You can monitor your site traffic during the ad campaign and see if it goes up by a reasonable rate per impression though?

Sure I suppose they could lie and you happen to have such a well crafted ad that it has a super high click rate and you are getting scammed but I think that is highly unlikely. Especially depending on your target it would be easy to check.

Because you have your own logs to compare if traffic increases or not?

Reddit was it but not anymore

Because that doesn’t kill the competition.

I have been so spoiled by my 3pa I can’t even look at the old.wasit.com I just see

Ad Post Post Ad Post Post Post Ad Next page.

Idk how people put up with that.

Maybe, but having a sense of community maked a big difference in keeping people engaged when communities are small and need to grow. There are certainly plenty of spaces that should be kept clean and on topic but if everything is always dry and boring you will have limited engagement and limited repeats.

When a lurker knows how to “newremoveds can’t triforce”

Or respond to “Red Leader standing by.”

Then they see positive feedback from the community they feel like they are part of the community vs an observer and tribalism is one of the strongest features/bugs of humanity.

This also helps keep discussions civil when you can realize the person you have having a disagreement with regarding “tensor wave field dynamics in corn flakes” isn’t just a raging dick because they used the “specific gravity of skim milk instead of whole milk like you were.”

Edit: make to makes and mile to milk