, since the outcome is very rarely actual fines, just a requirement to stop running the ad)

On FB I’m getting ads for drugs. It used to be subtle, now it’s just “we have the purest cocaine” with photos and everything. It seems like filtering ads in general is a difficult problem.

I keep getting shown fake Mr. Beast "videos" which are actually ads copying his style 100% and promising $1000 by just clicking on it, clear scams seem to be acceptable for YouTube, anything that pays good money is welcomed, I guess.

I've also wondered that, seeing MrBeast giveaway ads to fakedomains every other day. Reporting all those gets exhausting soon.

There is no incentive to remove them.

Greed.

These often outright disturbing ads are the real reason I have to block ads. Even if I were somehow convinced that using a service while blocking ads is wrong, I simply will not take the risk of seeing another disturbing weird fake ad.

I don’t understand why these ads aren’t considered criminal fraud, why Google and its directors aren’t held criminally responsible for said fraud, and why all the income derived from such fraud is considered proceeds of crime and seized.

Oh, wait, I do understand. It’s because criminal law is only really meant for the little people who sold some marijuana and not the corporations facilitating massive worldwide fraud.

If I help personally defraud one person? Straight to jail. But Google helps defraud millions of people? Here please take some more taxpayer cash.

Omg. Yesterday I watched an ad that explained in an AI voice how tinnitus causes memory loss and within three years I’ll be unable to form any new memories. It was absolutely ridiculous, low effort, overseas fraud.

Google has become a toilet of the Internet. The ad quality and quantity have degraded severely this year. I still think that based on how much they’re selling out any remaining trust or brand quality, they must be secretly struggling in a very bad way.

A very large portion of ads on Indian YouTube is some charlatan inviting to join masterclass/workshop/seminar where they try to brainwash you into buying a "course that will change you life".

Most of these fake gurus have been exposed but YouTube keeps running their ad.

The same way fake results are allowed on Google search.

my story: when my kids were in age around 5 yo, obviously they were watching YT cartoons, but this will not be story about ElsaGate, this knows everyone.

Some algorithm decided it is good to show during cartoons vasectomy ad. This is weird enough, but somehow I can understand this failed reasoning (kids -> tired parents -> no more kids -> vasectomy).

But this ad consisted only from one slide presenting intersection of penis and nothing more. For long seconds my kids were staring at it before I reacted and turned it off.

I also reported this to my country's authorities and I got some answer they gave Google some fine for this.

If anyone has NOT noticed these ads running constantly on YouTube, I’d encourage you to spend 10 minutes on the site in an incognito window.

I would have thought this thread was overblown had I not inadvertently done that a few weeks ago. But it was truly surprising just how awful the “untailored” ads were.

How were so many malware adverts allowed on Google's ad networks in the past? For the same reason: they just don't care.

Google will do absolutely anything for money.

Protip: avoid ads on the internet in any way you can.

I find them somewhat nostalgic of late, late night TV commercials. I keep waiting to see Baby Billy's Elixir promo.

Not advertisements, but I scrolled through my feed the other night and honestly, every single video suggested just seemed to be clickbait / spam / conspiracy nonsense. I'm usually addicted to YouTube, but I had zero interest in viewing any of it.

Not the first time I've felt like this in the last 12 months either.

The real question to be asking is, why don’t you see more ads for big time things? The most effective advertising is for cars, beverages, etc. Are you seeing those ads on YouTube?

The ads you see tell you a lot about the effectiveness of the ads. Or at least they tell you about how effective ad-buyers perceive the ads to be.

If ad buyers thought that YouTube ads actually worked, you would see big time companies buying YouTube ads. You would also see fewer ads selling at higher prices.

The fact that YouTube ads are so garbage is an indicator that their perceived effectiveness is terrible. Therefore the ads have to be sold for low prices. And low priced ads bring in all sorts of low budget scams who couldn’t afford to buy better placements.

Also, a lot of these ads, despite being obvious scams, are not actually illegal in a lot of places. If the law doesn’t force a company like Google to turn away dollars, they aren’t going to turn them away.

Also, I think this difference in ads at least partially explains some of the different attitudes of younger generations. For example, young people do not seem to be as in love with cars as older generations. The anti-car pro-environment movement is getting strong. You have to think that young people watching YouTube instead of broadcast TV, and not being inundated with car ads, has something to do with that.

There’s a lot more going on here beneath the surface.

Daily reminder that ublock origin is the best software being currently developed. Adding to this sponsorshipblock extension and the efforts by its community, the web is a place that can be digested again.

The ones that get me are mobile games. They show some cool concept but when you install the game it's just a cookie-cutter pay-to-win RPG type thing.

I banned YouTube for my teenager due to the amount of fraud and unsafe, fake content. It anything even remotely close was appearing on cable, the FCC would be all over it.

I think the standard for fraudulent ad in the US is really high, and understandably so. It's like AR-15, its a very indulging reading of the constitution, that the government shall not impede speech.

How can I get these Elon Musk deepfake ads? I'd much rather watch them then the (real) St. Jude's ads.

Is this just a US-American (or non-European) thing?

I don't think I've ever seen obviously fraudulent video advertisements in the UK or Germany. Video ads are generally video games, supermarkets or generic products (razors, personal hygiene, etc.)

Then again UK advertisements are a lot more heavily regulated than the USA, by the Advertising Standards Agency - https://www.asa.org.uk - they are actively targeting ads such as "clearly false or outlandish claims for products, for example that a device can save 90% on energy bills, or offering miracle cures".

I'm not sure of the situation in Germany, but I imagine something similar must exist.

However, I still see a lot of text-advertisements with a Mr Beast-style cartoon figure supposedly giving me $1000 for clicking a link, and a lot of distasteful-but-not-neccessarily-fraudulent ads such as dodgy online-dating.

Scams on marketplaces (ads or Amazon or the App Store) parasitize the buyers/viewers and legitimate sellers/advertisers but are symbiotic with the marketplace itself. This creates strong incentives for some PM with the goal of “make number go up” to torpedo any “clean up the marketplace” efforts if they make the number go down- and in the short term all such efforts will make the number go down because these scams are basically exchanging platform trust for revenue today.

Instagram is another story. They seem to be filtering ads properly, but the video section is full of far right agenda and foreign subversion propaganda. I'm reporting those videos and channels as scam all the time, but new keep popping up again and again after every few videos.

Quick remind that Firefox on Android allow you to install extensions and then adblocks. You can use it as a replacement for the Youtube app and you can even leave the browser and continue listening if it is music.

I'm curious why a post like this is pulled from the front page and the Ask HN page? Any insight @dang ?

It's not only YT. Now, there is ads for sponsorized links on Le Monde website, which is credited to being a newspaper of record.

My solution to this is to have https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/enhancer-for-... installed in my browser. It is also available for Chromium. It works perfectly and I have not been interrupted with ads at all. Highly recommended.

While I understand the need to support content creators, the way the ads work is highly disruptive of the flow of the contents of the video. I have no issue if the ads are at the start of the video (or even the end), but the way it has been showing up on browsers that don't have this plugin, is downright annoying.