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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

#71

Post by c7b »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #67
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.

Two points

- I think it's worth pointing out anyway, because in my experience white-collar workers - especially outside of areas like finance, where they do get a lot of compliance training - often seem to be of the impression that their work is far removed from what could eventually be considered crime

- Hands-on workers can absolutely be part of cyber crime schemes. Money mules, various packing, collection and delivery activities, intimidation,... can be important parts of the cyber crime 'supply chain'

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

#72

Post by indymike »

ekianjo wrote: post #48
gergov wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I used to own a digital agency. I had a client who was the 80 year old CEO of a 120 year old military contractor. He sat through a meeting where his 27 year old marketing manager and I walked through advertising metrics for digital ads. At the end he said,

“This is all very interesting, and will be helpful for Kelly (the marketing manager). I’m going to decide if we renew next year with this: increase in sales divided by ad spend. I’m looking for a number greater than 3.”

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

#73

Post by josteink »

lucideer wrote: post #62
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…

> 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.

> If bot operators are being forced to use botnets, I'd say the solution is working very well.

If ad-fraud goes from "We accidentally ran these 'indexing-bots' against some websites, causing some counters to be off. Sorry about that!" to "We deployed our code to run on stolen or hacked machines through botnets paid for in crypto on the dark web", you've moved from legally gray to clearly illegal.

I can see no down-sides with such a move.

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

#74

Post by themoonisachees »

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.

Major websites are ad-funded, the internet isn't. Networking technology, IPV4/6, http, ssl and most website frameworks aren't funded by advertising ( and even if they are eg react, they won't disappear.)

Let FAANGs fail. Let them try to disguise ads into content, fail and go off the deep end. What is there to lose, really? Search? Someone will take their place. Instant gratification online ordering (not funded by ads but fuck it) orchestrating modern slavery? We'l be fine. Facebook products? Might be a bit of a panic as chat for 50% of the world population goes down, but we'll manage. RCS is good now, matrix is right there, we'll manage. TikTok? We'l be fine.

Pretty much any thing funded by advertising is not vital to society (otherwise they could make you pay for it) and like half of it is parasitic.

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

#75

Post by blfr »

londons_explore wrote: post #63
dan-robertson wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The issue is not that you sold 60 widgets but Google tells you it was 130. The issue is that you sold 60 widgets with ads but you would have sold 59 widgets without ads: are you making sales because of ads or are you showing ads to your would-be customers.

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

#76

Post by raverbashing »

lucideer wrote: post #62
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…

> 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.

Show the ad to identified bots, but don't count it might be a solution

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

#77

Post by armada651 »

IggleSniggle wrote: post #70
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 t…

People using a privacy service are also highly likely to be using an ad blocker, I don't think trying to identify which ones are bots is even worthwhile.

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

#78

Post by jefftk »

lucideer wrote: post #62
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…

> 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.

Whether the solution is working well isn't about whether you have caused work for fraudsters (though I'm all for that) but about whether you are actually preventing fake traffic.

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

#79

Post by jefftk »

josteink wrote: post #73
lucideer wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> If bot operators are being forced to use botnets, I'd say the solution is working very well. If ad-fraud goes from "We accidentally ran these 'indexing-bots' against some websites, causing some counters to be off. Sorry about that!" to "We deployed our code to run on stolen or hacked machines through botnets paid for in crypto on the dark web", you've moved from legally gray to clearly illegal. I can see no down-si…

I'm not objecting to making the move (definitely do it) but about selling it as a "solution" when it's really beginning a perpetual fight.

People often don't recognize that they are in an adversarial situation, where taking a step that looks like it solves the problem does much less than you expect because other people will later counter your work.

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

#80

Post by titoCA321 »

jamespo wrote: post #15
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…

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

Even before online, newspaper would "distribute" their papers to hotels and college dorms to "invisible" subscribers to increase the count of their subscriptions. And let's not even get into how radio and TV viewers are counted via Nelson.
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