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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?

#41

Post by geocar »

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…

Boris buys "links", not "likes". Some of the companies fulfilling Boris get those links by simply buying iframes on doubleclick, so Google makes money, Boris makes money, and the advertiser gets a comScore cookie to "prove" it's in-demo.

Re: How much of your audience is fake?

#42

Post by geocar »

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.

Boris bought iframes on doubleclick (among other places). That's how he gets legitimate users' cookies.

Assumptions about video are that it not be clicked, so post-click analysis just isn't done.

Re: How much of your audience is fake?

#43

Post by davidgerard »

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.

Citation needed. (I would be most interested.)

Re: How much of your audience is fake?

#44

Post by davidgerard »

This is absolutely hilarious. And another powerful argument in favour of powerful ad blockers. Let the ad malware talk to the bot viewers and leave us out of it.

(That said, I'm still trying to work out how to unblock Project Wonderful, a non-arsehole ad network, in uBO. Seems to require picking the precise JS they serve.)

Re: How much of your audience is fake?

#45

Post by geocar »

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…

Actually the Myspace video ads are being sold as video (6-8$CPM on exchanges; I've seen it as high as 18$CPM to advertisers), so there's no expectation that they click.

Of the traffic I observed, I was able to (in a few hours) classify 80% of the traffic as fraud. I don't think there were any legitimate users on these sites except ad network operators verifying whitelists and agency teams showing off how much myspace traffic they were buying.

Re: How much of your audience is fake?

#46

Post by ck2 »

If you have any kind of posting allowed on your website, 80% of your server power is being used to deal with bots.

Good luck dealing with ipv6 traffic where their behavior cannot even be tracked across connections.

I'm already seeing bots that do not repeat an ipv4 in their farm for hours and that is with one attempt every few seconds.

Re: How much of your audience is fake?

#47

Post by emodendroket »

cwyers wrote: post #36
mattmanser wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Of course not, because it's false.

Re: How much of your audience is fake?

#48

Post by jgalt212 »

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…

yes, lots of scepticism here, but everyone (at least everyone who didn't get down-voted) seemed to buy into FB's claim of 1 billion users in a single day.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10131975

Re: How much of your audience is fake?

#49

Post by nosuchthing »

eecks wrote: post #28
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…

Doesn't Google make money off fake clicks on ads?

Yes, but they have fairly comprehensive effort to prevent automated ad clicks - http://adage.com/article/digital/inside-google-s-secret-war-...

Re: How much of your audience is fake?

#50

Post by geocar »

teej wrote: post #11
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 sur…

Nonsense. Google has "survived" because they benefit massively from ad fraud just like the fraud in the article. Always have.

I actually flew out to New York and showed Douglas de Jager this specific trick back in June, and he said that it's not their problem, and until media buyers agree, he's probably right.

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