Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend • Hacker News Board

Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

#891

Post by dang » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 7:54 PM UTC

imdsm wrote: post #380

pnw_hazor wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is creeping pretty close to the legal definition of fraud. But advertising has had a fair amount of safe-harbor carve-outs for over a 100 years or so that are not available to other industries. So it is no surprise it continues today. edit: I hate to say it but the auto-downvoters here on HN are approaching reddit levels. Everything I said above is true.

It's sad to see the downvote culture come here. Downvoting is meant for removing contributions that don't add much to a discussion, not for indicating whether someone agrees or disagrees with you. It seems to be a norm that is spreading though, sadly. It would appear jodrellblank is perfectly demonstrating how to misuse the feature, by calling you boring. Not exactly the kind of attitude that we want to have around h…

That's not true. Downvoting for disagreement has been ok on HN from the beginning.

I realize people have strong feelings about it, but that's because of the psychological intensity of the mechanism. There's no way HN would survive without downvotes, despite the fact that not all downvotes are fair. It's a critical part of the immune system.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314

Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

#892

Post by dang » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 7:56 PM UTC

pnw_hazor wrote: post #128

mumblemumble wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's critically important for adtech companies' customers, since it's an essential part of determining return on investment. But it's also critically important for both adtech companies and data scientists who work in the space to direct people's attention away from those sorts of metrics. You generally don't want to call the attention of the person who signs your paycheck toward the fact that it's all but impossible…

This is creeping pretty close to the legal definition of fraud. But advertising has had a fair amount of safe-harbor carve-outs for over a 100 years or so that are not available to other industries. So it is no surprise it continues today. edit: I hate to say it but the auto-downvoters here on HN are approaching reddit levels. Everything I said above is true.

Please don't break the site guidelines by going on about downvotes. I know they suck, but bilious addenda about downvotes also suck, which is why users here are asked to restrain themselves from posting them.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Apart from taking threads badly off topic, such complaints usually end up as uncollected garbage, since often the most unfairly downvoted comments end up getting corrective upvotes from users.

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=corrective%20upvote&dateRange=...

Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

#893

Post by dang » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 7:59 PM UTC

beaconstudios wrote: post #486

imdsm wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's sad to see the downvote culture come here. Downvoting is meant for removing contributions that don't add much to a discussion, not for indicating whether someone agrees or disagrees with you. It seems to be a norm that is spreading though, sadly. It would appear jodrellblank is perfectly demonstrating how to misuse the feature, by calling you boring. Not exactly the kind of attitude that we want to have around h…

The downvote button should be replaced with an "off topic" flag. If downvote is opposed with upvote and upvote is understood to mean "I agree" or "this is informative" then downvote would be expected to mean "I disagree" or "this is bunk". It's semantically misleading.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

#894

Post by dang » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 8:00 PM UTC

mumblemumble wrote: post #883

beaconstudios wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The downvote button should be replaced with an "off topic" flag. If downvote is opposed with upvote and upvote is understood to mean "I agree" or "this is informative" then downvote would be expected to mean "I disagree" or "this is bunk". It's semantically misleading.

> The downvote button should be replaced with an "off topic" flag. I hope not. Some of the most informative, useful comments I've seen on Hacker News have taken the form of wild tangents. I do see where you're going, though, that if "I agree" is sufficient cause for an upvote, then it's only reasonable that a vote in the opposite direction should be allowed to carry the opposite semantics. It's just that, from a pure…

Oh for sure—wild tangents are fine as long as they're unpredictable, which is what makes them interesting. The offtopicness we try to avoid are generic tangents, the kind where people get sucked into the same argument about some topic that they always get sucked into. Those are the black holes of internet forums—it's best to steer clear.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

#895

Post by dang » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 8:01 PM UTC

jodrellblank wrote: post #379

pnw_hazor wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is creeping pretty close to the legal definition of fraud. But advertising has had a fair amount of safe-harbor carve-outs for over a 100 years or so that are not available to other industries. So it is no surprise it continues today. edit: I hate to say it but the auto-downvoters here on HN are approaching reddit levels. Everything I said above is true.

> " edit: I hate to say it but the auto-downvoters here on HN are approaching reddit levels. Everything I said above is true. " It's not that you're wrong, it's that you're boring. "I knew this years ago, look how my cynicism is superior to your naievite" is a boring comment to read. You could explain why you think this is any closer to fraud compared to selling anything else and claiming it's the best in its class,…

Please don't cross into personal attack and name calling. It only makes things considerably worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

#896

Post by Dylan16807 » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 8:22 PM UTC

rjmunro wrote: post #827

Dylan16807 wrote: post #771

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm worried about trademark law, not fraud per se, and consumer confusion is the gold standard. The ad can violate trademarks even if the site behind the ad is squeaky-clean.

Trademark law does not stop you saying "my product is better than X". It only stops you saying "my product is X".

Generally, yes. But if a large fraction of people are getting confused in a specific context, then you can say "don't word it that way", even if the wording is true when you consider it in a vacuum.

If putting the other brand name first causes consumer confusion in certain places, that's a problem, even if they're not lying or even doing it on purpose.

Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

#897

Post by legitster » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 8:26 PM UTC

swyx wrote: post #887

legitster wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in digital marketing and this episode made me want to tear my ears off. First of all, they didn't differentiate between display or PPC advertising. PPC you only pay if the user actually engaged with the ad. Nearly all of the anecdotes they used where about online display advertising - a known crock. And we absolutely run experiments all the time! In fact, we tie our ad spend directly to conversions. If anythin…

since you work in the industry - how about your opinion on the Uber case in the original post? that is PPC.

I'm struggling to follow the actual narrative presented in the chopped up Twitter style. It sounds like there were was a third party ad network involved?

One thing we learned a long time ago is never to trust "engagement" data from platforms (be it Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, whatever). There are enough random user behaviors that you generate a ton of noise. You need to build larger, more robust attribution models that tie ad spending directly to revenue sources - new leads, new accounts, purchases, etc. Patting yourself on the back for how many shares or clicks you get is not great.

Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

#898

Post by swyx » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 8:41 PM UTC

legitster wrote: post #897

swyx wrote: post #887

Earlier quoted context omitted.

since you work in the industry - how about your opinion on the Uber case in the original post? that is PPC.

I'm struggling to follow the actual narrative presented in the chopped up Twitter style. It sounds like there were was a third party ad network involved? One thing we learned a long time ago is never to trust "engagement" data from platforms (be it Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, whatever). There are enough random user behaviors that you generate a ton of noise. You need to build larger, more robust attribution models th…

as a nonexpert its hard for me to say too but perhaps you will benefit from hearing directly from source - the performance marketing guy at Uber who found all this out: https://www.marketingtodaypodcast.com/194-historic-ad-fraud-... honestly i am not sure if he did a good thing by asking all these questions, or was partially to blame for gross incompetence managing a 150mm ad budget, or both. (the chronology of when exactly he took over matters, it seems he was only in the job about a year)

and of course for more detail the full text of the fraud suit is public https://www.adexchanger.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Uberf...

Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

#899

Post by supernovae » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 8:47 PM UTC

nutanc wrote: post #522

We did a similar kind of experiment some time back and found both FB ads and Google ads were doing jack shit for us. Google was better. FB ads were absolutely useless. So we stopped our ad spend. We observed no change in our customer acquisition. Another way these ad engines extract money out of you is by allowing competitors to bid for your brand name keyword. Try searching for Ozonetel on Google. There will be six…

Twitter has been by far the worst ad spend i've ever seen. When I complained that the clicks i got weren't real people, they blamed the landing page. I was advertising to 3 keywords "free astrophotography data" and the landing page was 0 ads, 0 popups and a link to free data to download.

They charged me for the ads, I complained to credit card company and did a charge back and they never followed through...

in fact, they offered me more credit to try advertising more.

For the life of me, I'm not sure how you can pay for 1,000 clicks to a very specific keyword and not have a single person download anything. The download was also valid for any user type. If you were on a mobile device, it showcased data that you could see on your mobile phone vs requiring a tool to download XISF or FITS data - it allowed you to download the high res image(s) in native iOS/Android formats.

Beyond the improbability of landing page being junk, Google analytics didn't fire for the majority of the traffic and twitters response was "the landing page may be too slow"

the landing page was anywhoo... the same ads on facebook, bing and google all had 75% click through and downloads but there were still a ton of clicks that had no analytics, no web time, didn't load anything in web analytics that we got charged for too...

the whole thing seems like a scam

Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

#900

Post by seppin » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 9:12 PM UTC

kevinmchugh wrote: post #861

seppin wrote: post #697

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even Google has other revenue streams. How long do they survive in their current form relying solely on them?

Days, probably, but that's not the point

It's exactly my point. Outside of Apple, all the biggest tech firms are 100% reliant on a form of income that is, at best, partially fraudulent. More realistically, almost entirely so.