This is from 2014. Most of the DSPs are struggling now.
AppNexus is the only one doing relatively well, no? The rest are either laughably small (and so is AN compared to Google and FB) or went public and are tanking.
High-Speed Ad Traders Profit by Arbitraging Your Eyeballs
41–50 of 52 posts
Re: High-Speed Ad Traders Profit by Arbitraging Your Eyeballs
#42I have experience doing the exact thing described in this article, but not at the level of sophistication described. I still made a decent amount of money from it. All of the exchanges (on the buy and sell side) know it's going on, and they generally don't try to stop it provided that it doesn't become news. A large number of well-known, venture-backed ad tech companies make money from this and they're not incentiviz…
The level of fraud happening in the ad space from 2013-15 (when I worked in it) was astounding. I saw millions of dollars go up in smoke. AppNexus also recently said up to 60% of its traffic was fraudulent.
Re: High-Speed Ad Traders Profit by Arbitraging Your Eyeballs
#43Can any average Joe sign up for these exchanges and start trading? Would be more than happy to lose a couple bucks playing around
Well you needs severs that can handle the 10,000+ QPS that they are going to send you and you need to write code decide what you are and are not going to bid on, and their is no trivial work to set this up so they are going to think that you might spend lots of money in the future.
You could play with https://contributor.google.com this works though Google's exchange and the gist is they bid on your behalf for ads that will get shown to you, you can then put arbitrary HTML in those ads. I saw one guy that was learning Japanese so he used it to display vocabulary words in place of ads. The major downside is it only works on ads that go to Google's exchange which is kinda random on most sites because of stuff like the article above. It ends up being a couple dollars a month to replace random ads on websites.
Re: High-Speed Ad Traders Profit by Arbitraging Your Eyeballs
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Okay as far as it goes, but the problem with that sort of analysis is that willingness to pay is only a good proxy for how much the ticket is valued for people with similar incomes. If you have enough money, being thrifty is optional. For someone barely breaking even, it's a requirement and there is a much higher threshold for spending money. Taken too seriously, the result of ignoring this issue is absurdities like…
Guess what happens if a rich man and a poor man try to eat in a restaurant. Generally society's answer is to have the government give necessities to the poor, and otherwise let the rich buy what they want. Edit: if you really want to untangle the money abstraction, look at it like this: person A has $X. They have $X because ultimately, other people gave them $X because A provided value to them worth at least $X. If t…
You can pretty it up with economic reasoning but that's still an essentially panglossian view of the world - a naive belief that fortunate people probably deserve their good fortune and unfortunate people probably did something wrong.
Re: High-Speed Ad Traders Profit by Arbitraging Your Eyeballs
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Guess what happens if a rich man and a poor man try to eat in a restaurant. Generally society's answer is to have the government give necessities to the poor, and otherwise let the rich buy what they want. Edit: if you really want to untangle the money abstraction, look at it like this: person A has $X. They have $X because ultimately, other people gave them $X because A provided value to them worth at least $X. If t…
You can pretty it up with economic reasoning but that's still an essentially panglossian view of the world - a naive belief that fortunate people probably deserve their good fortune and unfortunate people probably did something wrong.
I had like three disclaimers in that comment.
But if you're going to criticize capitalism, maybe you could offer an alternative that does better?
Re: High-Speed Ad Traders Profit by Arbitraging Your Eyeballs
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can pretty it up with economic reasoning but that's still an essentially panglossian view of the world - a naive belief that fortunate people probably deserve their good fortune and unfortunate people probably did something wrong.
I had like three disclaimers in that comment. But if you're going to criticize capitalism, maybe you could offer an alternative that does better?
I'm not criticizing capitalism. There are a lot of good things you can say about capitalism. It results in some efficient organizations being created, a lot of useful work getting done, and everyone having incentives to increase productivity and reduce waste. It produces a lot of wealth. I don't think we would do better without markets.
Like evolution, capitalism exists so we need to describe it and understand it. It's definitely a force to be reckoned with.
It's not a system for approximating justice. It doesn't result in people getting what they deserve, even approximately.
The problem isn't only the cheating but also the randomness, which basically gives outsized rewards for being lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time. Anyone watching the tech industry knows this.
If the people who end up with the money choose to spend it to pursue justice, sometimes the world becomes a better place. But nothing in economic theory guarantees it will happen. It's up to people to do it.
Re: High-Speed Ad Traders Profit by Arbitraging Your Eyeballs
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
“Scalpers make Benefit X possible” says nothing about whether “Scalpers create Harm Y.” For example, you say "If reselling tickets was impossible and the price remained the same, then people who didn't manage to get one would be out of luck; now, they can pay more and still get one.” But if there is a fixed supply of tickets, then there are a fixed number of people getting tickets. All you are changing is which peopl…
>But if there is a fixed supply of tickets, then there are a fixed number of people getting tickets. All you are changing is which people get the tickets. To be precise, you're allocating the tickets to those who value them the most, under the objective criteria of "who's willing to pay the most for them" (which may not be fair, but in the same way that capitalism favors those capable of getting money). >But people w…
As you say yourself:
> which may not be fair
Re: High-Speed Ad Traders Profit by Arbitraging Your Eyeballs
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
So, that doesn't address his point at all.
They assert that scalpers are an example where the free market isn't liked. I'm fine with the free market there, so that's a relevant point to make.
No it isn't because that doesn't negate his point; most people don't like scalping, that you don't mind isn't relevant.
Re: High-Speed Ad Traders Profit by Arbitraging Your Eyeballs
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
> All you are changing is which people get the tickets. I don't think this is true. Without scalpers, a sold-out concert ends up with basically every seat filled. Since services like StubHub have gotten big, it is now more common for there to be many empty seats because those were snatched up by scalpers and never got bought. The scalpers are often acting rationally here by holding out for high prices until the end i…
I don't think this undermines my point about value of tickets. If the total spent on some group of tickets goes up, then the buyers valued those tickets more than otherwise; it's thus better for them to have those tickets than the previous group.
This is your point, but not everyone agrees with your point. Which doesn't really mean that you're wrong, just that we have entered an area of subjectivity.
What you suggest is certainly one way to measure "better" objectively, but that doesn't magically make it the best way.
On a large scale, you can see this in the field of health care. Some people argue as you do, and this leads to a fully free market for medicine. And the principle is that the most good will be done, because the people who value their health the most will pay the most for their services.
But whether we agree or disagree with the principle, surely we must acknowledge that there are entire countries full of people who have a different belief about the greatest good with respect to health care: In Ontario, for example, it is usually illegal for a doctor to charge more than a set amount for a certain type of procedure, and thus the people able to pay more are prevented by law from doing so.
That doesn't make Ontario, Canada "right" and Ontario, California "wrong," but clearly the idea that "it is better if the people willing to pay the most get the most" is not a universally held belief.
Re: High-Speed Ad Traders Profit by Arbitraging Your Eyeballs
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think this undermines my point about value of tickets. If the total spent on some group of tickets goes up, then the buyers valued those tickets more than otherwise; it's thus better for them to have those tickets than the previous group.
This is your point, but not everyone agrees with your point. Which doesn't really mean that you're wrong, just that we have entered an area of subjectivity. What you suggest is certainly one way to measure "better" objectively, but that doesn't magically make it the best way. On a large scale, you can see this in the field of health care. Some people argue as you do, and this leads to a fully free market for medicine…
>In Ontario, for example, it is usually illegal for a doctor to charge more than a set amount for a certain type of procedure, and thus the people able to pay more are prevented by law from doing so.
There are several different possible justifications for such a law:
1. We think the amount people can pay for some services should be capped, someone willing to pay more doesn't mean they value it more 2. We think that people are uninformed about the prices of services, and/or are extorted by time pressure, and/or the medical profession is extracting rents
If it's 2, then they can still agree that people should be able to pay what they want to, but there's an informational asymmetry because you don't have time to shop around when there's an emergency, or there's a monopoly that needs price controls to break, etc. None of those invalidate my point.
Does any of Ontario's rules apply to discretionary medical services?
Do you have any other example that applies without falling into one of the categories above?