Ask HN: How do you prevent children from accessing your products?

After launching my first few apps, I'm running into an unexpected problem: younger children are the ones most likely to click my ads, using their parents' phones/tablets. This gets around the age restriction, and in fact, has a compounding effect: they are too young to have their OWN devices (so they just install and never use again), burn ad money, and most importantly, skew the target demographic towards users like them- so ad placements end up targeting more of them, because they're most likely to click!

This causes all my campaigns to immediately fail, no matter how much I play with the age restriction (again, parent's device). I've changed settings to stop showing in games and on tablets, which has helped a bit, but not fully.

Obviously, there is no chance I'm adding real age verification to the app itself.

6 points | by eastoeast 15 hours ago

3 comments

  • runjake 15 hours ago
    Figure out ads that are attractive to adults, but not attractive to children? Add broccoli emoji to your ads?
  • cm2012 13 hours ago
    Interestingly enough, Roblox has started doing face scanning to ensure people only play with voice chat online with people of their own age. That is better than unregulated chat, but man, what a world we live in.
    [-]
    • jaredsohn 8 hours ago
      In other discussions of this, I've heard that it can be faked and it isn't great to get people - esp kids - in the habit of sharing video of themselves to websites
  • shoo 14 hours ago
    How do you know this is happening?
    [-]
    • eastoeast 12 hours ago
      It's obvious from the profiles they fill out. Things like "I love pink things" or "I like kpop demons" etc. Just trendy kid stuff