Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots

Almost all advertising like grabbing attention without prior consent is already inherently corrupted, bots are just late fallout.

"How xxx Corrupted Advertising" is a really strange titlre.

It seems to assume that Advertising being corrupted is a new thing?

And that the Elon guy is somehow a genius for noticing a part of the problem?

The whole history of advertising seems to indicate that in fact Advertising was designed to make us buy things we don't need, not designed to talk to the better angels of our nature.

Edward Bernays, aka Freud nephew, was a pioneer in Public Relations (called Propaganda at the time, they were not afraid of the word) and one of his greatest success was to convince women to start smoking en masse. He did that by branding cigarettes as feminist "Torches of Freedom" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays

If that's not corrupt, I don't know what is.

I mean the whole industry would look really really different if they had to give up misoginy. Think "Cheat On Your Girlfriend, Not On Your Workout” (Reebook) and 42.000 other examples

When I worked in adtech, I proposed a simple solution to ad fraud on our platform - assume any UA coming from an IP range owned by a cloud provider was a bot and don't show them ads, don't count their impressions.

Worst case, people using a VPN hosted on EC2 might not see an ad, but I was certain they'd cope. Best case, higher quality traffic increases yields.

The business team vetoed that, it would adversely impact their numbers in the current quarter, and well, a significant proportion of their total comp was bonuses tied to those numbers. Also, the shareholders seemed to be of the mindset that has infected cryptocurrency speculators where no matter what, the spice must flow, wait, I mean, the number go up.

Then there were all the "bonuses" and "incentives" negotiated with big advertisers or publishers. We just referred to them as kickbacks, because they totally are, but labeling something in code as kickbackPercentage was verboten. Just in case.

Advertising has always been corrupt. Bots just corrupt it a little further.

Advertising is corrupt by nature.

“Victimless crime” - I think not. Most affected are small businesses and startups with precious marketing dollars that can no longer afford to run an App Install campaign that reaches real users instead of bots. The big dogs can brute force their way through this. I’d venture to say that Ad fraud is a moat in itself.