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Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots

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

#61

Post by markdestouches »

ekianjo wrote: post #46
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

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 ?

No one claims markets don't adjust. The claim is that unregulated markets often don't adjust for the benefit of the society at large. It weren't as amazing when the GPU prices soared due to mining, was it?

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

#62

Post by lucideer »

jefftk wrote: post #34
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…

> 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 Ad fraud is an adversarial game, and you can't 'solve' it with simple things like this. You'll temporarily cause a lot of pain for the bot operators (yay!) but then they'll adjust and start sending the traffic from botnets (hacked consumer devices). Which is already what they do when…

> they'll adjust and start sending the traffic from botnets

I'm not saying using a botnet is "hard", per se, but the difference in difficulty compared to using a hosting provider is significant. If bot operators are being forced to use botnets, I'd say the solution is working very well.

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

#63

Post by londons_explore »

dan-robertson wrote: post #53
londons_explore wrote: post #11

If you are paying any bill for ads, make sure you only pay for conversions . Ie. unless the customer actually buys your product, then don't pay anything. Eg. instead of paying $0.002 per view of your ad, or $0.10 per click of your ad, pay $6 per person who clicks your ad and then buys your product. That way, ad fraud doesn't affect you. Plenty of ad providers allow such an option. Internally, they convert your paymen…

A problem is that deciding whether or not a customer was converted from an ad viewer is done by the people you pay for ads. Perhaps the conversion numbers are slightly inflated but in general it’s just really hard to tell. If you show a lot of ads to potential customers then chances are, most people who buy things from you saw your ads. Does that mean they came to you because of the ad? I think even if you had perfec…

Most online businesses have multiple ways to track conversions... It will become pretty obvious if Google says you sold 130 widgets but your warehouse guys only delivered 60....

Likewise, lots of businesses have a different landing page for people coming from an ad vs people from organic search and people coming from referral links/shared URL's. The business counts how many people visited each of those.

They'll know if the ad providers stats are lying...

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

#64

Post by viraptor »

ekianjo wrote: post #46
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

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 ?

That's not quite right. The affordability increased slightly with the falling prices. But the merge basically opened the floodgates. It was a change in technology rather than a "market change" (as in business incentives balancing over time) that caused it.

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

#65

Post by fdewrewrewf »

emaro wrote: post #49

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...…

The internet and all related technology is largely funded by advertising. It would indeed be very fun to watch that all disappear.

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

#66

Post by anonyme-honteux »

tialaramex wrote: post #31
ahartmetz wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strange choice to stress misogyny. Women see attractive models in advertising, they think "unachievable beauty ideals, I feel pressured". I see the same, I think "it exploited my biology to grab my attention, damn it worked again". Is it misogyny or is it mis-everyone, let's make money?

> Is it misogyny or is it mis-everyone The word you might want here is misanthropy "a dislike of humankind".

That's a useless word though.

It's like "all lives matter". Nobody but psychopaths disagree so why do people bring it up? What's the point?

Mostly to defend the status quo where some lives matter less than others.

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

#67

Post by lotsofpulp »

c7b wrote: post #45

> 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, nu…

From my definition of white collar (office worker sitting on chair in front of computer all day), and blue collar (factory/shop/traveling/working with hands not computer), I would have thought white collar workers were the ones most likely capable of committing cyber crimes.

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

#68

Post by jefftk »

tjoff wrote: post #57
jefftk wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Ad fraud is an adversarial game, and you can't 'solve' it with simple things like this. You'll temporarily cause a lot of pain for the bot operators (yay!) but then they'll adjust and start sending the traffic from botnets (hacked consumer devices). Which is already what they do when…

So obviously it is better doing nothing since it benefits us??

Of course not! The my parent's company is completely in the wrong, and running an online advertising business with a "pretend they're not there" approach to bots is a terrible idea. I'm just saying it's nowhere near as easy as my parent seems to expect.

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

#69

Post by emaro »

fdewrewrewf wrote: post #65
emaro wrote: post #49

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...…

The internet and all related technology is largely funded by advertising. It would indeed be very fun to watch that all disappear.

Ads, military and porn, the three pillars of the internet!

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

#70

Post by IggleSniggle »

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…

Currently working in ad tech. Your solution wouldn’t work today because so many current and upcoming privacy solutions being rolled out across platforms are run through a VPN or VPN-like service, and many with IP rotation. Many of the bots are using these services so that their IP appears as coming from a legitimate privacy service like Cloudflare.

The privacy service providers don’t have good incentives to attempt to identify which users are bots because it would undermine their privacy claims. Tough situation.

We do think we have a solution to this but it’s unlikely to last in a privacy arms race. There’s really only one logical place this ends with the ad model surviving, and it’s not pretty.

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