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How much of your audience is fake?

bloomberg.com

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Re: How much of your audience is fake?

#11

Post by teej »

cognivore wrote: post #8

I find the whole soft white underbelly of internet advertising interesting in that pollutes the entire advertising pool. Even ads that are "legitimate" are lost in a sea of click bait and click fraud and morass that is covered in the article. It makes me wonder about companies that get a large part of their income from advertising (Google...). Once the ad market descends into a cesspool that no legitmate company will…

These things mimic biological systems. Fraudsters are disease and as you have noted threaten to kill the host they rely on. But the whole reason Google has survived is because they have built an immune system (ad fraud team) and antibodies (fraud detection systems) that keep it moving along. Over the years there have been plenty of ad exchanges that succumbed to the disease and died.

That's not to say Google will survive in perpetuity. Disease has a way of iterating and evolving. But big G won't go down without a fight.

Re: How much of your audience is fake?

#12

Post by ttctciyf »

cognivore wrote: post #8

I find the whole soft white underbelly of internet advertising interesting in that pollutes the entire advertising pool. Even ads that are "legitimate" are lost in a sea of click bait and click fraud and morass that is covered in the article. It makes me wonder about companies that get a large part of their income from advertising (Google...). Once the ad market descends into a cesspool that no legitmate company will…

I quite like the idea of a self-serving, artificial and mostly automated ad market. Maybe making it wholly automated would be an improvement..

Like: a browser plugin that would randomly click ads in a different browser profile, maybe through an IP-masking proxy, without ever displaying them or the pages they load to the user (hey, maybe without ever traversing the last mile from the proxy to the user's computer.)

In this way, and assuming the clicks can be made indistinguishable from actual for-real user clicks (maybe a tall order if a proxies are involved?), the whole ad market automation circle could complete while still retaining a usable web. The online ad economy spins off to become a self-sustaining fully automated exchange bubble, visible to the external world only at its interface to participants' billing systems and analytics.

Publishers and ad networks win because clicks, network infrastructure providers win because traffic is lucrative and content providers can flourish, users win big time because they have all the benefits of an ad-supported free-beer web with none of the down side (actually seeing and being tracked by ads, that is.)

So long as the advertisers (or, more specifically, the campaign managers' bosses) don't catch on, what could go wrong?

Re: How much of your audience is fake?

#13

Post by marwann »

Any clever advertiser doesn't judge the success of a campaign by its number of clicks, but by its number of conversions (and ultimately, revenue). What's become a new pain in the advertising space are spam/ghost referrals, messing your analytics only for the sole purpose of making you visit their websites, also adding up to the stack of fake audience of your site (which the article fails to mention).

Re: How much of your audience is fake?

#14

Post by meeper16 »

This is exactly why social networks are far less valuable than properties like Google that started with algorithmic foundations as opposed to rebranding the next geocities. I'll never trust facebooks numbers on their fake profiles especially when Yahoo kills close to 1mil fake profiles every month and while Ashley Madison was rife with them. Reddit started this way too, with tons of bots, fake accounts etc. We just don't know how many fake or synthetic Astroturfed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing accounts are really out there. I have a close friend that ran a consumer oriented search site with 50 million monthly active users and he showed me that if certain sites, not his, did not make it easy for fake accounts to be auto generated from various advertising groups and spammers, then they just would not get the bloated monthly active user numbers they wanted.

Ironically, Google the term "buy facebook accounts". This is the elephant in the room nobody wants to talk about in the social networking space. 50% or more of the social networking profiles out there could be fake given bots, systems and marketplaces that auto generate this stuff in mass amounts to spam and siphon ad dollars.

Another way to look at this is based on how and why virus makers target PCs along with how many PCs are currently affected.

Not many fake 'searches' are happening compared to fake bots and social networking profiles. Yet another reason why Google makes $70 billion per year.

Re: How much of your audience is fake?

#15

Post by wodenokoto »

inversionOf wrote: post #10
eli wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the mobile site that is constantly pushing content around in the hopes that one of your screen interactions accidentally yields an ad click I think a lot of the time what you're seeing is shoddy web design (i.e. incompetence and not malice). Not saying it never happens, just that I don't think it's common. Also, at the risk of stating the obvious, tricking people into clicking on ads is not a good long-term strateg…

i.e. incompetence and not malice The primary revenue source of many of these sites are ad clicks (impressions often don't matter). If the function paying the bills are ad clicks, and site stickiness really isn't a thing anymore (nowadays we're all directed by social news, Facebook, etc. Few of us visit specific sites), why not abuse the users that do come by. A principal web design facet in the past was the notion th…

It's interesting to think about whether it is engineered to be like this, or if it is just that poor webdesign did better in the metrics important to managers (clicks) than metrics important to UX.

Re: How much of your audience is fake?

#16

Post by chongli »

ttctciyf wrote: post #12
cognivore wrote: post #8

I find the whole soft white underbelly of internet advertising interesting in that pollutes the entire advertising pool. Even ads that are "legitimate" are lost in a sea of click bait and click fraud and morass that is covered in the article. It makes me wonder about companies that get a large part of their income from advertising (Google...). Once the ad market descends into a cesspool that no legitmate company will…

I quite like the idea of a self-serving, artificial and mostly automated ad market. Maybe making it wholly automated would be an improvement.. Like: a browser plugin that would randomly click ads in a different browser profile, maybe through an IP-masking proxy, without ever displaying them or the pages they load to the user (hey, maybe without ever traversing the last mile from the proxy to the user's computer.) In…

In this way, and assuming the clicks can be made indistinguishable from actual for-real user clicks (maybe a tall order if a proxies are involved?)

Unless your automated system actually spends money then it will always be distinguishable from the real thing. Advertisers, no matter how wealthy they might be, cannot afford to pay for a "fully automated exchange bubble" that gives them zero returns.

Re: How much of your audience is fake?

#17

Post by ttctciyf »

chongli wrote: post #16
ttctciyf wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I quite like the idea of a self-serving, artificial and mostly automated ad market. Maybe making it wholly automated would be an improvement.. Like: a browser plugin that would randomly click ads in a different browser profile, maybe through an IP-masking proxy, without ever displaying them or the pages they load to the user (hey, maybe without ever traversing the last mile from the proxy to the user's computer.) In…

In this way, and assuming the clicks can be made indistinguishable from actual for-real user clicks (maybe a tall order if a proxies are involved?) Unless your automated system actually spends money then it will always be distinguishable from the real thing. Advertisers, no matter how wealthy they might be, cannot afford to pay for a "fully automated exchange bubble" that gives them zero returns.

Unfortunately, I guess you're right. Dammit, I knew there'd be a catch somewhere! :)

Re: How much of your audience is fake?

#18

Post by fauigerzigerk »

cognivore wrote: post #8

I find the whole soft white underbelly of internet advertising interesting in that pollutes the entire advertising pool. Even ads that are "legitimate" are lost in a sea of click bait and click fraud and morass that is covered in the article. It makes me wonder about companies that get a large part of their income from advertising (Google...). Once the ad market descends into a cesspool that no legitmate company will…

I think cost per click will simply keep declining as the erosion of value caused by that cesspoolishness is priced in. It will never go to zero though because somewhere in there is a core of real influence on real buyers of goods and services.

I'm not worried about Google. I'm worried about user experience on the web as advertisers and publishers try to compensate ever more aggressively for the growing ineffectiveness of their business model (or is it greed?)

Average user experience on media sites is in rapid decline right now. If there isn't a whole page ad you need to click away, you can be sure there will be a popup for some customer experience survey or something else that acts like what we used to call a modal dialog box.

If I were in the business of defacing websites, I would like to replace all of those by an old Windows 3.1 modal dialog saying:

"General User Protection Fault"

Re: How much of your audience is fake?

#19

Post by fideloper »

marwann wrote: post #13

Any clever advertiser doesn't judge the success of a campaign by its number of clicks, but by its number of conversions (and ultimately, revenue). What's become a new pain in the advertising space are spam/ghost referrals, messing your analytics only for the sole purpose of making you visit their websites, also adding up to the stack of fake audience of your site (which the article fails to mention).

The really crazy thing is that tracking from click to conversion is still not a truly solved problem!

e.g. When a person clicks, and then closes the browser and/or views other web sites, only to come back as direct traffic later and convert. The funnel is very hard to track and very easy to lose.

Not that I do this full time (I don't), but I've yet to really see a solution that lets me truly match up a person who clicks an ad and then converts.

At best, I can roughly correlate ads to a bump in revenue.

Re: How much of your audience is fake?

#20

Post by yclept »

meeper16 wrote: post #14

This is exactly why social networks are far less valuable than properties like Google that started with algorithmic foundations as opposed to rebranding the next geocities. I'll never trust facebooks numbers on their fake profiles especially when Yahoo kills close to 1mil fake profiles every month and while Ashley Madison was rife with them. Reddit started this way too, with tons of bots, fake accounts etc. We just d…

> Not many fake 'searches' are happening

You think similar networks aren't abusing search?

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