[HN Gopher] Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to ...
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Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots
Author : marban
Score : 556 points
Date : 2022-10-01 09:58 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wired.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wired.com)
| robertlagrant wrote:
| If they're getting decent ROI on their ad spend, what does it
| matter? TV ads were normally shown to empty rooms while their
| occupants went to make themselves a drink. Still worth buying.
| shalmanese wrote:
| It mainly has an effect on content creators who rely on ads for
| revenue. They're the only ones providing real conversions but
| they're forced to share their revenue with bots emulating fake
| conversions and so their total slice of the pie goes down.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Conversions should be tracked differently to (and weighted
| higher than) impressions, though?
| manigandham wrote:
| Because the bad actors are bad and extracting illicit gains
| from the industry. Removing the fraud will lower ad costs, cost
| of goods and as a result the cost of products for consumers.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| I now realise I should've read the article, instead of
| clicking back as soon as it auto-played a video. I didn't
| realise it was deliberate, and fraud.
| from wrote:
| Because diverting money from actual productive businesses that
| employ lots of people into the pockets of people who are going
| to spend the money on Lamborghinis is net bad for society? Why
| care about insurance fraud if insurance is still profitable?
| Someone is paying for fraud and it's basically the rest of
| society in the form of higher costs.
| kkkrist wrote:
| I worked for a print ad business many years ago. They were
| basically running the same business model with the paper. Ads
| were placed in glossy and cheap/free pos magazines (cheap
| traffic) that mostly landed in the trash after collecting dust on
| the shelf. The bots consisted of distributors claiming high
| quality distribution while throwing the paper right into the
| trash. Everyone knew and hardly anyone cared because incentives
| were mostly aligned (mostly big brands).
|
| I was hired to help with the transition to digital. Guess how
| that worked out. Next I tried running my own online marketing
| business. I thought not deceiving customers and actually
| providing real value was something clients would pay for. Some
| did, but competing with all the fraud became to tiresome
| eventually. Not going to work in this industry every again unless
| there are alternatives (includes scrubbing toilets)
| leros wrote:
| Companies are measuring the results of their advertising pretty
| closely. I would (possibly incorrectly) assume they're still
| hitting their metrics despite serving their ads to lots of bots.
| anonyme-honteux wrote:
| "How xxx Corrupted Advertising" is a really strange titlre.
|
| It seems to assume that Advertising being corrupted is a new
| thing?
|
| And that the Elon guy is somehow a genius for noticing a part of
| the problem?
|
| The whole history of advertising seems to indicate that in fact
| Advertising was designed to make us buy things we don't need, not
| designed to talk to the better angels of our nature.
|
| Edward Bernays, aka Freud nephew, was a pioneer in Public
| Relations (called Propaganda at the time, they were not afraid of
| the word) and one of his greatest success was to convince women
| to start smoking en masse. He did that by branding cigarettes as
| feminist "Torches of Freedom"
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays
|
| If that's not corrupt, I don't know what is.
|
| I mean the whole industry would look really really different if
| they had to give up misoginy. Think "Cheat On Your Girlfriend,
| Not On Your Workout" (Reebook) and 42.000 other examples
| secondcoming wrote:
| Advertising to designed to make you choose a particular company
| over another when you go to buy that thing you don't need.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| Strange choice to stress misogyny. Women see attractive models
| in advertising, they think "unachievable beauty ideals, I feel
| pressured". I see the same, I think "it exploited my biology to
| grab my attention, damn it worked again". Is it misogyny or is
| it mis-everyone, let's make money?
| DoctorOW wrote:
| Obviously, the primary effects are those that impact women,
| but things can annoy you and still be misogyny.
| anonyme-honteux wrote:
| > Women see attractive models in advertising, they think
| "unachievable beauty ideals, I feel pressured".
|
| And they are right.
|
| > I see the same, I think "it exploited my biology to grab my
| attention, damn it worked again".
|
| And you are right.
|
| > Is it let's make money?
|
| Yes
|
| > Is it misogyny or is it mis-everyone?
|
| It is misoginy, and misoginy is always is mis-everyone - but
| a tiny elite who benefits from it.
|
| Advertisers for example.
|
| TODO: Add "why-not-both?" meme here.
| stormdennis wrote:
| I'm pretty certain that the advertising of women's things
| using beautiful, scantily dressed, women must work, it's
| being going on for long enough.
| tialaramex wrote:
| > Is it misogyny or is it mis-everyone
|
| The word you might want here is misanthropy "a dislike of
| humankind".
| anonyme-honteux wrote:
| That's a useless word though.
|
| It's like "all lives matter". Nobody but psychopaths
| disagree so why do people bring it up? What's the point?
|
| Mostly to defend the status quo where some lives matter
| less than others.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| > It's like "all lives matter". Nobody but psychopaths
| disagree so why do people bring it up?
|
| I only have anecdata to go on, but in literally every
| case I've seen, the reason has been "because of (and in
| response to) someone else implying otherwise".
| anonyme-honteux wrote:
| Sorry but that's also useless until we know whose lives
| are in danger and who is an obstacle to their lives being
| in danger.
|
| Because if the motivation is to save lies, why would you
| keep that information secret?
|
| Maybe you can ask your friends if they have something
| more precise and more useful that their ego being hurt?
|
| That could be for example "people who have a tendency to
| do depression are at a higher risk of suicide because
| Facebook has been optimizing user engagement like a
| psychopath".
|
| Now yes I would be interested because that looks like an
| area where you can have a meaningful positive effect in
| the real world.
| toss1 wrote:
| >>In June, the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), a US
| industry group, published a blog post that estimated that ad
| fraud is costing US advertisers $120 billion each year. Hours
| after it was published, those statements were removed. John
| Wolfe, the ANA's director of communications, tells WIRED that the
| figures were removed because they were out of date, but declines
| to provide any new figures.
|
| Right, because the up-to-date fraud numbers are higher.
|
| >>But the industry is letting ad dollars flow into the pockets of
| cybercriminals, he adds, who can then use it to fund other
| illicit activities. It's a major problem, he argues. "One that no
| one talks about, no one writes about, everyone thinks it's
| someone else's problem."
|
| Exactly, everyone is incentivized to accept the inflated numbers,
| and disincentivized to look at reality, so the result is
| unsurprising.
|
| >>Fou believes the industry was corrupted around a decade ago,
| when a series of opaque middlemen entered the scene. "Prior to
| that, advertisers would buy ads from publishers like The New York
| Times,"
|
| It's said in software that 'Everything can be solved by another
| layer of indirection'. Everything evidently includes inserting a
| fraud layer.
|
| Solution? De-scaling and going back to advertising directly with
| specific platforms instead of ad "networks". What about paying
| for conversion instead of clicks? That concept seems to have
| completely disappeared. Anyone inside know why or what could be
| done to get back to that?
|
| As a small biz owner developing physical products, I'd be
| interested in advertising, but I sure don't want to blow
| $$thousands out the door in hours for a mere illusion...
| barbariangrunge wrote:
| I'm going to ask the dumb question: if you had a newsletter or
| some online store that you wanted to promote, and you had at
| least some budget for ads, what actually works in terms of ads?
|
| All anyone talks about is how ads never work, but I know a couple
| of people who, for example, thrive on Facebook ads. Are they
| outliers then?
| Disruptive_Dave wrote:
| Broadly - conversions that you can validate. It's kind of that
| simple. Depends on the channel, as well. For LI and FB/IG, have
| tight targeting, tighter tracking, and really really good
| creative. As long as I'm making more than I spend, there's
| something there. Every now and then we turn off our ads for a
| month or so and analyze traffic and sales to make sure those
| ads aren't capturing leads that would've come in organically.
| Advertising is work - you have to constantly investigate and
| experiment and optimize and refresh. Then do it all over again
| when that particular well runs dry.
| jacooper wrote:
| I have a similar question.
|
| I am running a FOSS community in my local language. And we have
| a contest where we pay the best 5 articles in our forums every
| month.
|
| We would like to market our contest but how can one market
| their website without supporting bigtech?(keep in mind, not in
| English)
|
| Twitter is our biggest platform and the one we are going to try
| first, but that's big tech and not privacy friendly anyway?
| iamacyborg wrote:
| If anyone wants additional insights, I spoke with an ad fraud
| researcher on this topic during the pandemic. He had a lot of
| interesting things to say.
|
| https://www.mql.fm/002-60-million-60-billion-ad-fraud-questi...
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| Just listened to this - it was great. Augustine Fou was a
| fantastic interviewee and it made so much about the ad fraud
| market clear. I have bookmarked it by submitting the link on HN
| - well worth a listen to folks.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| Thanks! Always happy to hear some of the stuff I do is well
| received!
| dkobia wrote:
| "Victimless crime" - I think not. Most affected are small
| businesses and startups with precious marketing dollars that can
| no longer afford to run an App Install campaign that reaches real
| users instead of bots. The big dogs can brute force their way
| through this. I'd venture to say that Ad fraud is a moat in
| itself.
| londons_explore wrote:
| If you are paying any bill for ads, make sure you only pay for
| _conversions_. Ie. unless the customer actually buys your
| product, then don 't pay anything. Eg. instead of paying $0.002
| per view of your ad, or $0.10 per click of your ad, pay $6 per
| person who clicks your ad and then buys your product.
|
| That way, ad fraud doesn't affect you. Plenty of ad providers
| allow such an option. Internally, they convert your payments per
| conversion into payments per click and then payments per
| impression, but importantly this shifts the incentive to get rid
| of bots to them, not you - you no longer care. The provider also
| has an incentive to send you customers who will actually buy your
| product, and to send the bots and web scrapers to their other
| clients.
| Dave3of5 wrote:
| > If you are paying any bill for ads, make sure you only pay
| for conversions
|
| Others have already pointed out that this is actually
| impossible. The big ad platforms charge on impressions you can
| setup any targeting you want but they charge on impressions
| that's it.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| So Facebook charge based on impressions, but they rank based
| on conversions which tends to reduce the impression billing
| problem.
| omgomgomgomg wrote:
| After speaking to many sales reps for ad networks I have
| decided to to so,however, these Cpa deals have negative value,
| say if you provide a service that will or with not have better
| customer life time value than the cost for the cpa, what would
| be a useful idea about that?
| danielmorozoff wrote:
| Can you share which services allow to pay for conversions?
| omgomgomgomg wrote:
| Would be curious to here, too, as far ad networks go.
|
| There are many affiliates for online casinos, crypto
| exchanges etc, they usually have a cpa + revshare deal.
|
| They scrap the non converting audience, its vastly more
| expensive, but I imagine converting an impression from an add
| somewhere on an app or such to a paying depositor with life
| time values north of 200usd is just not going to be
| economically viable.
|
| So far, all I have spoken to ended up a cpm model slightly
| shuffled.
| jonnat wrote:
| Even if it would be easy only pay per conversion, you would
| create a different type of perverse incentive in which ad
| platforms would exclusively want to target consumers their
| models attach a high preexisting (before exposure to ads)
| probability of conversion. That is OK for lower funnel tactics
| but it would severely reduce your ability to put your brand in
| front of a new audience.
| beardedetim wrote:
| Maybe there's two sets of ads being discussed here:
| exposure/top of tunnel and conversion/bottom of funnnel?
| amelius wrote:
| Question: how do they know if you're playing fairly and tell
| them of the conversion? Also, do they get the customer's
| personal data that is involved in the purchase?
| abofh wrote:
| Usually there's a magic pixel that you embed on the checkout
| success page or a callback you invoke. I suppose people could
| cheat, but if your ad never converts, the network has no
| incentive to run it.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| This has major privacy and GDPR implications though.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Such as?
| [deleted]
| bigbillheck wrote:
| I don't think ad companies care too much about that.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Those who implement the tools from the ad companies are
| responsible for their GDPR compliance - you don't get to
| offload the blame somewhere else.
| kritiko wrote:
| This is why all websites have big cookie consent modals
| that appear before you can view content now. Most people
| just accept all. (And even when doing that, things like
| Apple Tracking Transparency have broken fingerprinting
| for a lot of adtech.)
| Nextgrid wrote:
| None of those consent modals are compliant. GDPR
| compliance requires those modals to make it as easy to
| decline as it is to accept, and not skew the choice via a
| pre-ticked checkbox or making one option more prominent
| than the other. Which again reinforces my point that
| nobody is interested in seriously enforcing the GDPR.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Also, how effectively can the GDPR be enforced on
| companies with zero European assets? They can say "stuff
| it" when the fines are levied. Will the EU force blocking
| at the ISP level?
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Realistically it doesn't matter because:
|
| 1) the biggest offenders do have EU-based subsidiaries
| which can be fined.
|
| 2) nobody bothers sufficiently enforcing it even against
| EU-based offenders, so no point talking about outside-EU
| enforcement for now.
| ta8645 wrote:
| They don't. But if you don't pay them enough, ad-companies
| will stop sending you any customers at all, and instead put
| their efforts into catering to other higher-paying clients.
| So you are incentivized to make a good ad campaign that
| generates a lot of sales.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| That would be the correct answer. The ad-companies are
| auction based, so they shouldn't have any problem with it.
|
| But somehow, people report differently. (Personally, I
| haven't looked for a while, so I don't know.)
| jeltz wrote:
| They generally just trust you.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| Audit: They click 10 ads and buy themselves and then check
| you compensate them for all 10 sales.
| jamespo wrote:
| This has been around for a long time, but which major ad
| providers offer this?
| [deleted]
| somedude895 wrote:
| Noone, except scammy "affiliate" post view rackets.
|
| You can set max cpa bid strategies, but that's still paying
| cpms.
| titoCA321 wrote:
| Even before online, newspaper would "distribute" their papers
| to hotels and college dorms to "invisible" subscribers to
| increase the count of their subscriptions. And let's not even
| get into how radio and TV viewers are counted via Nelson.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Google adwords does:
|
| https://support.google.com/google-
| ads/answer/6268632?hl=en-G...
| closewith wrote:
| That's a targeting strategy. You still pay for every click,
| whether they convert or not.
| chasebank wrote:
| Not true. We only pay for conversions in a few of our GA
| campaigns. I don't think this options is available to
| most advertisers though.
| [deleted]
| remram wrote:
| Conversion is not even sufficient. Conversions tell you how
| many people went through your ad and successfully bought
| something, but the value of ads is *how many people _who weren
| 't already going to buy something_ bought something through the
| ad*.
|
| E.g. people might be seeing an ad for Target after typing
| "target" in Google. The number of conversions through that
| doesn't matter and should be discounted. People might be seeing
| an ad or hitting an affiliate link for a website they already
| use regularly, if they go there hours later it doesn't mean
| your ad is effective.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| A problem is that deciding whether or not a customer was
| converted from an ad viewer is done by the people you pay for
| ads. Perhaps the conversion numbers are slightly inflated but
| in general it's just really hard to tell. If you show a lot of
| ads to potential customers then chances are, most people who
| buy things from you saw your ads. Does that mean they came to
| you because of the ad? I think even if you had perfect
| information it would be hard to decide. There is some chance
| that you just have an added sales tax where you send $6 to each
| advertiser every time you make a sale. I don't know how much
| (eg) google care about deciding whether conversion numbers are
| correct. But how do they even decide if the numbers are correct
| and what stops them from being biased towards reporting higher
| conversion rates?
| semanticjudo wrote:
| Sounds like a legitimately good application for block chain -
| both parties can have access to the immutable transaction
| history. Similar to how Walmart applied block chain to
| inventory delivery disputes.
| blep_ wrote:
| How do you verify the information being put into the
| blockchain is correct?
| londons_explore wrote:
| Most online businesses have multiple ways to track
| conversions... It will become pretty obvious if Google says
| you sold 130 widgets but your warehouse guys only delivered
| 60....
|
| Likewise, lots of businesses have a different landing page
| for people coming from an ad vs people from organic search
| and people coming from referral links/shared URL's. The
| business counts how many people visited each of those.
|
| They'll know if the ad providers stats are lying...
| ameister14 wrote:
| you don't even need a different landing page, though that
| makes it easier. Depending on the ad platform, you can (in
| the US) cookie them and connect their behavior after the
| initial click. For the first session, UTM's are often
| sufficient.
| blfr wrote:
| The issue is not that you sold 60 widgets but Google tells
| you it was 130. The issue is that you sold 60 widgets with
| ads but you would have sold 59 widgets without ads: are you
| making sales because of ads or are you showing ads to your
| would-be customers.
| heatmiser wrote:
| If I understand the premise, it should be simple enough
| to disaggregate my organic vs. paid-for conversions.
|
| For brand lift campaigns though, without enough
| historical sales numbers, I can see how it's harder to
| tell if your ad money is being well spent.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It's very hard to attribute sales correctly.
|
| I might see an ad today, think about it for a week, then
| come back and buy the product later. I might keep buying
| it for years afterwards. The ad is often just one step in
| the process that gets somebody to buy.
|
| I think of how I got turned on to Monster Energy drinks
| because I saw them at the store and liked the product and
| the portion size compared to Red Bull. A few years later
| Monster started spending heavily on sponsorships and
| other marketing but by that point I had lost interest and
| moved on.
| londons_explore wrote:
| > I might see an ad today, think about it for a week,
| then come back and buy the product later.
|
| In general, unless a specific sale can be affirmatively
| linked to a user who has clicked an ad for a specific
| product, then it is excluded. Basically, the ad providers
| stats won't count people like you who clear cookies
| regularly, so the business benefits from those sales and
| the ad provider loses out.
|
| So, in general, stats collection and reporting errors are
| in favor of the business selling goods.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| That still perfectly solves the bot problem.
|
| It doesn't the problem of optimizing your ads, but it's
| ok to only completely solve one problem and let the
| others on the same situation from the beginning.
| vincnetas wrote:
| As parent said, you can see that one sale was made from
| ../product_google_landing_page and 59 sales were made
| from ../product_landing_page
| raunak wrote:
| People come back on different devices, different
| browsers, clear cookies, shop at a later date etc.
| tommek4077 wrote:
| And that is whos problem? You dont pay for that either.
| omgomgomgomg wrote:
| That is a multi party collaborarion problem.
|
| Some affiliates make it very simple, affiliate links.
| Sure , there are some fraudulent tricks, on both sides,
| but it is manageable.
|
| The ad networks are never interested in implementing any
| such thing, they only show how "configurable" their
| setrings are.
|
| When asked where is the traffic coming from, "sorry,we
| cant disclose".which is funny, we would see later on
| anyway, right?
|
| Then other networks provide you with a list upfront.
|
| None or few of them have retargeting.
|
| When asking them straight up "ok , you own my product,
| how would you use your network to generate conversions
| rather than impressions?" .It is all suddenly silent.
|
| I have other,more qualified revenues, they are expensive
| but they deliver on cpa, else they are not paid. But they
| are the dearest, of course, so my boss is considering
| alternative revenue channels, even though they are the
| very least specifc and totally useless. He is the one
| impressed by rhe config options, I try to assign most
| spend away from such.
|
| We are speaking spending 5k on some impressions campaign
| with absolutelly zero sign up or first time depositors.
|
| For this money, you can pay a youtuber with regularly
| 200k legit views and say 30k my product views to create
| 8-10 10 minute videos, qhich actually converts.
| Ozzie_osman wrote:
| > A problem is that deciding whether or not a customer was
| converted from an ad viewer is done by the people you pay for
| ads.
|
| If you rely on their reporting, yes, but you can aleays set
| up your own basic attribution (with some caveats around ios
| traffic due to the ATT changes, but in that case the
| reporting comes from Apple). There are also third-party
| providers that can do attribution for you, but somewhat
| costly.
| actusual wrote:
| This makes it sound so much easier than it actually is.
| Tracking where customers from on iOS device is extremely
| difficult. Now spread that difficulty over 10 different
| advertising channels (youtube, Facebook, direct visits,
| google, etc), each with millions of dollars in budget, and
| the problem quickly becomes impossible to track yourself.
| bluGill wrote:
| Conversion isn't the best metric though for many ads. The big
| advertisers don't care about conversion because they are not
| trying for customers today, they are trying for mind share so
| when someone thinks about buying they are on the list.
|
| Conversion is a lot easier to measure than "buys your car
| sometime in the next 3 years", and is worth measuring. However
| it is often only a proxy for the real metric.
| aasasd wrote:
| Yeah, I long thought that these kinds of fraud are ultimately
| filtered by measuring the return. Paid to Zonama web shop to
| show your wares, but all visits are from people comparing
| prices with the in-house brand? Well drop the shop. Bought an
| ad campaign, see zero conversion? Why would anyone continue
| buying it.
| csa wrote:
| Does anyone know which companies media methane was partnering
| with?
|
| The following article explains the mechanics:
|
| https://www.anura.io/blog/king-of-ad-fraud-sentenced
|
| But who were these partners who were paying media methane for
| (fraudulent) clicks?
| NoGravitas wrote:
| Honestly, I'd much rather they show their ads to bots than to
| humans. Hopefully, the day will come when every human is using a
| competent adblocker, but the ad industries numbers don't go down
| thanks to the bots, and people can get paid for content that
| everyone enjoys for free.
| from wrote:
| But there's no free lunch. If businesses realize there is a 0%
| ROI to ad spend due to all the traffic being bots, they will
| stop buying ads. At which point sites will just migrate to a
| subscription model.
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| If businesses actually had the ability to correctly calculate
| ROI to ad spend, we wouldn't be talking about ad fraud.
| hedora wrote:
| Wouldn't the incompetent businesses keep buying ads, helping
| them eliminate themselves from the market?
| netr0ute wrote:
| That's the endgame! Then websites will have to compete for
| your dollars, and the cream will rise to the top.
| aasasd wrote:
| What incentive will the site authors have to produce content
| and design suitable for self-respecting humans?
|
| Time and again people fail to realize that if they install an
| adblocker, they remove themselves from the target audience and
| thus from influencing the content and quality of web pages.
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| What blows my mind is how bots even care about this stuff.
|
| Back in 2009 I started my first tech startup with a friend. We
| crawled the net and stored the locations of and contents of
| online ads. Aside from the mistake that this actually costs a lot
| of money and we were too young to effectively raise money, we
| also made another mistake: Ads were about to get _very_ dynamic.
| Not just ads rotating on a site, but search retargetting and
| hypertargetting were about to take off.
|
| So I did what any reasonable founder would do after learning that
| the business just wouldn't work. I turned down a just offered
| $200k (huge at that time) and closed up the business.
|
| Years later I'm learning that bots are still interested, and I
| suppose there is _some_ signal here, but its minuscule compared
| to what was available back then. Plus, there are fewer and fewer
| out-of-app websites people spend there time on these days.
|
| I dunno. I'm happy that startup never went anywhere. It would
| have sucked to be swept into the ad tech industry over the past
| decade.
| c7b wrote:
| > Yet the digital advertising industry has grown so accustomed to
| working with inflated numbers that few are willing to unmask the
| fake clicks
|
| That is a funny reason for why this phenomenon might have grown
| so big in the first place. The people in the ad-buying company
| who are in the best position to 'smell' when the numbers are off
| are also the ones most likely to individually benefit from
| inflated numbers (KPIs, number go up,...).
|
| A principal-agent problem at its finest, that unfortunately might
| drag some white-collar workers into being at least morally
| complicit in cyber crime.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| From my definition of white collar (office worker sitting on
| chair in front of computer all day), and blue collar
| (factory/shop/traveling/working with hands not computer), I
| would have thought white collar workers were the ones most
| likely capable of committing cyber crimes.
| c7b wrote:
| Two points
|
| - I think it's worth pointing out anyway, because in my
| experience white-collar workers - especially outside of areas
| like finance, where they do get a lot of compliance training
| - often seem to be of the impression that their work is far
| removed from what could eventually be considered crime
|
| - Hands-on workers can absolutely be part of cyber crime
| schemes. Money mules, various packing, collection and
| delivery activities, intimidation,... can be important parts
| of the cyber crime 'supply chain'
| civilized wrote:
| Reminds me of Graeber's bullshit jobs theory. We have people
| generating fake clicks so that the ad departments at big
| companies can feel important.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| On top of that, IIRC he mentions advertising among the "zero-
| sum" variety of bullshit job. Not all of it, but a great deal
| is "we're spending more because [other big brand] started
| spending more, just to keep from _losing_ market share ".
| oldstrangers wrote:
| They have award shows that give out awards based on these
| numbers. It's really silly.
| strangattractor wrote:
| People that buy ads for companies want to keep their jobs too.
| And like most jobs the more money the company gives you
| responsibility for spending the more they pay you. Don't see why
| they care how many bots see their ads.
| hedora wrote:
| Hey, what if we added an x-i-am-an-ad-bot header to HTTP?
|
| I'd happily set it if it meant lower ad revenue, and that way,
| the actual click fraud bots wouldn't be committing fraud.
| AtNightWeCode wrote:
| Not surprised. I worked with companies that paid affiliates for
| purchases done by load testing in test envs. Budgets is not
| always a good thing.
| convexfunction wrote:
| I worked for a while on an online ad measurement product,
| specifically on identifying and helping our clients avoid
| "invalid traffic", which is almost but not exactly a synonym for
| "bots". Reading this article, you'd come away with the impression
| that companies doing this work don't even exist? (Besides the
| venerable Dr Fou, who excels at getting his name in print
| whenever this subject comes up.)
|
| I can't vouch that all the third party ad measurement vendors do
| a good job -- in fact I know from experience that some of our
| competitors did not -- but it was weird to not see any
| acknowledgement that there's a whole competitive field of the
| adtech industry with lots of talent behind it working
| specifically on this problem and which any serious advertiser,
| publisher, or exchange in the open web ad ecosystem is already a
| client of. (The "walled gardens" like Google/FB/etc also work
| with these measurement vendors, though the measurement itself is
| neutered to the point of uselessness, basically just passing
| their definitely totally trustworthy numbers through to another
| dashboard. Now that's a topic I'd like to see a journalist dive
| into!)
| m1117 wrote:
| I wish they only showed ads to bots. I find myself vigorously
| clicking "skip ad" on youtube. Is that "ad rage"?
| jrm4 wrote:
| "How bots corrupted advertising"
|
| Ah, yes, "advertising," that fine institution representing the
| best the world has to offer in purity and honesty...
| [deleted]
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| Add it to the huge sums that companies pay for misclicks.
| Traditional banner ads are a total scam.
|
| Outside of advertising, how many business expenses regularly have
| single-digit effectiveness rates?
| [deleted]
| amai wrote:
| That is known since the 1990s. And yet, nothing changes.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| This is a classic problem when relying on proxy metrics instead
| of real-world impact.
|
| Proxy metrics are convenient, they are also easy to game.
|
| With enough time, any system involving humans will be corrupted.
|
| But in the grand scheme of things, I don't care about adtech
| being demonetized in the long run.
| devonallie wrote:
| Huge companies that exploit their workers are themselves being
| exploited. Sounds like maybe there is a god.
| amelius wrote:
| So in the end we're all being exploited by advertising?
| from wrote:
| Ad fraud overwhelmingly victimizes companies that pay for ads
| many of whom are small businesses whereas the big companies
| like Google benefit because it means more volume.
| emaro wrote:
| If you ask me, we should simply delete the entire advertisement
| sector--influencers included--and start from scratch. The amount
| of wasted resources (i.e. attention, money, electricity,
| bandwidth, time, smart people) is just _insane_! The benefits I
| see are mostly lot 's of jobs and means for the biggest
| businesses to sell more stuff. That can hardly be worth it.
|
| I know I'm dreaming and it will never happen, but still... let me
| dream.
| user456324234 wrote:
| Agree. And this is yet another proof that lots of meanningless
| jobs exist!
| kylebyproxy wrote:
| I'm just amazed ads work at all. Anytime I receive an ad I
| didn't explicitly request, I boycott that company. I'd have
| hoped enough likeminded people in the world would naturally
| defeat the ad sector, but evidently I'm an outlier. I'll never
| understand why the average consumer rewards and reinforces ad
| spend
| calrueb wrote:
| Actually curious, do you hold the same standard for print
| media (a newspaper/magazine ad), out-of-home (billboard), and
| television advertising?
|
| How do you primarily discover businesses and products?
| aliqot wrote:
| > Anytime I receive an ad I didn't explicitly request, I
| boycott that company.
|
| Can we see your list? Is it in Git somewhere?
| driverdan wrote:
| I do something similar. I block every account that shows me
| ads on Twitter and Instagram. I wouldn't say I boycott them
| but 99% are companies I wouldn't buy anything from in the
| first place.
| FiatLuxDave wrote:
| Here's a plan: Tax it. Tax the everliving hell out of it.
|
| The problem isn't the existence of advertising, it is that
| there is so much of the crap advertising. Taxing ads would
| raise the price of advertising, which would lower the ROI on
| advertising and force ad buyers to be more careful about which
| ads they buy. Crappy advertisers who are not actually
| connecting buyers with sellers would tend to go out of
| business, shrinking the industry. The remaining ad industry
| would have to create less ads with higher quality to compete in
| the newer high cost marketplace.
|
| Basically, the idea is to move the supply curve on the (on the
| supply and demand curves) to a place where they meet at a
| higher price and a lower quantity. See for example,
| https://www.economicshelp.org/microessays/equilibrium/price-...
| (scroll down to Tax Incidence). Note that for advertising the
| 'producer' on this graph is the company making the ads and the
| 'consumer' is the company buying an ad for their product. The
| part about moving the curve to a lower quantity is the key! The
| goal here being to reduce the ratio of 'attention used' to
| 'product-consumer fit created'. We would have a smaller, better
| ad industry. We can't have that with current market conditions;
| competition won't allow it.
|
| The nice thing about a tax plan is that it is pretty easy to
| sell people on the idea of 'take money away from these people
| who annoy all of us and give it to [insert social good here]' .
| The best people in advertising would likely benefit from it as
| well, as they would likely stay in business and have better
| margins in a smaller industry with less competition.
|
| So, keep dreaming, but feel free to spread this idea around.
| Maybe it will grow by word-of-mouth.
| fdewrewrewf wrote:
| The internet and all related technology is largely funded by
| advertising. It would indeed be very fun to watch that all
| disappear.
| emaro wrote:
| Ads, military and porn, the three pillars of the internet!
| Joker_vD wrote:
| But that advertising money still come from somewhere and
| someone, right? Surely there is some other way to make those
| someones to spend that money on the internet and all related
| technology?
| fyvhbhn wrote:
| That someone is the one watching the ad by buying products
| the person sees in ads
| themoonisachees wrote:
| Major websites are ad-funded, the internet isn't. Networking
| technology, IPV4/6, http, ssl and most website frameworks
| aren't funded by advertising ( and even if they are eg react,
| they won't disappear.)
|
| Let FAANGs fail. Let them try to disguise ads into content,
| fail and go off the deep end. What is there to lose, really?
| Search? Someone will take their place. Instant gratification
| online ordering (not funded by ads but fuck it) orchestrating
| modern slavery? We'l be fine. Facebook products? Might be a
| bit of a panic as chat for 50% of the world population goes
| down, but we'll manage. RCS is good now, matrix is right
| there, we'll manage. TikTok? We'l be fine.
|
| Pretty much any thing funded by advertising is not vital to
| society (otherwise they could make you pay for it) and like
| half of it is parasitic.
| kritiko wrote:
| Photo & video hosting for all of your major life events
| that delivers the content to all of your friends and
| family?
| max51 wrote:
| Is there any cloud that is ad-supported? AFAIK, all of
| them (including google) is supported by charging directly
| for it and/or bundling it a different purchase (physical
| phone, software subscription, etc.)
| kritiko wrote:
| I'm referring here to Instagram / Facebook. How are you
| going to send your wedding or vacation or dog photos to
| your network? Mass email? The social platforms have a
| utility for most people at this point.
| Dove wrote:
| I, for one, would _love_ to see the existing incumbents
| fail, and a mad scramble by upstarts to do this better.
| This could be done way, way, way better, and I would love
| to see what happened if the network effect got out of the
| way of that happening.
| Melatonic wrote:
| Group chats work pretty damn well
| fdewrewrewf wrote:
| >vacation or dog photos
|
| >social platforms have a utility for most people
|
| Hard to tell if you're serious!
|
| I quit all social media and gave up my smartphone. I
| don't miss that brief "huh, that's nice" moment when
| being seeing an acquaintance's random photo they felt
| they had to share, and moments when visual imagery _are_
| shared now feel much more special.
| fyvhbhn wrote:
| If they have an utility, people will pay for it (they
| don't even have to pay as much as they pay indirectly via
| advertising). If not, not gonna miss it
| duderific wrote:
| You can create a group share in Apple Photos. Non-Apple
| folks can use a web link to view photos.
| [deleted]
| omgomgomgomg wrote:
| Well, I have to say though, those little influencers do deliver
| results.
|
| I have spoken with many of them and they come up with ideas
| regarding gamification, retention and acquisition being far
| superior to the ad networks.
|
| They have a community and I would hire some of them on the
| spot, no need, though, some of them earn my salary many times
| over.
|
| The ad networks might be ok for flight by night ops like
| selling viagra copies on porn websites, but they will always be
| that annoying pop up, I am not sure it they count towards the
| result if people have ad blockers.
|
| Or let me ask, which businesses can actually convert measurably
| from ad networks? Assuming life time value of customers being
| more than 50 usd.
|
| Its always sold as for "brand propagation", an excuse to inform
| you ahead that no conversion at all will happen.
|
| If you have a fast paces business which relies on large
| throughput and a constantl flow of new customers it is not very
| useful.
|
| I know facebook could convert very well, but they will not
| allow any product.
| rr888 wrote:
| > If you ask me, we should simply delete the entire
| advertisement sector--influencers included--and start from
| scratch. The amount of wasted resources (i.e. attention, money,
| electricity, bandwidth, time, smart people) is just insane!
|
| I agree there is lots of wasted time out there. But the
| advertising paid for Google, Facebook etc. It pays for Chrome,
| Android, React, PyTorch etc.
| potamic wrote:
| If free software that runs nearly everything could be done
| without advertising, so could these.
| cwkoss wrote:
| That's a small sacrifice for ending pervasive thought
| manipulation and surveillance.
| fyvhbhn wrote:
| The software would be cheaper if financed without ads
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I think fraud is ubiquitous in advertising and often the
| publishers are to blame. Frequently on mobile devices the ads
| cover the content and you wind up clicking on the ad when you are
| trying to hide it.
|
| Also I think it is not so accidental that mobile web sites have
| so many layout shifts because each layout shift is a chance you
| click on the wrong link and ka-ching!
| baloki wrote:
| Layout shifts on ad sites are more usually related to the fact
| that ads come in various sizes and to make sure one is always
| displayed (and the company makes a tenth of a hundredth of a
| local denomination of currency) so you can't prefix the ad
| space to take out of the page.
|
| Then UX and your ad team will duke it out for if it should be a
| fixed size or should the company make more money and the user
| always loses :(
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I dunno.
|
| Half of the problem is knowing where people will click, the
| other half is knowing when.
|
| People into Black Hat SEO circa 2008 would often practice
| "blending" where the point was fitting the Google text ads
| into places on your site where people would be likely to
| mistake them for content. This is related tactically to a
| certain kind of landing page which seems to make no sense,
| but some users will get confused and click on a random link
| which goes "ka-ching".
|
| In that kind of site all the links are paid links, on the
| real web it is not too different, it is maybe 10 or 20 paid
| links per real link. Fitts' law is on their side. I guess the
| only reason they don't put mini-banners between the
| navigation links (as Fitts would have you do) on the bottom
| of the page is that goes too far and gets you kicked out of
| the ad network.
|
| I have noticed the layout shifts that happen on certain sites
| when I am just about to touch a link on my tablet and
| thought... "I wonder if you can predict some clicks based on
| the accelerometer trace" but then, nah, they'd have to ask
| permission to use the accelerometer wouldn't they?
| anm89 wrote:
| And how much of tech valuations are based off of the bs revenues
| this genetates? Id venture a lot since a lot of tech valuations
| are levered up based on other tech valuations in a daisy chain
| demarq wrote:
| This. I believe this is what really has google and meta in a
| panic.
|
| Network effects for these companies have been built upon
| funding from advertisers.
|
| They have failed to build consumer business models (B2C) on top
| of these networks.
|
| There are clocks ticking as advertisers seek direct routes to
| customers.
|
| People just like free stuff at the end of the day, and if you
| are zuck or Sundar this is absolutely terrifying. You have to
| either give something to advertisers or convince people to pay
| for "free stuff".
|
| In all honesty, the one bet google had right was gaming,
| consumers aren't shy about opening their wallets.
|
| People may debate paying a couple of dollars for twitter blue,
| or sharing a Netflix password BUT will happily fork over 100s
| of dollars for games.
|
| Google however expected overnight success and now they going to
| try squeeze ads and all their freemeum toys for all the juice
| they can get.
|
| Same goes for meta, which at one point was poised to be the
| king of online gaming.
| ryan93 wrote:
| I think a insane fraction of google revenue comes from lawyers,
| insurance and car sales. But maybe you are talking about
| smaller companies that buy ads being overvalued.
| throw827474737 wrote:
| Almost all advertising like grabbing attention without prior
| consent is already inherently corrupted, bots are just late
| fallout.
| excalibur wrote:
| If a company counts as a person for purposes of filing lawsuits,
| why doesn't another company count for purposes of viewing web
| pages? Why do they have to be human? That's racist.
| punnerud wrote:
| When using Facebook ads I am fine with that.
|
| First I argent for likes, after getting a lot of likes on the ad
| (from bots?) I switch to targeting the right demographic
| classichasclass wrote:
| Even the smol internet is not immune. At Floodgap, I estimate
| about 2/3rds of the Gopher traffic is automated, based on the
| nature, spacing and progression of IPs through the site. Some of
| it comes from HTTP->gopher proxies that allow web bots to index
| through them (can't imagine how much money that can cost), but
| much of it seems to be connected to no known proxy.
| russiasux wrote:
| I been saying it, ain't I been aging it?
| fortyseven wrote:
| To be fair, the bots were mostly impressed.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| When I worked in adtech, I proposed a simple solution to ad fraud
| on our platform - assume any UA coming from an IP range owned by
| a cloud provider was a bot and don't show them ads, don't count
| their impressions.
|
| Worst case, people using a VPN hosted on EC2 might not see an ad,
| but I was certain they'd cope. Best case, higher quality traffic
| increases yields.
|
| The business team vetoed that, it would adversely impact their
| numbers in the current quarter, and well, a significant
| proportion of their total comp was bonuses tied to those numbers.
| Also, the shareholders seemed to be of the mindset that has
| infected cryptocurrency speculators where no matter what, the
| spice must flow, wait, I mean, the number go up.
|
| Then there were all the "bonuses" and "incentives" negotiated
| with big advertisers or publishers. We just referred to them as
| kickbacks, because they totally are, but labeling something in
| code as kickbackPercentage was verboten. Just in case.
|
| Advertising has always been corrupt. Bots just corrupt it a
| little further.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > Then there were all the "bonuses" and "incentives" negotiated
| with big advertisers or publishers. We just referred to them as
| kickbacks
|
| But every time I propose that market without rules at all leads
| to corriluption and inefficiency, people get up in arms
| edwnj wrote:
| The markets are working.
|
| 1. Even with the bots, the price made sense for advertisers
| for so long because of how cheap ads were. 2. Its starting to
| not make as much sense and now we are getting these
| accusations thrown at platforms etc.
|
| TLDR: Markets work but just not real time and not very
| perfectly. The issue with rules (esp excessive rules) is the
| corruption of the rule maker. To enforce these rules, the
| rule maker tends to have the ultimate capability for
| coercion.
|
| And If you think "voting" prevents this corruption then you
| are r*ar*ed. Let alone the corruption of the masses which btw
| has resulted in the greatest acts of violence in history
| (USSR, Cambodia, Nazi Germany, 20th century Japan, French
| Revolution..)
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Sounds like to you, even the casting couch and sexual
| favours are an example of working free market.
|
| Something along the lines of secretary that provides
| blowjobs for the CEO ensures they are always at the top of
| their game?
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| > and now we are getting these accusations thrown at
| platforms etc.
|
| What?! This problem existed for so many years! And it
| wasn't some niche knowledge but pretty mainstream already
| in 2014 (Veritassium video "Facebook Fraud" with 6M views):
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag
| seti0Cha wrote:
| I think the point is, the problem isn't a problem if it
| is priced into the product. It's cheap as hell to show
| ads on a cost per delivery model because the value is
| low, in part because of bots, in part because people
| don't click on ads much and in part because it's not
| clear how useful they are for building brand awareness.
| If there are more bots than previously suspected, sites
| will need to charge less to account for that. That's how
| the market functions, not a sign that it is not
| functioning.
| ekianjo wrote:
| There is no market that does not adjust itself with new
| circumstances. Crypto prices fell and GPUs are now affordable
| without any government intervention. Amazing isnt it ?
| markdestouches wrote:
| No one claims markets don't adjust. The claim is that
| unregulated markets often don't adjust for the benefit of
| the society at large. It weren't as amazing when the GPU
| prices soared due to mining, was it?
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > ". Crypto prices fell and GPUs are now affordable without
| any government intervention"
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_failure
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartel
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullwhip_effect
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demerit_good
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_asymmetry
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Avoid_Parkinson%2
| 7...
|
| And countless others.
| viraptor wrote:
| That's not quite right. The affordability increased
| slightly with the falling prices. But the merge basically
| opened the floodgates. It was a change in technology rather
| than a "market change" (as in business incentives balancing
| over time) that caused it.
| Bakary wrote:
| This assumes these things don't operate in an environment
| affected by multiple nation states and their specific
| regulations
| mjburgess wrote:
| Markets are, in a sense, defined by rules.
|
| Perhaps the argument goes better if you say _competition_
| without rules leads to mafia, ie., people stop competing and
| form gangs -- since this is more efficient _for them_. These
| gangs then monopolise trade, and use violence to stop people
| competing with them.
|
| If they disagree, you can always point to the state itself as
| an example. But likewise, without a winning mafia to set the
| rules, others arise quickly. No group _wants_ to compete, the
| _want_ to have already won.
| bostik wrote:
| > _No group wants to compete, they want to have already
| won._
|
| Or to put it another way: a capitalist fears nothing more
| than a truly well-functioning market.
| mjburgess wrote:
| No, because a capitalist (in the friedman, etc. sense)
| distinguishes between free markets and ancap-competition.
| A free market is a construct of a state with a
| functioning legal system, requiring as it does, property
| rights (, limited liability, etc.).
|
| Capitalism _is not_ ancap libertarianism. Indeed, it
| seems quite clear that ancap is an iterative
| contradiction, as "rule-free competition" cannot produce
| free markets.
| lmm wrote:
| They don't "fear" it any more than you or I "fear" going
| into work every morning, but competing honestly in the
| market is how they benefit society, and monopoly rents
| are the carrot that they're chasing. It's up to us to get
| our money's worth out of them.
| sharperguy wrote:
| So how about starting by not actually blocking the bots, but
| publishing two numbers, the original calc including bots, and
| the adjusted with bots removed. Try to estimate said number for
| competitors as well. Then after some years try to move to using
| mainly the second set of numbers.
| kazinator wrote:
| > _and don 't show them ads_
|
| Wee, I'm tunneling by browser session through IP address on a
| cloud provider so I don't have to see ads!
|
| Meanwhile, ads are shown to my cracked residential router which
| has been enlisted into a botnet.
| stephen_g wrote:
| I've worked for a company that used an Azure hosted internet
| gateway/firewall that all their sites connected through using
| an MPLS VPN. So there are definitely some non-not users with
| traffic coming from there. But yeah, happy enough to not see
| ads when piping traffic through those ranges!
| bosie wrote:
| > Then there were all the "bonuses" and "incentives" negotiated
| with big advertisers or publishers.
|
| your firm's higher ups received bonsues/incentives from
| publishers and/or big advertisers directly?
| tpetry wrote:
| No. When the ad spent increases the sales person, manager
| etc. get a bonus. And you don't do anything to improve
| quality which would reduce ad spend.
| axlee wrote:
| What kind of rational system would ever incentivize
| spending rather than results (aka sales?). Sounds like the
| marketing equivalent of being paid by the line of code.
| otikik wrote:
| It takes a really good salesman to convince customers
| that they need to pay for something they don't need.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > What kind of rational system would ever incentivize
| spending rather than results (aka sales?)
|
| Is that a sarcastic question? I guess the part about
| humans creating a rational system is a dead give-away.
| csmpltn wrote:
| > "What kind of rational system would ever incentivize
| spending rather than results (aka sales?). Sounds like
| the marketing equivalent of being paid by the line of
| code."
|
| OP works for an advertising company. They get paid by
| clients to run advertising campaigns. Employees of the
| advertising company get bonuses for closing high-profile
| deals with clients. The employees are incentivized to
| continue bringing in more revenue streams and continue
| closing more high-profile deals.
|
| The deals couldn't have been made in the first place
| without some form of trust between the parties. As long
| as the clients are seeing results (aka return-on-
| investment, ROI), the trust is maintained, and the deals
| are renewed. Different clients have different budgets,
| and have different ways of measuring their ROI (sales are
| one parameter, but there can be more). No one would be
| buying those advertising services if they wouldn't be
| seeing ROI.
|
| It is generally acknowledged that "advertising works". In
| reality though, there are lots of factors at play.
| gergov wrote:
| Marketing ROI is very tricky to measure. On the other
| end, you would see that the more you spend the more
| customers you have. The question is: are those new
| customers due to your increased spend or not? There's all
| sorts of attribution magic that goes in the background to
| trace back adcampaigns to converting users (especially
| across devices). That's why the article mentions that
| most of the "big fraud" that was uncovered by simply
| turning off paid campaigns without conversions dropping.
| That's a pretty big giveaway that something is amiss.
|
| There's an old saying in advertising that we know half of
| our budget is wasted, we just don't know which half. Ad
| fraud and bot traffic live in that area, kind of as
| expected waste.
|
| Then there's the other issue - branding campaigns also
| cost an arm and a leg, and the most you get is vanity
| metrics like reach and likes and impressions and whatnot,
| which have dubious correlations with reality but they
| look nice on dashboards.
| ekianjo wrote:
| Its not tricky to measure at all. Thats why we have
| marketing mix models for like 20 years if not more.
| gergov wrote:
| The entire problem with ad fraud is that it's engineered
| to look good on those models.
| indymike wrote:
| I used to own a digital agency. I had a client who was
| the 80 year old CEO of a 120 year old military
| contractor. He sat through a meeting where his 27 year
| old marketing manager and I walked through advertising
| metrics for digital ads. At the end he said,
|
| "This is all very interesting, and will be helpful for
| Kelly (the marketing manager). I'm going to decide if we
| renew next year with this: increase in sales divided by
| ad spend. I'm looking for a number greater than 3."
| bombcar wrote:
| This is the dichotomy. The company's purchasing the ads
| want to spend based on conversions - the ad companies
| want to charge based on impression or clicks (if forced).
| makestuff wrote:
| Did they renew?
| indymike wrote:
| They did. We got them 5.2, but it was very hard, and it
| was also very good for our team to have to deal with a
| hard metric target. We got a lot better at ad buys.
| secondcoming wrote:
| In adtech you have to spend all the budget a client gives
| you. They get very pissy if you don't and it's not
| unheard of for clients to penalise you several multiples
| of the unspent budget.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Yeah, because their bonuses are based on spending all the
| allocated money (which is insane, so standard corporate
| behaviour).
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| Currently working in ad tech. Your solution wouldn't work today
| because so many current and upcoming privacy solutions being
| rolled out across platforms are run through a VPN or VPN-like
| service, and many with IP rotation. Many of the bots are using
| these services so that their IP appears as coming from a
| legitimate privacy service like Cloudflare.
|
| The privacy service providers don't have good incentives to
| attempt to identify which users are bots because it would
| undermine their privacy claims. Tough situation.
|
| We do think we have a solution to this but it's unlikely to
| last in a privacy arms race. There's really only one logical
| place this ends with the ad model surviving, and it's not
| pretty.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Is the "one logical place" a Chrome monoculture with neutered
| extensions and even textual content being rendered to a DRM-
| wrapped canvas?
| mcosta wrote:
| What percentage of people uses these privacy solutions?
| boxed wrote:
| It'll soon be most iPhone and mac users. The mac userbase
| can be ignored, but iPhones? Those are the people you want
| to target the most!
| armada651 wrote:
| People using a privacy service are also highly likely to be
| using an ad blocker, I don't think trying to identify which
| ones are bots is even worthwhile.
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| Ads that are pre-rendered by the first-party origin,
| embedded in the page, cannot be blocked by ad blockers,
| unless the ad blocker keeps a giant blacklist of rendered
| advertising content. I don't know about you but I've been
| starting to see more of this kind of content. Ad blockers
| are a separate issue from bot traffic.
|
| But more importantly, while your assumption is probably
| true today, it won't be soon. On-by-default network privacy
| enhancement is coming, and already here in places. You can
| easily have these services in place by accident, today,
| without knowing the first thing about them or why you might
| want them.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Origin-served ads cannot be blocked by _host-based_
| adblockers, but _can_ be blocked by hueristics-based
| adblockers.
|
| I'd implemented a variant of this as banner ads began
| increasing in prevalence in the late 1990s / early
| aughts, using CSS to filter out standard banner sizes and
| path elements. Tools such as uBlock Origin incorporate
| far more sophisticated variants of this. It's also
| possible to block (or selectively _permit_ ) specific
| page elements with a CSS editor (e.g., Stylus), with web
| proxies (including SSL/TLS terminating proxies), or other
| means.
|
| My experience is that if a site tries excessively hard to
| cram ads down my throat, I'll kill it and look elsewhere.
|
| For a long time the argument was that this was a limited
| technically-sophisticated niche response, and that "the
| average person" didn't care and wouldn't bother. The
| increasing prevalence of ad-blocking tools _and default
| incorporation_ (e.g., in the iOS platform) suggests that
| the barrier is knowledge and skill rather than of caring,
| and that people who _can_ block ads in general will.
|
| This itself should be a cautionary note to both
| advertisers and advertising platforms, as the trend will
| be to drive the audience bar further down sophistication
| and means capabilties, meaning what ad content _is_ shown
| aims at less remunerative segments, and tends toward
| ever-increasingly noxious methods. That story ends
| poorly, as do most Gresham 's Law dynamics.
|
| (A similar point is made more pithily here:
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33067889>)
| tomhallett wrote:
| I made an ad fraud startup which ran into the exact same
| problem. With video ads, advertisers will pay 10x more to be in
| a "user initiated" video player (the user clicked or there was
| a reasonable expectation there'd be a video on that page -
| YouTube, camera icon on preceding link, etc).
|
| But more often then not, those ads are running in an autoplay
| context (sticky video players in the bottom corner, large
| players in the footer, etc).
|
| I built a mechanism which could tell the difference (viewport,
| fixed positioning, fingerprint elements on the page, provide a
| screenshot of the offended page with your ad on it, and various
| other signals).
|
| We ran tests with advertisers, agencies, demand side platforms
| (dsps), server side platforms (ssps). We'd compare their
| existing fraud numbers (very low) with our reports (80% fraud).
|
| Within each company, we'd have a champion saying "this is going
| to change everything. Quality supply, better performance
| metrics, etc etc". Then we'd get introduced to a team whose
| compensation was driven by "percentage of spend" - every deal
| died at this stage.
|
| My opinion: if your company is using online advertising tied to
| conversions (someone buying something, or potentially signing
| up for something) then you'll be fine as long as it's
| economical. But if your ads are for brand awareness, be
| extremely careful running on any website which isn't in the top
| 10 sites on the internet.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| A funny anecdote that's not fraud but puts a bit more
| ambiguity into the alleged targeted ad eyeballs even from the
| big players. There's a good amount of "ambient" content on
| YouTube these days. Some not targeted at adults or even
| humans.
|
| I have been playing YouTube videos on my TV of birds &
| wildlife, for my house cats to enjoy. There is one guy who
| makes 8 hour long videos. There is one content creator
| basically targeting this market of "birds for your cats to
| watch".
|
| I have noticed that the YouTube app on my Samsung TV will
| play for an unbelievable number of hours without any "are you
| still watching" prompt. Easily 6 hours!!
|
| I've been playing them videos almost daily for weeks and only
| got this prompt this weekend finally.
|
| So some companies probably think they are paying for targeted
| ads to some category like "people interested in cats /
| wildlife", YouTube collects a cut and pays the content
| creator a cut. All this for feline-only eyeballs.
| emaginniss wrote:
| That's why my cat recently ordered a casper mattress
| dylan604 wrote:
| Next, the cat will upgrade that meager 55" to a 75". A
| new fridge with bottom freezer will follow. Kitty must be
| comfy, else kitty will find new home
| kmeisthax wrote:
| I do the same thing, but in my case it's guinea pig
| eyeballs. But I'm a Premium subscriber so I don't get ads
| anyway.
|
| Kids videos on YouTube[0] is another vector of techincally-
| not-fraudulent-but-very-low-value ad inventory. The stats
| on those videos also tend to be highly suspicious - i.e.
| basically no comments but millions of views and likes.
| Normally you'd call this bots, but then you realize that
| small children are literally incapable of commenting on all
| those Pregnant Elsa & Spiderman videos they are subjecting
| themselves to.
|
| [0] Not to be confused with YouTube Kids, a subbrand/app
| intended for small children to satisfy US COPPA
| vanviegen wrote:
| Hmm, that raises the question whether marketing can be made
| cost effective. One would need to get the cat excited about
| a product that it can somehow instruct its human caretaker
| about...
| Retric wrote:
| I have played serval hours of an ambient ocean sounds vid
| on YouTube and the only advertising was at the beginning.
| That was years ago, but I suspect they intentionally avoid
| inserting advertising in the middle of such videos.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| These videos actually have frequent ads throughout the
| video like any monetized content
|
| And because no one is there to skip them after 5 seconds,
| my cat gets the full length ad served..
|
| It's hilarious
| midhhhthrow wrote:
| That's not fair to the kitty. Why can't they skip ads
| too? Let's get the European nut bags to draft up some
| ridiculous legislation like GDPR that forces advertisers
| to put another pop up warning potential ata they can't
| skip these ads
| Retric wrote:
| Could be because some people actually watch these videos
| and click skip occasionally. The sea sounds was a static
| image so I doubt people just stared at the empty screen
| for very long.
| bart_spoon wrote:
| Ironically, it seems like the best indicator an actual
| human is there to view your ad would be if they skipped
| them after 5 seconds or watched the whole thing.
| tomschwiha wrote:
| Don't undererstimate how much human will actually spend to
| please the feline fellow.
| thih9 wrote:
| Until somebody finds a way to use that. E.g. play scary ads
| to the cat, display ads showing cat anxiety specialists to
| the cat owner.
| vgeek wrote:
| Maybe the ads are really effective, but you just need a cat
| translator to know how effective the ads are on your cats?
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5JuVHCJVYf4
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| Actual cat translator: "I want to kill those pretty
| birds".
| barbariangrunge wrote:
| By top 10, do you mean google / Facebook ads? I have some
| friends whose online store got a lot do traffic from Facebook
| but I don't know much personally
| jsonne wrote:
| See I run a DSP and I'm not sure what incentive we would have
| to be against this? My primary goal is to keep advertisers
| spending, and the better their results the longer they hang
| around. I have a vested interest in eliminating fraud if
| followed to that conclusion. Then again we focus on
| performance campaigns not brand awareness so we're a bit a
| different. Most of our inventory too comes from large
| sandboxed audio apps so while not perfect on the fraud front
| there is less potential for it from less players.
|
| Then again I am a startup and I have seen how some people at
| very large adtech companies operate. Less sophisticated
| clients (many of them with huge budgets) can't properly
| evaluate what they are buying and thus default to cheapest
| CPMs possible. It's unfortunate and a symptom of the
| incredibly opaque ads stack and inventory.
| MisterTea wrote:
| > See I run a DSP
|
| Digital Signal Processor?
| ThePowerOfFuet wrote:
| The acronym was defined in the post to which they were
| replying (two levels above your reply), so it would have
| been a bit redundant for them to define it yet again.
| ThePowerOfFuet wrote:
| The acronym was defined in the comment to which they were
| replying (thus two levels above your own reply); it would
| have been redundant to again define it yet again.
| MikeTheGreat wrote:
| Another post mentioned "Demand Side Platform", which
| Wikipedia explains like this:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand-side_platform
|
| But yeah - I'm totally out of my depth here, and while
| the Wikipedia articles makes some sense if anyone here
| wanted to throw out (or suggest) a quick primer on this
| industry I know that _I_ would learn a lot :)
| rkagerer wrote:
| Amidst all this fraud there must be a huge opportunity for a
| startup with a different model that actually delivers
| verifiable results (eg. higher fee for a cut of affiliated
| sales would better align incentives and perhaps encourage a
| reduction of unwanted spam to end users).
| Cheezewheel wrote:
| But it isn't even a problem that experts don't know how to
| solve it. We _know_ how to solve this issue. The problem is
| that at basically every large company someone 's bonus is
| tied to keeping the current status quo. There are all these
| measures and statistics around ad revenue and spending, but
| the problem is that a lot of it is naive and outdated, but
| nonetheless John's quarterly bonus is tied to a program
| that is defunct and wasteful, and often these are business
| people, they are not going to blatantly work against their
| own interests.
|
| It is like with Google. They have a huge issue with the
| company spinning up new projects and then abandoning them
| at the drop of a pin, and it is crystal clear _why_ this
| happens (people take on impactful[i.e. visible] projects
| for their promotion packet, but the incentives are for
| heading a project, not for maintaining it). It isn 't a
| matter of figuring out a solution, the problem is that the
| problem will persist as long as important stakeholders are
| financially incentivized to resist change.
| lovehashbrowns wrote:
| When I worked at a company that got like almost 100% of their
| revenue from ads, we got a very serious warning from an ad
| agency to stop serving our ads to bots. They gave us like 7
| days to fix our traffic or we'd get removed, effectively
| killing our company. Scary time to be an engineer that morning!
| That was like 6-7 years ago, though! It's kinda crazy that
| things have changed this much.
| freediver wrote:
| Great insight, thanks. Are there any 'honest' ad networks with
| integrity out there in your opionion?
| mikeodds wrote:
| If those MBAs could read they'd be very upset
| xadhominemx wrote:
| Yes they would be upset because it wouldn't work
| manigandham wrote:
| 12 year adtech veteran here. Ad fraud is a business problem,
| not a tech problem.
|
| All the major solutions are well known but not implemented
| because of the massive effect it would have on business for
| everyone down the chain for advertisers.
|
| The entire industry meets every year. They _can_ figure this
| out and fix most big problems in a few hours, but incentives
| are not aligned for that to happen.
| api wrote:
| So basically the industry is incentivized to waste money and
| hide this from the boss, even within companies that are
| spending on ads?
| manigandham wrote:
| Mostly yes, but also common in many other industries (with
| different kinds of spending).
| taftster wrote:
| You mean, hide this from the stock market.
| jefftk wrote:
| _> I proposed a simple solution to ad fraud on our platform -
| assume any UA coming from an IP range owned by a cloud provider
| was a bot_
|
| Ad fraud is an adversarial game, and you can't 'solve' it with
| simple things like this. You'll temporarily cause a lot of pain
| for the bot operators (yay!) but then they'll adjust and start
| sending the traffic from botnets (hacked consumer devices).
| Which is already what they do when trying to defraud
| advertisers on networks that take fraud seriously (which it
| sounds like your company didn't).
|
| (Disclosure: I used to work on ads at Google)
| kome wrote:
| there is some big logical fallacies in this line of thinking.
| better to say that google is totally fine bots traffic.
| that's what you said, after all.
| lucideer wrote:
| > _they 'll adjust and start sending the traffic from
| botnets_
|
| I'm not saying using a botnet is "hard", per se, but the
| difference in difficulty compared to using a hosting provider
| is significant. If bot operators are being forced to use
| botnets, I'd say the solution is working very well.
| stingraycharles wrote:
| It's not. You have several large proxy providers that use
| millions of consumers devices to proxy your traffic.
|
| Ever wondered how free VPN services make their money? Lots
| of them use a portion of your traffic to proxy these types
| of requests.
| josteink wrote:
| > If bot operators are being forced to use botnets, I'd say
| the solution is working very well.
|
| If ad-fraud goes from "We accidentally ran these 'indexing-
| bots' against some websites, causing some counters to be
| off. Sorry about that!" to "We deployed our code to run on
| stolen or hacked machines through botnets paid for in
| crypto on the dark web", you've moved from legally gray to
| clearly illegal.
|
| I can see no down-sides with such a move.
| jefftk wrote:
| I'm not objecting to making the move (definitely do it)
| but about selling it as a "solution" when it's really
| beginning a perpetual fight.
|
| People often don't recognize that they are in an
| adversarial situation, where taking a step that looks
| like it solves the problem does much less than you expect
| because other people will later counter your work.
| cwkoss wrote:
| I'd argue it's prosocial to mislead ad spenders into
| thinking they are reaching more humans than they actually
| are.
| nonasktell wrote:
| Well it:
|
| -cuts their profits in half or more because they have to
| pay for the proxies(or if they own them they can't sell
| them since they need them)
|
| -it prevents most low skilled people from doing it
|
| -it prevents them from doing on it on an infinite scale,
| AWS have more than a 100 millions IPs, it's rare to see a
| grey market proxy provider with more than a few millions
| clean IPs, and it usually cost like 40 cents per IP,
| where it can be FREE on AWS
|
| You add basic protection against headless browsers,
| behavioral analysis etc...And now 99% of the people who
| can fool you are already making 6 figures in legitimate
| jobs and won't risk 10 years of jail to earn just a bit
| more money.
| lucideer wrote:
| > _selling it as a "solution" when it's really beginning
| a perpetual fight_
|
| If your qualifying definition of "solution" is "magic
| bullet" then there are no solutions. Every solution is a
| component in the perpetual fight.
| jefftk wrote:
| Only in adversarial games, and most of engineering isn't
| adversarial. Enabling compression on your website or
| designing your UI to make things clear to users give real
| improvements that don't degrade with time. Other sorts of
| improvements like optimizing your JS delivery or your
| server specs decay with time, because people make
| incidental changes elsewhere, but this is a slow process.
| Adversarial situations are very different because there's
| a motivated person on the other end trying to counter
| what you're doing, and gains are especially short-lived.
| lucideer wrote:
| I don't really follow any of this comment. Are you saying
| perfect solutions are possible on non-adversarial
| situations?
| jefftk wrote:
| I like to divide solutions into four approximate
| categories based on what sort of scenario they're
| applying to:
|
| 1. Collaborative situations: your solution works better
| and better, because people notice and work with you. Ex:
| designing an icon or coining a word for a new concept;
| over time more and more people recognize it, use it, etc.
|
| 2. Indifferent situations: your solution continues
| working about the same, because it's not about
| interaction with others who adapt. Ex: enabling
| compression on HTML serving, inventing joist hangars, new
| cancer surgery technique. Most inventions and engineering
| is in this category.
|
| 3. Decay situations: your solution slowly stops working
| as well, because the world moves on. Ex: payroll software
| needs to be updated as payroll regulations change.
|
| 4. Adversarial situations: your solution quickly stops
| working well, because others are directly trying to
| counter your work. Ex: investing strategies, antibiotics,
| ad fraud, ad fraud detection.
|
| When you're evaluating a solution based on how it seems
| like it would work in the current world, thinking about
| how collaborative-vs-adversarial the situation is helps
| you predict what the full rollout of your solution would
| look like.
| lucideer wrote:
| It's nice that you have a framework but you still haven't
| addressed my (I think fairly simple) question about how
| any of it applies here.
|
| I realise this probably comes of a little snarky but I've
| tried following your comments in good faith and it just
| seems like a very abstract hammer looking for a nail
| without really reading/listening to the quite
| literal/simple/not-very-abstract discussion being had
| here.
| jefftk wrote:
| We started with EdwardDiego calling blocking cloud IPs "a
| simple solution to ad fraud" and me replying that because
| ad fraud is an adversarial situation this wouldn't be
| nearly as much of a solution as they seemed to think.
|
| Then, in our subthread it seemed to me like you were
| saying that it being adversarial doesn't matter, and wins
| are always ephemeral ("every solution is a component in
| the perpetual fight"). I responded by explaining how this
| varies by situation, with some where wins compound
| (cooperative) but that the adversarial nature of ad fraud
| shortens the lifetime of wins dramatically compared to
| other domains.
| bombcar wrote:
| When you're competitive it can be enough to be just a bit
| harder to crack than the competition. The bots may just
| choose another advertising platform as the target.
| jermaustin1 wrote:
| I ran a volunteer bot net that generated legitimate looking
| traffic to websites. Its incredibly easy for anyone with a
| large network of gray and black hats to pull it off.
|
| My botnet was specifically for the optimization of bounce
| rates, we kept away from any ads of any sort, and only
| navigated around the internal website through clicking
| relative links or absolute links with the same domain.
|
| If you wanted lower bounce rates, you had to also run this
| on your PC, and kick over $50/mo. It was my favorite
| service I ever wrote even if it did help rank websites that
| naturally shouldn't have been ranked higher.
| recyclelater wrote:
| This is one of the more interesting comments I have seen
| in 15 years of reading hn, care to elaborate anymore?
| jermaustin1 wrote:
| Maybe this deserves a blog post, but I'm lazy. So here is
| the back story from 10,000 feet.
|
| I worked for a company that basically gave me 80% time.
| 20% of my time was supporting the products we already
| launched, the other 80% was experimenting and coming up
| with new products.
|
| I was blogging kind of regularly back then (once every
| week or so), on a subdomain without any actual backlinks
| other than from a few "no-index" and "no-follow" links on
| social media. So technically my website should not have
| been in the top page for any search term and I shouldn't
| have had ANY traffic, but it usually was #1 or #2 for
| various WordPress and jQuery related searches (I had a
| couple of jQuery plugins and wrote some php hacks that
| eventually took down millions of websites), and I got 10k
| monthly visitors on average.
|
| So I started looking into WHY I was the top result of
| those queries, and it was because when someone landed on
| my site with that query, the bounce rate was only 10-30%
| compared to most other sources being 85-90% bounce. The
| exact technical meaning of a bounce is lost on me now,
| but it had to do with how long you stayed on the site
| without leaving or if you click on other internal links
| for the site.
|
| So I proposed to the owner of the company, I would create
| a "Click Faker". It would go to google on your local PC,
| it would then search for a term you wanted to rank, then
| it would navigate the top 10 pages, if it found you, it
| would click your link, then spend 2-5 minutes navigating
| around your site before closing the window.
|
| I first tried this with Selenium (or an equivalent back
| then), and Google blocked it almost immediately. So then
| I hacked together a headless version of chromium, with
| some standard but randomly generated user agent, and
| eventually expanded it to IE and Firefox as well.
|
| And the marvelous thing is it WORKED! And surprisingly
| well. BUT you had to get your site in the top 100
| results, and be running google AdSense before it would
| work. It also proved what we had long suspected that
| google would rank sites with Adsense higher than a
| website without (probably because of telemetry data they
| could gather).
|
| The concept worked, we launched the product, and got a
| few dozen subscribers over the next month, BUT the demand
| just never materialized, and after 6 months we started
| seeing diminishing returns as google started captcha-ing
| our requests, and eventually it was no longer useful and
| we shuttered it.
|
| Without a large enough network of consumer PCs on
| consumer internet, it was doomed to fail. The network
| needed to be around 1000 users before it would work. We
| even tried giving away free limited accounts (20
| visits/day for free if you ran the script, and it
| stacked, so if you had 3 different PCs on 3 different
| ISPs - home/work/mom & dads house/etc - you would get 60
| visits/day).
|
| Ultimately, I think there wasn't enough education around
| it, and nothing we did marketing wise really helped.
| recyclelater wrote:
| The word volunteer is what caught my attention so much,
| sounds like you were making a product to sell, so why use
| the word volunteer?
| jermaustin1 wrote:
| Because we didn't forcefully take over anyone's computer.
| You voluntarily signed up and installed the bot. And it
| was free if you installed the script to use the botnet to
| crawl your own websites.
| alberth wrote:
| > So I proposed to the owner of the company, I would
| create a "Click Faker". It would go to google on your
| local PC, it would then search for a term you wanted to
| rank, then it would navigate the top 10 pages, if it
| found you, it would click your link, then spend 2-5
| minutes navigating around your site before closing the
| window.
|
| Dumb question: how would google know you spent 2-5
| minutes on that domain and navigated around it?
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| One way they can tell is whether they see you on the
| search results page again, or if they see you click
| another result on the search results page.
| nickphx wrote:
| If you're hoping to participate in the SEO game, you have
| to utilize google's javascript analytics code. Their code
| collects and reports on a variety of user activity. It's
| safe to assume (based on google published articles [1])
| that the data collected is used to influence the site's
| rankings.
|
| 1. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9205520?h
| l=en
| awavering wrote:
| You don't need to install Google Analytics to rank on
| Google.
|
| The article you cited mentions CRUX data[1], which comes
| from the Google Chrome browser, not Google Analytics.
| That data is reported to website users in the form of the
| Core Web Vitals report, which is a different product than
| Google's ranking algorithm. Although similar data is
| probably used as a ranking factor, you can't conclude
| that from this support documentation.
|
| 1. https://developer.chrome.com/docs/crux/
| jermaustin1 wrote:
| Your site needed 2 or 3 things to work: Ranking in the
| top 100 results of Google Search, then Google AdSense
| and/or Analytics for this to fool Google.
| mysterypie wrote:
| > _long suspected that google would rank sites with
| Adsense higher than a website without_
|
| Google says that they don't do that. I don't believe
| Google based on personal experience and it's interesting
| to see that you had some experimental confirmation.
| jermaustin1 wrote:
| It is definitely hard to compare one site ranking vs
| another and definitively conclude that AdSense made one
| rank higher than just Analytics, but in every case
| AdSense+Analytics sites correlated with a better
| ranking/.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| Wouldn't another possibility simply be that that sites
| which invest in those 2 technologies also invest in SEO?
| jermaustin1 wrote:
| All of the cases were sites that were doing SEO (on- and
| off-site). There were lots of differences between them,
| so never an apples to apples, but Analytics + AdSense >
| AdSense only > Analytics only.
|
| It was very compelling results. Never did a GA ONLY site
| improve better than an AS only or an AS + GA.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Show the ad to identified bots, but don't count it might be
| a solution
| bombcar wrote:
| Each layer of difficulty reduces the number of adversaries
| you have to deal with. Check your spam folders to see how
| many are incredibly basic and easily caught with the
| simplest tools.
| paulgb wrote:
| Moreover, fraudsters are generally lazy. If fraud that
| works against somebody else doesn't work for you, the
| fraudster won't go after you until they've saturated all
| the "somebody elses", which may be a long time. I used to
| work in fraud detection in adtech, there was a _lot_ of
| low-hanging fruit.
| jefftk wrote:
| Whether the solution is working well isn't about whether
| you have caused work for fraudsters (though I'm all for
| that) but about whether you are actually preventing fake
| traffic.
| lucideer wrote:
| Difficulty will always have a direct impact on scale: if
| you've significantly increased the difficulty for
| fraudsters that's going to have a knock-on effect on the
| amount of fraudulent traffic you receive.
|
| There's no such thing as zero; a successful measure is
| one that achieves significant reduction.
| jefftk wrote:
| Definitely! I was taking issue with your counting "forced
| to use botnets" as a success, but it sounds like you're
| actually saying it's just a decent proxy for success,
| because it is hard enough that you expect this to
| massively cut down on fraud?
|
| (I think of botnets as not actually that hard a step for
| fraudsters, and fraudsters as being very determined, but
| it depends a lot on how much money people can make with
| fraud against your particular situation)
| bombcar wrote:
| One AWS device grinding ads is cheap, if you have a full-
| fledged widespread bot net you may very well make more
| money selling it as DDOS service.
| otikik wrote:
| This is like burglars. You don't need to scare all the
| burglars, you just need to make your house slightly more
| inconvenient to rob than your neighbor's door.
| golergka wrote:
| But what if you (the party who bans the cloud provider IP
| ranges) don't have a majority share of the market, and your
| bigger competitors don't block these ranges?
|
| Then it would be easier to bot owners to just move onto your
| competitors, and you would have higher efficiency than them.
| bluGill wrote:
| What if the customers you want to attract use a cloud
| provider?
| vinay_ys wrote:
| Anything that makes things more expensive for the fraudsters
| than the defender is a win.
| tehlike wrote:
| What he said, same disclaimer
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| That might be a net benefit for the web if it's more
| profitable to rent out botnets for ad fraud than sell them
| for DDoS-on-demand.
| tjoff wrote:
| So obviously it is better doing nothing since it benefits
| us??
| jefftk wrote:
| Of course not! The my parent's company is completely in the
| wrong, and running an online advertising business with a
| "pretend they're not there" approach to bots is a terrible
| idea. I'm just saying it's nowhere near as easy as my
| parent seems to expect.
| ad_versary wrote:
| > I'm just saying it's nowhere near as easy as my parent
| seems to expect.
|
| Apple could eliminate most ad fraud that pretends to be
| its platforms, by generating tokens from its secure
| enclave for advertisers, and providing a REST API to
| validate the token is from a live device.
|
| And of course, as you are in this industry, you know that
| Apple devices are the highest quality, valuable,
| _converting_ clicks in the ecosystem.
|
| Then again, PAT would diminish inventory, prices would
| rise, and people would get better, but nonetheless
| similar, ROI that they get today.
|
| It is intellectually dishonest to make predictions about
| ROI. Nobody really knows. Bot farms, fraud, those are all
| red herrings. Most advertising has shitty creatives.
| jefftk wrote:
| _> Apple could eliminate most ad fraud that pretends to
| be its platforms, by generating tokens from its secure
| enclave for advertisers, and providing a REST API to
| validate the token is from a live device._
|
| What stops someone from buying an Apple device and
| generating a zillion tokens?
| syntheticcorp wrote:
| Rate limiting access to the enclave? Somewhat related, I
| fear this is where we are going to end up with secure
| attestation, limiting web access to approved devices.
| jefftk wrote:
| I wonder if there are ways to trick the enclave into
| thinking time is passing faster...
|
| Pegging the rate limiter to 100% on an old iphone is also
| going still give you a lot of tokens very cheaply.
| wnevets wrote:
| > it would adversely impact their numbers in the current
| quarter, and well, a significant proportion of their total comp
| was bonuses tied to those numbers
|
| So much about how terrible things are in general can be tied
| back to this one simple concept.
| sethammons wrote:
| that almost sounds whistleblower status. If they are a public
| company, and they are knowingly using bad data to look more
| financially successful, there may be something there.
| walrus01 wrote:
| codegeek wrote:
| "assume any UA coming from an IP range owned by a cloud
| provider was a bot and don't show them ads"
|
| As someone who is trying to get into google ads for their
| startup, what's the best way to do this ? Is there a nice
| Google Ads 101 other than Google's own tutorials ?
| dekken_ wrote:
| Ads are cancer.
| lofaszvanitt wrote:
| It is wonderful that after cable TV, where a few thousand of
| individuals' viewing habits determined who watched what, we now
| have an absolute stellar system where everything can be
| measured, yet, nobody wants to see the real numbers. :D
|
| ...
| ravenstine wrote:
| Advertising is corrupt, but much of business (and public
| perception) is corrupt in a much similar way. What you are
| seeing is a lack of integrity shared by business leaders who
| don't ask for rigor when their minions report higher rates of
| "engagement". There's too much of an incentive for the people
| in charge to be satisfied with someone telling them that
| something is "up", and too much incentive for those coming up
| with the numbers to not perform due diligence. I've seen this
| multiple times firsthand.
|
| _Our number of subscribers is through the roof! Mr.
| Corneroffice will be thrilled! Wait as sec... 90% of them are
| people we gave away free trials to. Ahh... fuck it. Mr.
| Corneroffice isn 't gonna know or care, and neither will the
| investors. We're BigCo! Everything we say is considered
| official by most people anyway. After all, Mr. Corneroffice
| told us "fail fast, fail early" and "fake it 'til you make it".
| If he secretly knew I was including the free subscribers, he'd
| be proud! But he can't know because then I might not get that
| sweet, sweet bonus. Besides, it's not a lie, right?_
| seti0Cha wrote:
| Mr. Corneroffice has an incentive to catch BS like that,
| which is that aside from subscriber numbers, he's probably
| accountable for retention numbers, or even revenue numbers.
| If he accepts the fake numbers this month, his retention
| numbers are going to nosedive next month and he's going to
| look for a neck to choke. If he's content to fake all his
| numbers, his boss will have a similar counter-incentive, and
| so on all the way to the top until you reach investors, who
| are strongly incentivized to detect bullshit, if only to
| unload the stock onto some other sucker.
| winddude wrote:
| We did do that when I worked in adtech. However even 10 years
| ago there were massive networks of residential proxies.
| elliekelly wrote:
| > Advertising has always been corrupt. Bots just corrupt it a
| little further.
|
| I had friends in college who did door to door sales for a major
| cable company. At the beginning of every week they had to stop
| by the office to pick up a stack of flyers and at the end of
| every week they had to mark off the houses they visited on a
| map. They got paid per flyer distributed and every flyer was
| distributed directly into the trash can.
|
| They got paid, no one got harassed by door to door sales
| people, and the cable company got their marked off maps.
| Everyone was happy.
| pmontra wrote:
| > The business team vetoed that, it would adversely impact
| their numbers in the current quarter, and well, a significant
| proportion of their total comp was bonuses tied to those
| numbers
|
| Furthermore they were not spending their own money to buy those
| ads. Shareholders money is (almost) for free. In my experience
| companies run by the founders with little or no investors are
| always more careful about the money they spend.
| coldtea wrote:
| Ad businesses are in the business of selling ads. Not of
| selling less, but good, ads, if they can sell more but bad...
| willis936 wrote:
| Fleecing the investors, who are fleecing the workers and
| consumers to entertain their gambling addiction.
| nonasktell wrote:
| >When I worked in adtech, I proposed a simple solution to ad
| fraud on our platform - assume any UA coming from an IP range
| owned by a cloud provider was a bot and don't show them ads,
| don't count their impressions.
|
| Wait, is that not automatic on every single Ad network out
| there? WTF?
|
| How long ago was that?
| doix wrote:
| I run wireguard on an OVH box that I've had for years as my
| VPN. I just checked and I still get Google ads.
|
| So it's not even automatic on the largest ads network out
| there.
|
| Personally, I'd love it if using a VPN meant that advertisers
| didn't even try serving ads to me, but unfortunately that's
| not the case.
| nonasktell wrote:
| I mean yeah but Google doesn't count those clicks for ad
| revenue at all
|
| or maybe just on OVH or smaller provider,but AWS ips are
| definitely flagged for advertising
| nightpool wrote:
| What, you just expect Google to show you a giant red box
| saying "Whoops, we detected that you were trying to do an
| ad fraud! Better luck next time!". Google will happily show
| you whatever ads you request, but they won't count them as
| monetizable impressions and they won't charge advertisers
| for them. The goal is to make it impossible to tell as a
| bot operator whether your fraud was successful. So why give
| bot operators more info about how to evade your detections?
| reillyse wrote:
| They should not charge people for them but they
| definitely do.
| ok123456 wrote:
| A few years ago, I tried to help out a locally owned gym do an
| experiment with Google Ad-Words. The place small storefront in a
| run-down strip mall straight out of the 1960s, but it had very
| good equipment for people that were in the know and it was 24
| hours.
|
| The owner was a nice guy but he relied entirely on word-of-mouth
| and his technical skills extended to making expletive laced,
| 128-point-font signs reminding people to put equipment away in
| Word. I got the sense the business was not going well after a
| protracted battle with a former business partner, where the
| business partner just wanted to liquidate the assets and call it
| a day. He managed to buy the business partner out and continued
| to operate the place---sans a few treadmills. I decided to try
| and help him out by volunteering my time and some money to see if
| a small, targeted ad buy from Google could help him out. It sure
| beat finding another place like this.
|
| The dashboard made it look very targeted geographically. But,
| when I investigated where they were all coming from it was 95%
| international and from affiliates listings from very low quality
| sites with no information on them. A month and $300 later, I
| discontinued this experiment because the traffic was entirely bot
| driven.
|
| From that experience, I've come to the conclusion that online Ad
| Tech is 99% a scam.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| LatteLazy wrote:
| Companies should be doing testing to check the efficiency of
| their ad spending. If they're happy with the Spend/Sales ratio
| then it is irrelevant whether they pay $x for 1000
| impressions->10 real views->1 sale or $x for 10 impressions->10
| real views->1 sale.
|
| If they are not doing their homework, that is on them.
|
| And frankly, 90%+ of advertising is a blight on the environment
| whether it's online or broadcast or physical so who cares.
| paulpauper wrote:
| This is sorta a self-correcting problem because bot traffic is
| imputed into the price/bids for ads. Bot traffic lowers ROI,
| hence lower bid. If ads converted really well and were 100% human
| traffic, they would be much more expensive on a CPC or CPM basis
| than they already are (even though they are plenty expensive
| still). Evidently in spite of bots, companies still derive enough
| value to keep spending tons of money on ads and pay really high
| CPM and CPC rates.
| djfjdjduct wrote:
| there's two ad clients: small business who want cheap ads to
| sell, and large incumbent who want expensive ads as a barrier for
| new competitors.
|
| the players (dsp, ssp, etc) all want expensive ads, more profit.
|
| the second group will gladly pay the inflated cost because that's
| what they want anyway. and they have weight to force even google
| to submit to known bogus accreditation that let all bots through.
|
| the first group have to pay because they have no leverage and
| can't force Google to have a valid accreditation.
|
| ads sales pay huge 20-30pct commission because everyone knows
| some of that goes back to the large client buyer.
|
| sucks to be a small business.
| hnburnsy wrote:
| To me it feels like companies have these ad budgets, and just
| feel the need to spend, spend, spend without measuring any sort
| of ROI.
|
| Example, almost every GM commercial these days are for EV
| cars\truck that you cannot even buy, some you cannot even put
| down a deposit or the "pre-order" is meaningless (like refundable
| $100 for the Lyriq, but no specs, colors or pricing has event
| been announced). It is like GM needs to spend its marketing
| budget no matter what.
| lofaszvanitt wrote:
| They have specific goals to spend x amount on y product every
| month. SO that is not a mystery. Also, there are video game
| sales of 10s of millions where only 10% ever finish the game.
| Yet the next version has the same mechanics and sales are
| higher and still 10% finish the game. Interesting...
| from wrote:
| I think for bigger brands like Coca-Cola it becomes harder to
| measure. Because it's not like you see an ad for Coke Zero on
| Facebook and order it right away, whereas you might if there
| was a new company with a cool new product. That's why they run
| "awareness ads" to make sure they stay in people's heads but I
| don't think anyone knows exactly how effective those are.
| cloudking wrote:
| I've seen some paid solutions for this like
| https://www.clickcease.com/
|
| Does anyone know of any free open-source solutions?
| aaaaaaaaaaab wrote:
| Advertising is corrupt by nature.
| remram wrote:
| There are probably more problems about advertisement
| effectiveness than bots cheating the system. This article from
| The Correspondent was on the frontpage a few years back and I
| think about it a lot: https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-
| dot-com-bubble-is-h... HN:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21465873
| vinay_ys wrote:
| With private access tokens demo'ed at WWDC2022 [1] as a better
| replacement for captchas, this problem can be reduced to a great
| extent. As this becomes an IETF [2] standard that Google and
| Microsoft and many others will also implement, this will no-doubt
| be used to solve bots-in-ads problem.
|
| 1. https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2022/10077/
|
| 2. https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-private-access-
| tokens-...
| leothecool wrote:
| Botnets create traffic from trusted devices. Would the icloud
| token provider un-trust compromised devices? Sounds like a
| nightmare.
| caseysoftware wrote:
| It's amazing how much compute time - both hardware and humans -
| is dedicated to figuring out how to show which ads to people..
| and it turns out that many of the "views" aren't even people.
| propogandist wrote:
| there is no incentive to figure out the solution to this
| problem. The largest players in this space (Google, Facebook)
| require advertisers to spend money to make money.
|
| If the big players were to solve the ad fraud problem, beyond a
| superficial level, it would hurt their bottom line --- which
| hurts stock price, which is tied to compensation for their
| employees.
|
| Ad fraud is usually a niche conversation that doesn't get much
| traction (esp as most publications are reliant on ads), but the
| twitter / musk lawsuit is helping more people pay attention.
| seydor wrote:
| That's not my problem. Advertisers are part of the problem, they
| take in huge sums of money and feed the Google+fb monopoly,
| without ever knowing how their money is wasted, they "trust"
| them. There is nothing more opaque than google, the company that
| controls both the supply and demand of search ads. If you
| willingly participate in that market,i m sorry, not sorry
| manigandham wrote:
| Its not trust so much as monopoly access to the digital ad
| market. Google has so much prime inventory (search results +
| youtube) that it's impossible to avoid it if you want any kind
| of scale for your campaigns.
| iKevinShah wrote:
| I am not an advertiser or anything, but businesses dont "trust"
| them. The moment businesses see an alternate option with more
| transparency and somewhat similar results - They will jump
| ship. Although we are way far from anything like that coming up
| (on that scale)
| seydor wrote:
| There were a bunch of ad marketplaces that were pretty
| transparent - (buysellads.com? not sure, and many others)
| because they were pretty basic, you were buying ads directly
| on websites. Google is not transparent on the publisher or
| the advertiser side. Advertisers "bid" on "keywords" with the
| amount that google suggests (pulled out of their ass? who
| knows). On the publisher side, if you add "auto ads" on any
| website, a bunch of ads appear all over the place, most of
| the time breaking your page layout. You are given an RPM for
| your ads that , as far as i know, could also be pulled out of
| their ass. They control the inflow and the outflow, and
| adjust according to their cashflow needs. Advertisers like
| them because they provide a lot of bloated dashboards with
| fancy graphs as proof of their work.
| ehnto wrote:
| I did always find auto-pricing for ads weird. Why would I
| trust the one entity that stands to gain from an increase
| to set my bid? The fact that it's impossible to verify the
| veracity of the system makes that a no-go for me, but
| clearly not for everyone.
| nottorp wrote:
| > The case started when Uber pulled all online advertising and
| discovered barely any drop in app installs or sales.
|
| Uber is a bad example I think. Not only they've been in the news
| so many times advertising is probably irellevant, there is an
| actual "natural" ceiling for demand for Uber in an area.
|
| They may have to compete with ads in places where they have
| competition, but not overall.
|
| > The technology to detect and block bots already exists
|
| Yeah, right. When I close the site because i can't be arsed to
| look for palm trees in 120x80 photos, I'm a bot.
| omgomgomgomg wrote:
| I do think they are a good example, however , maybe they ran
| those less quantifyable brand name campaigns.
|
| There are many reports out there confirming the same.
|
| Dont give the ad networks a carte blanche sometimes they
| themselves are hijacked by bad operators.
|
| It seems there is very little done a mitigation or prevention
| of bad traffic and a lot of sending beginner sales persons to
| the front lines.
|
| I mean, they do provide some estimates for conversion rates,
| but never will they put that on paper. Where are their numbers
| for traffic cost even coming from if they do not know?
|
| When they say lets run a test campaign for 1 or 2 k before I
| commit to 5 times that, I ask them what have my comoetitors
| done, do you have feedback?( I do, am on friendly terms with
| competitors) they always say they have no insight(is that so?).
| All I know that some of them create either zero or so much fake
| traffic that I have to justify the 400 percent page views month
| to month to some payment partners.
| myth2018 wrote:
| > "After all, who cares if big brands waste their money showing
| ads to bots?"
|
| I'm not so sure this affects only big brands.
|
| I've experienced that in march 2020. I ran ads in a very popular
| platform and was fairly happy about the results -- modest, but
| steady.
|
| When the pandemics hit, my target-market shifted their focus away
| from my sort of product, and such shift happened almost
| overnight. Since I used to get a reasonable amount of real
| visitors, I thought "well, I believe the clicks on my ads will
| decrease sharply now".
|
| Guess what? I kept getting the same amount of clicks on average,
| and my budget of course kept burning at the same rate. The only
| difference was that the "visits" started to last only a few
| seconds, the pages were not scrolled anymore, and the "visitors"
| never sent an inquiry.
| lofaszvanitt wrote:
| And have you checked what was the ip range they came from?
| seti0Cha wrote:
| Your bounce rate went up. That's still consistent with your
| target audience losing interest. It may be that they care
| enough to click on your ad but don't engage with your content.
| It could also be that the ratio of bots increased at the same
| rate as customer interest wained, or it could be the ads were
| never effective. It kind of doesn't matter. As an ad buyer, the
| only thing you to need worry about is whether the value of the
| traffic coming from the ads is worth your money. Uninterested
| humans and bots are of equally little value.
| myth2018 wrote:
| They cared enough to keep searching for my keywords, to click
| on my ads, but then they realized they were not interested
| and bounced?
|
| Also, like I said, the traffic the ads generated was good (it
| generated prospects fitting the profile I was targeting, and
| I was happy with the numbers), so yes, the ads were
| effective.
| seti0Cha wrote:
| My point is, either the traffic got worse or your ad is no
| longer effective and a higher bounce rate can indicate
| either. Bots don't shoulder aside regular users, so
| regardless of whether there are more bots, there are less
| users. Otherwise you'd have seen traffic increasing but not
| conversion. If traffic is flat and interaction is down,
| you've lost interested users and you need to look at your
| creative, or your targeting, or possibly consider whether
| any design or content changes on your landing page could be
| responsible. It could also be that you are getting outbid
| and your placement is now not catching the best customers.
| The fact that what worked before doesn't work now is
| totally normal. Customer tastes change, competitor behavior
| changes, the traffic supplier is changing. Ad buying is a
| constant battle.
| Oarch wrote:
| The digital economy would doubtless take a hard hit if we knew
| the true scale of synthetic engagement out there. It's just
| easier not to look too hard. Reminds me of a joke:
|
| "Doctor, my brother has lost his mind. He think he's a chicken."
| "Have you tried telling him he's not a chicken?" "No. You see,
| the thing is, we really need the eggs..."
| c7b wrote:
| > No. You see, the thing is, we really need the eggs.
|
| Isn't that the opposite of the problem here? If the bots
| actually generated sales, the adbuyers would likely be quite
| happy. This seems more like the Emperor's New Clothes, if
| you're looking for a metaphor.
| wccrawford wrote:
| I read that as his brother doesn't actually lay eggs, they're
| just hoping against hope for it.
|
| Same as the ads and the bots.
| mountainb wrote:
| No one really wanted to do much digging when the market was
| good, but now that the market is bad, expect a lot of digging
| and a lot of suing.
| InCityDreams wrote:
| Must be a European joke. In the States I'm guessing it costs
| more to see a doctor than just go buy eggs.
|
| And, yes, i know my euro-taxes essentialy pay for my doc, but a
| week in hospital that cost me EUR13.50, I'll live with. As well
| as a year's worth of post-care and meds....EUR0.00.
|
| Eggs are getting a bit pricey now, though.
| JCM9 wrote:
| Years ago our company was running an ad campaign on social media.
| Curious on the results I spent time looking into a randomly
| selected pool of the "users" that had been clicking on our ads.
| It quickly became clear that at least half (if not a lot more) of
| the clicks were from what appeared to be fake users or bots. We
| shut the whole ad spend there off immediately.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I sometimes when an advertisement annoys me, I punish it
| clicking on it, clicking around on the website, maybe adding
| items to the cart or going through half of the click funnel,
| and then I close the tab and never come back.
|
| It's great.
| omgomgomgomg wrote:
| You could automate this with a script running at certain
| intervals.
|
| Some will throw you a captcha sometimes, but not all and not
| always early enough.
|
| I did not abuse this, I have observed this when developing a
| scraper.
|
| Test headless before deploying was my most valuable take
| away.
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