Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots • Hacker News Board

Re: Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots

#41

Post by secondcoming » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 10:38 AM UTC

anonyme-honteux wrote: post #4

"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 nephe…

Advertising to designed to make you choose a particular company over another when you go to buy that thing you don't need.

Re: Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots

#42

Post by Oarch » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 10:43 AM UTC

The digital economy would doubtless take a hard hit if we knew the true scale of synthetic engagement out there. It's just easier not to look too hard. Reminds me of a joke:

"Doctor, my brother has lost his mind. He think he's a chicken." "Have you tried telling him he's not a chicken?" "No. You see, the thing is, we really need the eggs..."

Re: Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots

#43

Post by closewith » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 10:54 AM UTC

londons_explore wrote: post #25

jamespo wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been around for a long time, but which major ad providers offer this?

Google adwords does: https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/6268632?hl=en-G...

That’s a targeting strategy. You still pay for every click, whether they convert or not.

Re: Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots

#44

Post by demarq » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 10:56 AM UTC

anm89 wrote: post #20

And how much of tech valuations are based off of the bs revenues this genetates? Id venture a lot since a lot of tech valuations are levered up based on other tech valuations in a daisy chain

This. I believe this is what really has google and meta in a panic.

Network effects for these companies have been built upon funding from advertisers.

They have failed to build consumer business models (B2C) on top of these networks.

There are clocks ticking as advertisers seek direct routes to customers.

People just like free stuff at the end of the day, and if you are zuck or Sundar this is absolutely terrifying. You have to either give something to advertisers or convince people to pay for “free stuff”.

In all honesty, the one bet google had right was gaming, consumers aren’t shy about opening their wallets.

People may debate paying a couple of dollars for twitter blue, or sharing a Netflix password BUT will happily fork over 100s of dollars for games.

Google however expected overnight success and now they going to try squeeze ads and all their freemeum toys for all the juice they can get.

Same goes for meta, which at one point was poised to be the king of online gaming.

Re: Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots

#45

Post by c7b » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 10:58 AM UTC

> Yet the digital advertising industry has grown so accustomed to working with inflated numbers that few are willing to unmask the fake clicks

That is a funny reason for why this phenomenon might have grown so big in the first place. The people in the ad-buying company who are in the best position to 'smell' when the numbers are off are also the ones most likely to individually benefit from inflated numbers (KPIs, number go up,...).

A principal-agent problem at its finest, that unfortunately might drag some white-collar workers into being at least morally complicit in cyber crime.

Re: Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots

#46

Post by ekianjo » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 11:02 AM UTC

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #9

EdwardDiego wrote: post #6

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…

> Then there were all the "bonuses" and "incentives" negotiated with big advertisers or publishers. We just referred to them as kickbacks But every time I propose that market without rules at all leads to corriluption and inefficiency, people get up in arms

There is no market that does not adjust itself with new circumstances. Crypto prices fell and GPUs are now affordable without any government intervention. Amazing isnt it ?

Re: Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots

#47

Post by stephc_int13 » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 11:03 AM UTC

This is a classic problem when relying on proxy metrics instead of real-world impact.

Proxy metrics are convenient, they are also easy to game.

With enough time, any system involving humans will be corrupted.

But in the grand scheme of things, I don't care about adtech being demonetized in the long run.

Re: Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots

#48

Post by ekianjo » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 11:04 AM UTC

gergov wrote: post #36

axlee wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of rational system would ever incentivize spending rather than results (aka sales?). Sounds like the marketing equivalent of being paid by the line of code.

Marketing ROI is very tricky to measure. On the other end, you would see that the more you spend the more customers you have. The question is: are those new customers due to your increased spend or not? There's all sorts of attribution magic that goes in the background to trace back adcampaigns to converting users (especially across devices). That's why the article mentions that most of the "big fraud" that was uncov…

Its not tricky to measure at all. Thats why we have marketing mix models for like 20 years if not more.

Re: Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots

#49

Post by emaro » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 11:06 AM UTC

If you ask me, we should simply delete the entire advertisement sector—influencers included—and start from scratch. The amount of wasted resources (i.e. attention, money, electricity, bandwidth, time, smart people) is just insane! The benefits I see are mostly lot's of jobs and means for the biggest businesses to sell more stuff. That can hardly be worth it.

I know I'm dreaming and it will never happen, but still... let me dream.

Re: Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots

#50

Post by hdjjhhvvhga » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 11:07 AM UTC

edwnj wrote: post #28

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then there were all the "bonuses" and "incentives" negotiated with big advertisers or publishers. We just referred to them as kickbacks But every time I propose that market without rules at all leads to corriluption and inefficiency, people get up in arms

The markets are working. 1. Even with the bots, the price made sense for advertisers for so long because of how cheap ads were. 2. Its starting to not make as much sense and now we are getting these accusations thrown at platforms etc. TLDR: Markets work but just not real time and not very perfectly. The issue with rules (esp excessive rules) is the corruption of the rule maker. To enforce these rules, the rule maker…

> and now we are getting these accusations thrown at platforms etc.

What?! This problem existed for so many years! And it wasn't some niche knowledge but pretty mainstream already in 2014 (Veritassium video "Facebook Fraud" with 6M views):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag