51–60 of 185 posts
I strongly believe only way to bring these mega companies to senses and rein in on their arrogance by trust busting and creating level playing field for competition.
We need DOJ and anti-trust into big 3 oligopoly (GOOG, FB, AMZN) to crack down on them. They are too big for small players to compete.
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I really can’t help but wonder if our entire online ecosystem is built entirely on fraudulent ad sales.
Yes and no. Conventional wisdom inside ad tech is that fraud rates are about 30% on average. Typically lower for video. So there's real value in there (in terms of ROI for the advertiser) but there's effectively an entire margin of fraud where advertisers are bearing much of that cost.
I have mentioned that several times before, but I always believed that FB's but also Google's metrics are at least borderline fraudulent. Inflated by bots and apps that simulate DAUs and clicks. I only have anecdotal evidence from Google, where I was frequently charged over my campaign limit on ad clicks that I could never validate on my own site. I believe FB is same.
And another discussion where Facebook does something wrong and HN immediately starts talking about Google.
I've been doing a large amount of video production that is published to Facebook for the last few years. Mostly live, some post / uploaded work. But the live productions stats the morning after an event are extremely suspect. It seems like the numbers astronomically inflated.
Pretty sure Twitter has an ad metrics problem too. As I wrote last year: > When I ran a Twitter Ads campaign for one of my clients, within two days I noticed that Google Analytics was reporting nearly 100% fewer visitors from the campaign than Twitter was reporting clicks. That is, if Twitter counted (and charged for) 100 clicks, Google Analytics showed fewer than 5 visitors from the campaign. > The support team at T…
If some scripting is involved to log scrolling, and logging it over ajax, it will not help for the fact that when the page is being rendered, footer may for a split second appear within the viewport.
The later, is what makes the lion share of contention around video ads.
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I really can’t help but wonder if our entire online ecosystem is built entirely on fraudulent ad sales.
Shhh, don't say that out loud. I love the fact that I get internet content for nothing as it's paid for by big advertisers who are to stupid to realise that I never purchase anything that they advertise.
In 2008 I worked for an ad network and we dealt with a massive amount of fraudulent traffic. We did our best to shield our advertisers from the obviously bogus traffic, as it absolutely killed traffic quality and inflated CPAs. However some advertisers, notably one large video game/entertainment website, wanted to purchase as much traffic as possible, and they were overjoyed to get the bot traffic (which went for a C…
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No. Revenue and users are both increasing year over year.
> Facebook lured advertisers by inflating video ad-watch times: lawsuit > Revenue and users are both increasing year over year. They wouldn't lie, of course.
In 2008 I worked for an ad network and we dealt with a massive amount of fraudulent traffic. We did our best to shield our advertisers from the obviously bogus traffic, as it absolutely killed traffic quality and inflated CPAs. However some advertisers, notably one large video game/entertainment website, wanted to purchase as much traffic as possible, and they were overjoyed to get the bot traffic (which went for a C…
How and why was bot traffic priced at $0.001 CPC? No ad network would price legitimate traffic that low, which means you must have known it was illegitimate. So that means you were complicit in committing fraud against the downstream advertisers, correct?
Our ad server code only supported 3 decimal places. It wasn't until later that we figured out the how/why behind their desire for what we outright informed them was most likely bot traffic. And yeah, I didn't stay much longer at that company. The entire industry is incredibly sketchy and that apparently hasn't changed much.