Hey, Reddit. Quick question. All those clicks on my ads. Were they actually real?
Reddit was sued by an unhappy advertiser who claims that internet giga-forum sold ads but provided no way to verify that real people were responsible for clicking on them.
The complaint [PDF] was filed this week in a US federal court in northern California on behalf of LevelFields, a Virginia-based investment research platform that relies on AI. It says the biz booked pay-per-click ads on the discussion site starting September 2022; as the name suggests, the advertiser pays a little bit for every click on one of its adverts.
That arrangement called for Reddit to use reasonable means to ensure that LevelField's ads were delivered to and clicked on by actual people rather than bots and the like. But according to the complaint, Reddit broke that contract.
Click fraud, the filing explains, occurs when a person or program clicks on an ad with no intention of doing business with the advertiser. These ad interactions may come from competitors who wish to inflict charges upon a rival or by publishers who wish to increase the fees they collect, among other possible scenarios.
