Meta Projected 10% of 2024 Revenue Came From Scams
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Meta is projected to have earned 10% of its 2024 revenue from scams and banned goods, sparking outrage and calls for greater accountability among HN commenters.
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Someone recently even tried to attempt scamming me when buying a burger by telling me if I want certain toppings without telling me it will cost more. Apparently now have to play mind games when buying a burger.
Probably 75% of products you see on instagram ads, you can go find on temu for their actual cost, usually at 80% discount.
But when you do buy it on Temu, is it even a legitimate product?
To me any product advertised on Instagram, or through YouTubers sponsorships, have become synonymous with overpromised bullshit if not outright scams. Every single time I see a sponsorship deal on a YouTube video I do some research just to validate it, and the vast majority of it are outright shitty products.
It's been working great as a signal of what products not to buy.
That probably depends on your definition of a scam but I'd argue we need to resynchronize that definition. They are scams, because the people behind them know what they're saying is plainly false, and they exploit the explosion of digital networks (like ads) to spread those lies. In the 20th century, the channels for scams were far narrower and easier to pinpoint.
I never understand why well-paid HN commentators refuse to pay for their entertainment.
On the web at large, sure use an ad blocker, there's no choice there. There is on youtube though.
People don't want to pay (help) people they don't like. YouTube ads do not feel fair, they feel manipulative and unethical. It's expected that most people wouldn't want to willingly engage with that kind of asshattery.
Contrast that with platforms like twitch. I'd say the average twitch viewer (that interacts with streams/chats) has a slightly negative view of Twitch. But many will still willingly donate dozens of subs to streamers they like. This removes ads for other people, not themselves.
People think YouTube is greedy and untrustworthy. Why would you willingly feed that machine?
My local cinema charges me to watch a film. Sure I could sneak in through the fire escape.
That's not paying protection money.
If they say "you can watch for free if you attend our timeshare presentation first", then that's still not paying protection money.
If I want a magician to entertain me at a party, it's not paying protection money. If they say "you can watch for free but only if you listen to me drivel on about some cause first" that doesn't either.
People on HN are unwiling to pay people to entertain them. Its astounding.
I like trailers.
But I pay happily for YouTube, because I use it daily, and my home country’s propaganda was annoying enough to make it worth.
YouTube premium lite has been a game changer. Otherwise I would have given up on watching on Apple TV
As soon as I disable my adblocker on my PC though I only get fake scam ads.
Google YouTube TV for NFL Sunday ticket Robinhood Some dog tracker thing Detergent Peloton Liberty mutual Some truck brand Foam insulation
Other than how to buy gold ads and sandy hook promise, my ads are very mild. YMMV
That being said, I am paying for Premium, so I wonder if you are, and if you are blocking ads.
Scam videos are the chum box ads of the video world. Usually the lowest cost ads and so if you block tracking or are viewing a video in a private session you will have the highest chance of hitting these ads.
Gotcha. So you are ignorant of why people are commenting.
The OP was talking about seeing 50% scam crypto ads. Our responses were to provide a comparison. Not to say that it doesn't happen, but that 50% scam crypto ads are not the norm for everyone. It's helpful to have that comparison when providing anecdotal information.
No one is saying those ads don't happen, only that it's probably not normal.
Next time, instead of being unnecessarily antagonistic, admit to being ignorant and ask.
I am simply asking what is the point of the response to my comment. Ads of all degree exist but these scams do exist in a pretty large % of the ads shown but perhaps much lower dollar value since they get shown to profiles without a tangible viewer model.
Next time, instead of using inflammatory language please just slow down and reread or have a more thoughtful discussion. Thanks.
You were ignorant (fact) and unecessarily antagonistic (fact).
I corrected you.
> You were confused and I pointed out that
I wasn't, and claiming I was is a lie.
> I am simply asking what is the point of the response to my comment.
Yes, you were ignorant. You didn't know somehting. Ignorance isn't an insult. It's a lack of knowledge.
> instead of using inflammatory language
Take our own advice.
The ads are get rich quick, unregulated powders, crypto etc.
So again I am not even sure what you are arguing about or why you use such nasty language but read what I keep saying and relax.
Ad and "promoted" videos are different in this context. And the OP was mentioning promoted videos, not ads.
> At least 50% of the YouTube promoted videos
I've never seen a "promoted video" (whatever that is specfically) that deals with crypto. Note: Premium users can still see promoted videos. I imagine these are more targetted to people who would want to watch these sorts of videos.
> Nothing to do with what it is recommending unless I am entirely conflating the root of this subject.
I was referring to recommended not in a strictly technical sense, but in a way any normal person would use the term. e.g. Recommended videos meaning: All the videos youtube shows me that it thinks I might want to watch. Whether these are officially "Recommended" or "Subscribed" or "Promoted" or whatever, I don't know.
What I do know is that I don't see any crypto scam videos or ads.
> If that is true, then of course you would never have seen these as a premium user.
Apparently, that's not the case.
tl;dr: We are talking about videos like normal people. You are wrong.
And again as a premium user you won’t see chum style feed or promoted videos because premium removed the feed style and promoted will be more tailored to your preferences.
Which coming full circle leads us back to my original statement. If they don’t have a good user profile for you, you will get lower cost ads (promoted videos) which generally are going to be the chum box of ads, crypto, magic formula powders, get rich quick.
- video from screenshot[2]
- coe from video[3]
I'm guessing I get served these because I typically interact with them because I'm curious to read the code they link to see how obvious the scam is. It's also fun to reverse face search the actors and find them on fiverr.
[0](https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/141808?hl=en) [1](https://imgur.com/ckAxmuk) [2](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvsGCvw9AFM) [3](https://pastecode.io/s/pcp4ao4q)
Infomercials for all kinds of scams from buying real estate with zero down, crap products that didn't work...
You are making a silly argument here. There's no equivalence at all.
Then you had guys like Kevin Trudeau and Don Lapre.
Arguably weirder, since stuff like this is on sometimes:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15737708/
It's a low-budget horror host show which was made for streaming, and coincidentally ended up on the air late on Friday nights.
I've never seen anything like this and I see the reverse quite a bit.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Israel/comments/1bmdy03/someone_in_...
There were many other similar ones, especially on the smaller digital ad spaces that were basically just TVs on the side of roads. And those ones were more specifically calling for empathy for the deaths occurring to Israeli people during the war on Palestine
Normalize paying for things instead of selling your attention to the highest bidder.
That's a pretty good scam.
But you just admitted that you pay for YouTube and it shows you creator promotions. You are literally paying to see ads, then telling people not to do the same.
Unless there's some subtlety I'm missing here. I haven't been on YouTube in at least a decade. I see no difference between a blogger pushing a VPN and Google showing an ad for a VPN.
The big draw for cable TV was that you could watch TV without ads. Then ads started appearing on cable and people said it's OK, because the content is higher quality and not available elsewhere. Then that changed, and now there is no difference between broadcast, cable/satellite, and streaming services. Except that you don't have to pay for broadcast. (Yet. It's coming.)
Youtube Premium is fighting back against the sponsor segments with this "commonly skipped segment" feature. You hit a fast forward button and it automatically skips ahead to the place most people jumped to.
No idea if that's been borne out in practice, though.
Personally I pay for youtube and I don't mind the sponsor sections. They're easy to fast forward through and income goes directly to the creator. Youtube doesn't take a cut. These are the only kinds of ads that work on me - in the rare case that the product is something I'm interested in, I go out of my way to make sure I use the creator's link.
The long story short is that there are creators I like and I want them to devote all their time to making more content. I'm glad some of them get sponsors. For many I just straight up give them money on Patreon.
I've gotten rid of 90% of the ads by paying for YouTube, the rest of the ads I skip by jumping forward in the video which is annoying but only a little OR by being legitimately interested in what the person has to say if they're reviewing a product which has been in some way paid for. I'm also just fine with someone promoting their own merch or patreon which I am sometimes actually interested in.
The subtlety I don't get why you're missing is I now have very much reduced ad exposure and the rest I do have is entirely controllable.
It's easy to skip creator promotions. You can also choose not to engage with creators that conduct ads.
I'm fine paying YouTube not to force me to watch their ads. I can deal with product placement on my own.
Mostly, I'm getting things like German ads for my local German supermarket (that I would've gone to anyway without the ad) dubbed badly into English with an AI that can't tell how to pronounce the "." in a price, plus a Berlin-specific "pay less rent" company that I couldn't use even if I wanted to because I don't rent.
But when I get 30 seconds of ads a minute into a video that had 30 seconds of ads before I could start watching… I don't care what the rest of the video was going to be about, I don't want to waste my life with a 30:60:30:… pattern of adverts and "content" whose sole real purpose is now to keep me engaged with the adverts. (This is also half of why I don't bother going to Facebook, every third post is an ad, although those ads can't even tell if I'm a boy or a girl, which language I speak, nor what my nationality is, and the first-party suggested groups are just as bad but grosser as they recently suggested I join groups for granny dating, zit popping, and Elon Musk).
Paying for YouTube premium lite (I think it’s new) has been the best thing in ages! The toxic ads are finally gone!
Google products' bullshit as usual, I never needed/wanted YouTube Music and the other bloat they wanted to force me to pay for, I was happily paying to not have ads...
[0] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6307365?sjid=93860...
The laws need to be changed.
Let me take things back a step - it's nearly impossible to hold people who are lying accountable. Surely the platform bears less responsibility than the liars on it?
Kind of like how South Korea (where you need a national ID to access digital services) is doing, or the UK is trying to do with their ID push.
(And then who wants this could go have a fight with the people who don't want this.)
The post was submitted by an asset (IP Address). Just send the bill to the registered owner of that asset.
We do the same thing for speeding tickets. This isn't difficult.
Do you mean the VPN provider ought to be liable? I think that's an interesting solution. Take money from bad actor anons then the bill is yours.
But I mean yeah, you could theoretically rent a car in the UK and kill somebody then flee to the US and hide. But don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
My how the worm turns.
HN users used to herald that law as the best thing since Betty White (who was older than sliced bread).
Without 230, there would be no YouTube. No Facebook. No Instagram. No social media. Forums would likely have gone extinct. Half of the tech industry and a good chunk of the jobs that people on HN do would never have happened.
Now people on HN want to get rid of the law. People who are too young to know what it was like before that protection set the internet free to create and collaborate.
I despise social media. But demonizing 230 just shows a basic lack of knowledge of history, economics, and the reasons it was created.
Usenet was a thing. A huge thing. There was zero danger that it would go "extinct" due to the lack of extralegal protections.
> But demonizing 230 just shows a basic lack of knowledge of history, economics, and the reasons it was created.
You're ignoring the context. Section 230 was created when the Internet was nascent and we were trying to encourage broader /business/ investment into the technology.
Now that that investment has occurred and most consumers _prefer_ to do business on the Internet, whereas the opposite was previously true, we no longer need the _additional_ protections for hugely profitable businesses.
Aside from that is there some reason we can't _modify_ the law to bring it more in line with citizen expectations? We're bound to the decisions of the past absolutely? Please...
Sounds like a good thing to me?
> Half of the tech industry and a good chunk of the jobs that people on HN do would never have happened.
And it would be good. It's not like we do any real work. I know I don't.
Normal non-tech users (from watching youtube at friends houses or at my parents), mostly get ads for fabric softener and cat litter.
Does trillion-dollar Google desperately need the 3½¢ of revenue the scam ad generates?
To put it another way, you have next to no value, and it's only by the goodwill of Google that they even let you on the platform.
Home Depot doesn’t want me to know about it, but I saw the ad!
2 days later, I got the same ad again.
I suppose the next move by advertisers will be corrupting all the other metrics of quality that I rely on. At that point, paywalled services like Consumer Reports (which has its own massive limitations) may be the only relatively authentic signals of quality left in the digital world.
A convergence to that equilibrium can be predicted based on it having already happened in the financial advice industry. The dictum that "if it's free, you're the product" is just as true of old-school in-person finance as it is of the digital world, except in finance the exploitative free system has been carefully carved out by decades of industry-honed regulation.
Honestly, in every area of my life where I have to rely on others, someone has tried to grift me at least once. And that's only the cases where I have definitive evidence.
I don't have any kids, so asking because I don't know and am curious.
Repeal section 230
If you place these ads you should be held accountable. Meta has a duty to know who they're taking money from.
Banks can’t take money from drug cartels. Why can meta and google take money from crypto scams ripping people off
They say the people placing ads should be liable. This sounds reasonable but in practice they're anon overseas and can't be held accountable but Meta will still take their money!
§230 protects Meta from liability for user-generated content. Ads are not user-generated content. So repealing it would do absolutely nothing in this case.
Furthermore, the precedent that CDA 230 was intended to overturn would not help much. Fraud isn't defamation, and there's all sorts of lying you can do in advertising that doesn't rise to the level of fraud in the eyes of the law. So the courts might just decline to extend the Belfort precedent to the advertising business altogether.
What you want is a law that explicitly says "CDA 230 does not apply to fraudulent advertising", explicitly defining advertising as any speech that the speaker is paying to publish on the platform. This neatly exempts all the same speech that CDA 230 was intended to protect while still allowing you to sue the shit out of Facebook[0] for taking money from scammers.
tl;dr Free Speech should only apply to free speech. Money speech is not Free Speech.
[0] It is always ethical to deadname corporations.
No wonder scammers are still spamming his likeness all over Facebook paid ads even though it's technically trivial for them to algorithmically flag it
How the heck are they not being raided and at least temporarily shut down at this exact moment? No wonder Trump is best friend of Mark as of recently... it really does scream "guilty".
1 third of all scams, crazy.
You can also use AdGuard+Tailscale to get DNS blocking of all ads on all devices. Tailscale will let you block in app ads, even on your phone even when on the cell network.
I combine both to block as much as possible.
I also suggest turning on the Annoyances and Cookie Banner filters in the uBO settings. They get rid of many popups.
Blocking in-app ads is a whole other ballgame. I don't have any suggestions for that.
- "Never download anything unless it's from the Apple App Store"
- "Never buy anything unless you're on amazon.com"
- "Dont use the internet outside of ChatGPT"
Could I interest you in some very durable car fuses that don't actually trip? https://youtu.be/B90_SNNbcoU?si=5QUpXUHwSlZj4i4G
Or perhaps radioactive protection pendants are your thing? https://shungite-c60.com/quantum-pendant/
Could I interest you in some Amazon choice firecrackers? https://edition.cnn.com/2020/09/10/business/amazonbasics-ele...
Let's not even mention the health and nutrient products that make the FDA shudder.
Sure, you can ask for your money back, and flag the seller. But new sellers pop up selling the same crap all over again with a new name and company ID. This is all while real sellers of real (and safety certified products) get pressured by Amazon and dissuaded from taking their business off platform.
Avoid Amazon if at all possible. It's not good for consumers nor sellers, and it's keeping a leach on online retail.
Most countries have laws around liability of sold products. This is often set up to fall on the importer of said product. Amazon Europe (and perhaps USA) is doing something very funny with these laws; You, the consumer, is the importer. If your house burns out, then it's between you and a random chineese ghost companny that just disappeared into smoke. Amazon is "handling the import paperwork for you", and not taking liability for anything.
A lot of consumers have no idea they got a cheap imitation. Counterfeiters have gotten quite good, and in many cases the scam is "falls apart in a year instead of ten", not "it's completely non-functional".
Technically, on Bol.com, a EU-platform, EU consumer protection is in place. So if a product breaks within guarantee terms, is dangerous, never gets delivered etc. the person re-selling is responsible. They are importing "illegal" goods and could even go to jail for it.
So, technically, that premium price brings me me the assurance that I am protected by EU consumer laws. That a TV I buy can be returned, is CE certified, won't explode and isn't a 12" TV pictured in a tiny living-room on the images on unpacking.
Except these products often don't meet EU criteria, aren't adhering to (food, safety, chidren protection) EU laws and money-back is often hard because the re-seller just dissapears. In the last case, Bol.com will step up and refund, because they have to. But for the rest, they plead innocence: It wasn't us that sold illegal goods, it was that reseller from which we skim a lot of fees.
The incentives are just wrong. And the solution simple: Make platforms by proxy legally responsible for their "users". Resellers in my case. Or advertisers in the case of TLA.
If some-guy sells a TV that explodes, and can't be found or held responsible, then make Bol.com responsible. Let their CEO go to jail in the very worst case. Let's see how fast they solve this.
Shouldn't the manufacturer have some liability?
But how are you going to enforce that liability? Making and selling knock-off "Lego ™" is already "illegal"¹ yet Ali-express is filled with this. How would this change when this knock-off-lego is also made with poisonous plastics?
Point is that e.g. within the EU the liability is clear and enforcable and the manufacturer has a role there. But with imported products, it doesn't. That liability lies entirely on the importer.
¹ (in legislations that recognize the International Trademark and copyright laws)
That is bog-standard drop-shipping. Every open online market had a pile of that. It isn't that they've taken the images from AliExpress it is that both sets of sellers are drop-shipping product from the same source or collection of sources (or buying and reselling though that is much less common as it means managing stock) and the images come & other sales material come from there.
> So, technically, that premium price brings me me the assurance that I am protected by EU consumer laws.
When comparing Amazon (UK) or eBay to the sellers on, for example, Facebook, often there isn't a premium, Amazon (or AliExpress, or similar) are often cheaper than sellers on social media and/or advertising via adverts on YouTube and their ilk. Those sellers will often try to make the product out to be some unique high quality item with a price to match (which of course is heavily discounted if you buy in the next hour or two), and if you check your preferred general marketplace you'll find several people with the same thing, often with the same images, making no such pretence of it being unique or high-value, at a price noticeably cheaper than the seller from SM/etc. I assume this is the same with Amazon in other jurisdictions and other marketplaces like Boi.
My two most recent examples: a couple of rolls of 3D printer filament that looked nothing like as advertised (bad sales images there I think, rather than a comingled-with-a-cheap-scammy-alternative issue) which was taken back unquestioned for same-day full refund despite one of them being opened, and a couple of years ago a replacement drive for my media RAID array that, while the right drive and not, as far as I could tell, counterfeit, certainly wasn't new/unused which is what I ordered, which again was taken back with no quibble or cost (other than my time of course).
There are problems dealing with Amazon sellers, but those can mostly be avoided with care and a healthy dose of cynicism (to avoid ordering crap in the first place). I'd never buy some things from there though: safety equipment, for instance.
Though as mentioned, I find it very easy to believe this will vary by location and account for various reasons.
The most common one I've run into is third party sellers taking items that come in multiple to a pack from the manufacturer and splitting them up but then also listing the single item for the same price as the multi-pack's MSRP.
As an example, pouches of cat food treats that come 10 to a pack. Scam sellers will split the pack and sell each pouch for the same price as the full 10 pack and because Amazon has historically done nothing to guard against this, their scam listing appears fully comingled with the manufacturer's listing in a way where it is very hard to recognize the scam option even if you are aware of the possibility.
Amazon has made some noise about fixing these comingling issues this year, but their plans have been vague and for me the well is already poisoned after years of letting it go.
Its actually shocking that it took until this year for Amazon to really acknowledge this as an issue. Manufacturer/brands can't have been happy about this considering that for any item that can be scammed like this you'll find lots of bad reviews on Amazon where the review isn't really complaining about the product, but the scam.
Some example reviews that I just randomly and easily found on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R1KZ41Q9MZL7UX
https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R3UUT2K2Q4OROF
I'm actually somewhat less critical of Apple/Google/Facebook/etc. than probably most readers would be, on the grounds that it simply isn't possible to build a "walled garden" at the scale of the entire internet. It is not possible for Big Tech to exclude scammers. The scammers collectively are firing more brain power at the problem than even Big Tech can afford to, and the game theory analysis is not entirely unlike my efforts to keep my cat off my kitchen counter... it doesn't matter how diligent I am, the 5% of the time the cat gets up there and finds a tasty morsel of shredded cheese or licks some dribble of something tasty barely large enough for me to notice but constitutes a nice snack with a taste explosion for the much-smaller cat means I'm never going to win this fight. The cat has all day. I'm doing dozens of other things.
There's no way to build a safe space that retains the current size and structure of the current internet. The scammers will always be able to overpower what the walled garden can bring to bear because they're so many of them and they have at least an order of magnitude more resources... and I'm being very conservative, I think I could safely say 2 and I wouldn't be really all that surprised if the omniscient narrator could tell us it's already over 3.
[1]: https://9to5mac.com/2025/09/25/new-study-shows-massive-spike...
[2]: To forstall any AI debate, let me underline the word "lazy" in the footnote here. Most recently we received a shirt with a very large cobra on it, and the cobra has at least three pupils in each eye (depending on how you count) and some very eye-watering geometry for the sclera between it. Quite unpleasant to look at. What we're getting down the pipeline now is from some now very out-of-date models.
Okay, but if it matches the illustration on the storefront, can it really be called a scam?
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