How much of your audience is fake? • Hacker News Board

Re: How much of your audience is fake?

#31

Post by meeper16 » Thu, Sep 24, 2015, 5:25 PM UTC

mattmanser wrote: post #25

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…

Incidentally, red face for the journalist, it turned out with regards to the Ashley Madison 'fake' profiles, the vast majority of them weren't fake.

That means the bots were real too.

Re: How much of your audience is fake?

#32

Post by r00fus » Thu, Sep 24, 2015, 5:41 PM UTC

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…

Apropos: Palantir crows about being able to use multiple sock puppet accounts to spam social networks - "persona management" [1].

It's a big market - and there are vendors who specialize in fake accounts - that means there's a lot of interest/money in being able to fake popularity.

The future ground of all social networks is Astroturf.

[1] http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/06/23/1218189/-HBGary-Pal...

Re: How much of your audience is fake?

#33

Post by johnward » Thu, Sep 24, 2015, 6:05 PM UTC

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 never realized how bad fraud can be until I swapped out my old Google Adsense code for new. For awhile Adsense reported $200 a month in estimated earnings which was more than the $20 or so I usually get. Then after Google finally corrected for fraudulent clicks I actually got paid my normal $10-$20. Eventually the estimated earnings start to account for fraud so I no longer see $200 projections. That means a majority of the actual clicks were determined to be fraud. Either that or Google is shaving clicks. I lean more towards to first scenario.

So Google already detects and refunds advertisers for fraud.

Re: How much of your audience is fake?

#34

Post by noxToken » Thu, Sep 24, 2015, 6:12 PM UTC

ecopoesis wrote: post #23

fideloper wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cli…

Your example is actually pretty easy to track. That's why sites drop cookies and have look back logs. Harder to track is when someone clicks on a link on mobile, and then switches to desktop to complete the transaction. Unless everyone is logged in, you have no chance of tracking the funnel.

I know nothing about advertising, but isn't this method thwarted by users (likely small in number) that either do not allow cookies or dump cookies after a session? The latter type would only affect tracking if the transaction was completed in another session. I would think that IP tracking is somewhat useless due to shared public address among users.

Really what I'm asking is that is it trivially possible to track a user that does not store cookies?

Re: How much of your audience is fake?

#35

Post by nostromo » Thu, Sep 24, 2015, 6:20 PM UTC

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 deep pockets in online advertising aren't able to easily track the effectiveness of their ads.

They're big brands, like Target, Old Navy, Tide, movies, etc.

They don't even care if people click their ads. They just want the impressions.

Re: How much of your audience is fake?

#36

Post by cwyers » Thu, Sep 24, 2015, 6:21 PM UTC

mattmanser wrote: post #25

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…

Incidentally, red face for the journalist, it turned out with regards to the Ashley Madison 'fake' profiles, the vast majority of them weren't fake.

Can you expand on this?

Re: How much of your audience is fake?

#37

Post by cwyers » Thu, Sep 24, 2015, 6:33 PM UTC

forgetsusername wrote: post #24

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…

> This is the elephant in the room nobody wants to talk about in the social networking space. Indeed. I was working for a Facebook gaming company around 2010. Through the "recruit a friend" bonuses and "have X friends click this" mechanics, there were incentives to simply make fake accounts to obtain the goals. We looked at our users and figured about half were fake Facebook accounts. I have to imagine the numbers fo…

From an advertiser's point of view, those fake profiles are still real humans, right? So your ad is still being seen, and those Facebook profiles probably share enough of the social graph with a real Facebook profile that you can still do demographic targeting, no?

Re: How much of your audience is fake?

#38

Post by sologoub » Thu, Sep 24, 2015, 6:50 PM UTC

"The most startling finding: Only 20 percent of the campaign’s “ad impressions”—ads that appear on a computer or smartphone screen—were even seen by actual people.

“The room basically stopped,” Amram recalls. The team was concerned about their jobs; someone asked, “Can they do that? Is it legal?” But mostly it was disbelief and outrage. “It was like we’d been throwing our money to the mob,” Amram says."

Every time I see an account of an advertiser seeing a viewability metric, it reminds me how scare tactics always work to drive sales. Viewability tech is very nascent and is often just guessing because there are so many variables out there that can give it both false positives and false negatives.

However, giving such numbers to advertisers drives sales of your tech big time, even if the number cannot be verified because it's such a scary number.

Re: How much of your audience is fake?

#39

Post by geocar » Thu, Sep 24, 2015, 7:01 PM UTC

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 (myspace) vehicle the article is being sold as CPM pre-roll video, and not per click as the expectation is that people don't click video ads when they're watching an ad before the youtube clip that they came to see.

Re: How much of your audience is fake?

#40

Post by geocar » Thu, Sep 24, 2015, 7:13 PM UTC

sologoub wrote: post #38

"The most startling finding: Only 20 percent of the campaign’s “ad impressions”—ads that appear on a computer or smartphone screen—were even seen by actual people. “The room basically stopped,” Amram recalls. The team was concerned about their jobs; someone asked, “Can they do that? Is it legal?” But mostly it was disbelief and outrage. “It was like we’d been throwing our money to the mob,” Amram says." Every time I…

Amram is trying to become his own brand, so I skip articles that he's got a quote in simply because he's not out to solve any problems, just get an agency job in a few years. I don't think he actually understands ad fraud at all.

Here's the thing: The (Boris Boris) sites that myspace is selling are obviously crap. Absolutely worthless. The traffic he's buying is a bunch of fraud redirects, and he thinks that it's the media buyer's responsibility to be choosier.

However Christopher Barnet of Myspace is selling these sites as genuine video preroll that retails at around 6-8$ per thousand views. He's selling them on ad exchanges and they're buying it like crazy because it reports as highly "viewable", it's in "demo" (meaning a lot of these users have a comScore cookie), and of course, because nobody believe's Myspace is defrauding them.

So here we are: At least 80% of Myspace's ad inventory is fraud, and nobody's going to ask for their money back because "hey, we got fooled too".

And life goes on.