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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

#81

Post by bostik »

mjburgess wrote: post #23
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

Markets are, in a sense, defined by rules. Perhaps the argument goes better if you say competition without rules leads to mafia, ie., people stop competing and form gangs -- since this is more efficient for them . These gangs then monopolise trade, and use violence to stop people competing with them. If they disagree, you can always point to the state itself as an example. But likewise, without a winning mafia to set…

> No group wants to compete, they want to have already won.

Or to put it another way: a capitalist fears nothing more than a truly well-functioning market.

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

#82

Post by willis936 »

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…

Fleecing the investors, who are fleecing the workers and consumers to entertain their gambling addiction.

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

#83

Post by bigbillheck »

Nextgrid wrote: post #26
abofh wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usually there's a magic pixel that you embed on the checkout success page or a callback you invoke. I suppose people could cheat, but if your ad never converts, the network has no incentive to run it.

This has major privacy and GDPR implications though.

I don't think ad companies care too much about that.

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

#84

Post by JCM9 »

Years ago our company was running an ad campaign on social media. Curious on the results I spent time looking into a randomly selected pool of the “users” that had been clicking on our ads. It quickly became clear that at least half (if not a lot more) of the clicks were from what appeared to be fake users or bots. We shut the whole ad spend there off immediately.

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

#85

Post by Nextgrid »

bigbillheck wrote: post #83
Nextgrid wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has major privacy and GDPR implications though.

I don't think ad companies care too much about that.

Those who implement the tools from the ad companies are responsible for their GDPR compliance - you don't get to offload the blame somewhere else.

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

#86

Post by kylebyproxy »

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...…

I'm just amazed ads work at all. Anytime I receive an ad I didn't explicitly request, I boycott that company. I'd have hoped enough likeminded people in the world would naturally defeat the ad sector, but evidently I'm an outlier. I'll never understand why the average consumer rewards and reinforces ad spend

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

#87

Post by a1369209993 »

anonyme-honteux wrote: post #66
tialaramex wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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

I only have anecdata to go on, but in literally every case I've seen, the reason has been "because of (and in response to) someone else implying otherwise".

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

#88

Post by 3pt14159 »

What blows my mind is how bots even care about this stuff.

Back in 2009 I started my first tech startup with a friend. We crawled the net and stored the locations of and contents of online ads. Aside from the mistake that this actually costs a lot of money and we were too young to effectively raise money, we also made another mistake: Ads were about to get very dynamic. Not just ads rotating on a site, but search retargetting and hypertargetting were about to take off.

So I did what any reasonable founder would do after learning that the business just wouldn't work. I turned down a just offered $200k (huge at that time) and closed up the business.

Years later I'm learning that bots are still interested, and I suppose there is some signal here, but its minuscule compared to what was available back then. Plus, there are fewer and fewer out-of-app websites people spend there time on these days.

I dunno. I'm happy that startup never went anywhere. It would have sucked to be swept into the ad tech industry over the past decade.

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

#89

Post by golergka »

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…

But what if you (the party who bans the cloud provider IP ranges) don't have a majority share of the market, and your bigger competitors don't block these ranges?

Then it would be easier to bot owners to just move onto your competitors, and you would have higher efficiency than them.

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

#90

Post by lucideer »

jefftk wrote: post #78
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.

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.

Difficulty will always have a direct impact on scale: if you've significantly increased the difficulty for fraudsters that's going to have a knock-on effect on the amount of fraudulent traffic you receive.

There's no such thing as zero; a successful measure is one that achieves significant reduction.

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