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Fraudulent Advertising on Facebook

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Re: Fraudulent Advertising on Facebook

#91

Post by Lxr »

ethanbond wrote: post #52
Lxr wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly this is likely the truth. Advertising is a unique business model that relies on thinking up increasingly creative ways of tricking users. When linkbait no longer works, lie about the source.

"Unique?" Bait and switch scams have existed since the dawn of time.

I was more referring to the fact that any given form of advertising basically fails by default after a certain time when people adapt to ignore it. The business therefore relies on continuously coming up with new ways to sneak content in to people's heads.

Re: Fraudulent Advertising on Facebook

#92

Post by AznHisoka »

CaveTech wrote: post #73
AznHisoka wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. It's all fine and well he's getting lots of clicks but is he actually converting them to revenue? If all he's doing is an ad arbitrage mode (i.e. Hope visitors click on Adsense ads) he's doomed because that will never succeed.

To both you and the parent... I can promise you he made money. Affiliate advertising is rampant on Facebook because of how profitable it is. They do anton of shady things because Facebook actively tried to shut them down. This person is 't doing view arbitrage, theyre clearly doing affiliate marketing and I know it accounts for no less than several hundred million per year in revenue for Facebook.

I've done my share of affiliate marketing in various channels, and Facebook was by far the least successful for me. The guy in this piece doesn't seem to be targeting based on fans of that supplement, or something very targeted. He'd be lucky to get a 1% conversion rate. If I was a betting man, I'd wager it wasn't successful at all. He'd have better luck targeting keywords in Adwords, and preventing those ads from being seen in the city the supplement makers are based at, or something sneaky.

Re: Fraudulent Advertising on Facebook

#93

Post by daveguy »

1) Avoid phone apps.

2) Install uBlock Origin on your browser.

3) Install Privacy Badger* on your browser.

* I used to use just uBlock origin, but things work so much better with privacy badger. There must be some kind of code to indicate "yeah, yeah, you're tracking me so well" because I don't get nearly as many broken sites. Third party comments don't work (like disqus), but HN is about the only place comments add value.

Fraud, malware, deceit unwanted intrusions are reasons to block all advertising. Facebook or otherwise, they are becoming the norm. We see this over and over again. It is past time to take a stand.

On a related note. Does anyone know whether or not there are advertising groups that provide single line, vetted ads (single line could be small non-intrusive ads) to be embedded into a site rather than injected from an ad network? There has to be SOME good actor providing single line unobtrusive ads like the old google ads.

Re: Fraudulent Advertising on Facebook

#94

Post by CaveTech »

AznHisoka wrote: post #92
CaveTech wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To both you and the parent... I can promise you he made money. Affiliate advertising is rampant on Facebook because of how profitable it is. They do anton of shady things because Facebook actively tried to shut them down. This person is 't doing view arbitrage, theyre clearly doing affiliate marketing and I know it accounts for no less than several hundred million per year in revenue for Facebook.

I've done my share of affiliate marketing in various channels, and Facebook was by far the least successful for me. The guy in this piece doesn't seem to be targeting based on fans of that supplement, or something very targeted. He'd be lucky to get a 1% conversion rate. If I was a betting man, I'd wager it wasn't successful at all. He'd have better luck targeting keywords in Adwords, and preventing those ads from be…

I work for an Ad Network, I see this shit all day long. They're profitable. Very profitable.

Re: Fraudulent Advertising on Facebook

#95

Post by tehwebguy »

cdcarter wrote: post #80
tehwebguy wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who doesn't, the marketers? I'm saying they should have to suck it up and buy the domain they want to display.

The issue is that they are hosting their pages on a 3rd party platform (HubSpot, Pardot, Unbounce, &c) and don't want to point root DNS at the landing page host or put bounce pages TO landing pages from the main site. They just wanna set up a pages. cname and run with it.

Right, and I'm saying that Facebook should tell them "too bad" the way Google does

Re: Fraudulent Advertising on Facebook

#96

Post by tmaly »

willholloway wrote: post #81
stevoski wrote: post #55

When Google got into advertising, they were relaxed about what ads they accepted. They happily ran just about any advert. But then two things happened. 1) the scammers came. 2) governments started holding Google accountable for running ads for online gambling and prescription medication. Google (and Microsoft and Yahoo) had to pay large fines for running ads for products and companies that governments saw as illegal.…

I have a lot of experience with the Facebook ad approval process from a stint running affiliate ads on the platform many years ago. I was able to discover an oddity in the approval process, that created an arbitrage opportunity for me that was quite lucrative in the online dating space. This was very nice since I had just finished college in 2008 and the global economy and job market stood in ruins all around me, and…

What are you doing these days in the paid traffic space?

Re: Fraudulent Advertising on Facebook

#97

Post by eonw »

facebook is rife with this kind of stuff, there are whole business' setup(that also advertise on facebook) to help you skirt this stuff.

i know a number of people that play in the space spending 6 figures a month doing this... they wouldnt be hard to catch, if you tried, but why would facebook want to get rid of that revenue until absolutely forced to? and imagine, i only know a handful of them.

Re: Fraudulent Advertising on Facebook

#98

Post by eonw »

ethanbond wrote: post #51
radicalbyte wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're right. It looks like Facebook host a lot of ads themselves, so I guess that advertisers use URL shorteners as a way to verify click throughs from Facebook. For unsophisticated advertisers (i.e. with no referrer log analysis) I guess it's pretty easy and effective.

I guess it'd be just downright impossible for one of Facebook's 10,000 employees to handle some bitly level analytics in order to counter rampant fraud.

or just ban those all together, no smart marketer wants others to see their stats, they should probably own their own domain or other tool that can do this type of analytics for them if they want such data.

Re: Fraudulent Advertising on Facebook

#99

Post by eonw »

Cpoll wrote: post #10
GeneralMayhem wrote: post #6

Not to defend Facebook for not doing their due diligence, but this article is really underselling the complexity of the problem. The pseudocode given: if (display_domain == landing_page_domain) { approve_ad = true; }else{ approve_ad = false; } is, for one thing, not robust against cloaking (if malicious advertisers see the request coming from a Facebook IP, they might actually redirect to the displayed domain).

Facebook could probably check periodically from a separate IP (secret-shopping, if you will) and pull the URLs that don't comply. Of course, it'd probably turn into an arms race as malicious advertisers try to profile FB's bot behavior and properly redirect it. That is to say, I agree with you, the problem is non-trivial.

this is a shared service and the operators of this service have gotten pretty good at catching FB when they do this... they will just add the last 10 IPs that saw the banned ad, to their list of IPs to only show a "safe" page to. then everyone paying into the service has that rule.

Re: Fraudulent Advertising on Facebook

#100

Post by eonw »

andrewvijay wrote: post #36

Laughed way too hard at the code suggestion. Fantastic write up. Genuinely shocking that Facebook allows such an easy loophole undetected. Or maybe they know it.

there are similar loopholes in other ad networks, if you want to play in those sorts of things. this is not a unique problem, its just that facebook is the largest and most obvious target. Those that made their money when it was much easier are selling off their knowledge, nowadays thats more lucrative then playing the cat and mouse game.
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