If "hackers" fabricate views ? How much you think youtube is fabricating and lying to their advertising customers?
Hackers Make $5M a Day by Faking 300M Video Views
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Re: Hackers Make $5M a Day by Faking 300M Video Views
#22Can anyone explain why it's the ad buyers that lose out in this case, not the ad network? Surely it makes way more sense for the ad networks to bare the financial responsibility of preventing ad fraud and not the ad buyer? (The ad equivalent of a money-back-guarantee) How is an ad buyer ever supposed to make an informed decision about how susceptible their chosen ad vendor is to fraud?
Because Google require you hold them harmless in order to buy on their network.
Re: Hackers Make $5M a Day by Faking 300M Video Views
#23>> those bots "watched" as many as 300 million video ads a day, with an average of $13.04 per faked view. Who on earth pays that kind of price to have someone watch their ad video? Serious question.
Clickfarm workers should unionise...
Their usual pay is around 5 USD per hour here in Russia
Re: Hackers Make $5M a Day by Faking 300M Video Views
#24Can anyone explain why it's the ad buyers that lose out in this case, not the ad network? Surely it makes way more sense for the ad networks to bare the financial responsibility of preventing ad fraud and not the ad buyer? (The ad equivalent of a money-back-guarantee) How is an ad buyer ever supposed to make an informed decision about how susceptible their chosen ad vendor is to fraud?
The ad networks sometimes do refund money for invalid clicks. However, there's not much incentive to do so, other than maintaining a good reputation. For this reason, I suspect they put just enough work into fraud detection that you see some refunds, enough to convince you they are diligent.
I suspect it's similar for the R&D spend on preventing them in the first place.
Re: Hackers Make $5M a Day by Faking 300M Video Views
#25Is that the biggest? From 'the past' I believe (but no proof) that the fraud on normal display ads was/is much higher. Bot generated ad clicks, bot generated content to drive up ad prices etc should be much higher than $5m even by individual hacker groups? Maybe video ad clicks are easier to fake but worth less?
$5M per day is pretty big for an individual group, no?
Re: Hackers Make $5M a Day by Faking 300M Video Views
#26I wonder what happens to overall ad revenue if anyone really figures out how to stop fraud.
Re: Hackers Make $5M a Day by Faking 300M Video Views
#27Can anyone explain why it's the ad buyers that lose out in this case, not the ad network? Surely it makes way more sense for the ad networks to bare the financial responsibility of preventing ad fraud and not the ad buyer? (The ad equivalent of a money-back-guarantee) How is an ad buyer ever supposed to make an informed decision about how susceptible their chosen ad vendor is to fraud?
They're probably following the Uber model of not considering themselves responsible for anything.
Re: Hackers Make $5M a Day by Faking 300M Video Views
#28Can anyone explain why it's the ad buyers that lose out in this case, not the ad network? Surely it makes way more sense for the ad networks to bare the financial responsibility of preventing ad fraud and not the ad buyer? (The ad equivalent of a money-back-guarantee) How is an ad buyer ever supposed to make an informed decision about how susceptible their chosen ad vendor is to fraud?
When I've purchased ads I've always assumed a certain percent will be fake clicks from th get go.
Re: Hackers Make $5M a Day by Faking 300M Video Views
#29Normally a "real browser" can't run 100s of ad players at once, but "methbrowser" is a node.js application with a C module that speaks Flash's plugin protocol directly. It simulates a dom, runs JavaScript in a node VM, but doesn't have to do any of the messy rendering that things like PhantomJS have to. It was discovered years ago because: * Their IP stack was acting like Linux[1] * Their flash player said "I'm Linux…
Can we have a spamhaus for ad fraud?
* list of botnet infected IPs participating in ad fraud
* list of offending/incompetent SSP blindly accepting forged requests
Re: Hackers Make $5M a Day by Faking 300M Video Views
#30I've long wondered if the best ad blocker would be a client that simply randomly clicks ads instead of blocking them. If you send fake clicks and spoof looking like real activity, that will pressure both advertisers and the websites that display ads. If millions of people do this...
In a brazen attack on privacy, intrusive javascript tracks mouse movement, behaviour etc. and can detect if it's a human that does the clicking or your ad blocker/clicker. Next up might be eye tracking through the webcam, do you want an BS-armsrace with the ad industry or can we just block all that nonsense? If you sell shoes, put up some shoe ads with an affiliate link, shouldn't that work good enough? You'd save mi…
A VM running the an OS, a browser with some software identifying the interesting banners and clicking on the while they move the mouse and scroll the window in human-like ways.
Imagine now a beefy box with a couple hundred VMs running on it.
Now imagine fake cameras catching a rendered environment and tracking virtual eyes that move according to what the camera would expect.
If you want ad networks that rely on cameras to detect your presence capturing your image, imagine installing a fake camera driver on your PC that shows a rendered person in a rendered environment doing random browsing.
edit: last part was unclear