When we created battle.net at Blizzard for Diablo, there was a bug where the game would launch in full-screen mode and hang, and the only way to escape back to the Win95 desktop was to click the ad displayed by battle.net.
We weren’t aware of this.
The ad company we used notified us of this issue and gave us three days to fix it. Afterwards our click-through rate went from something like 3% to .25%.
Many of those "accidents" are not really accidents: I've seen two kinds of ways sites engineer those "accidents"
(1) many sites, like phys.org, have crowded and confusing layouts that try to trick you on clicking on an "x" or something to close an ad but really clicking on the ad, there's a lot of deniability on this on mobile where the touch accuracy is poor
(2) a few years back there were a lot of sites which seemed to always change the layout when you were trying to click on something in the sidebar, anandtech was one of the worst, i could swear they were watching the mouse events and predicting the click events. this stopped all of a sudden, could be Google put the smack-down on this behavior
Ah okay, I had misunderstood you as referring to like, bot farms or something, not developers going out of their way to make it easier for people to accidentally click
When we created battle.net at Blizzard for Diablo, there was a bug where the game would launch in full-screen mode and hang, and the only way to escape back to the Win95 desktop was to click the ad displayed by battle.net.
We weren’t aware of this.
The ad company we used notified us of this issue and gave us three days to fix it. Afterwards our click-through rate went from something like 3% to .25%.
That's hilarious. I miss the old Battle.net.
"All clicks are click fraud" is related to the dead internet theory.
I get what you're saying, but fraud is different from accidents by otherwise real people.
Well... I'd say that
Many of those "accidents" are not really accidents: I've seen two kinds of ways sites engineer those "accidents"
(1) many sites, like phys.org, have crowded and confusing layouts that try to trick you on clicking on an "x" or something to close an ad but really clicking on the ad, there's a lot of deniability on this on mobile where the touch accuracy is poor
(2) a few years back there were a lot of sites which seemed to always change the layout when you were trying to click on something in the sidebar, anandtech was one of the worst, i could swear they were watching the mouse events and predicting the click events. this stopped all of a sudden, could be Google put the smack-down on this behavior
Ah okay, I had misunderstood you as referring to like, bot farms or something, not developers going out of their way to make it easier for people to accidentally click