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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

#91

Post by heatmiser »

blfr wrote: post #75
londons_explore wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If I understand the premise, it should be simple enough to disaggregate my organic vs. paid-for conversions.

For brand lift campaigns though, without enough historical sales numbers, I can see how it’s harder to tell if your ad money is being well spent.

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

#92

Post by lucideer »

jefftk wrote: post #79
josteink wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> selling it as a "solution" when it's really beginning a perpetual fight

If your qualifying definition of "solution" is "magic bullet" then there are no solutions. Every solution is a component in the perpetual fight.

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

#93

Post by Bakary »

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 ?

This assumes these things don't operate in an environment affected by multiple nation states and their specific regulations

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

#94

Post by vinay_ys »

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…

Anything that makes things more expensive for the fraudsters than the defender is a win.

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

#95

Post by jermaustin1 »

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.

I ran a volunteer bot net that generated legitimate looking traffic to websites. Its incredibly easy for anyone with a large network of gray and black hats to pull it off.

My botnet was specifically for the optimization of bounce rates, we kept away from any ads of any sort, and only navigated around the internal website through clicking relative links or absolute links with the same domain.

If you wanted lower bounce rates, you had to also run this on your PC, and kick over $50/mo. It was my favorite service I ever wrote even if it did help rank websites that naturally shouldn't have been ranked higher.

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

#97

Post by iKevinShah »

seydor wrote: post #56

That's not my problem. Advertisers are part of the problem, they take in huge sums of money and feed the Google+fb monopoly, without ever knowing how their money is wasted, they "trust" them. There is nothing more opaque than google, the company that controls both the supply and demand of search ads. If you willingly participate in that market,i m sorry, not sorry

I am not an advertiser or anything, but businesses dont "trust" them. The moment businesses see an alternate option with more transparency and somewhat similar results - They will jump ship. Although we are way far from anything like that coming up (on that scale)

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

#98

Post by xadhominemx »

mikeodds wrote: post #19
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…

If those MBAs could read they’d be very upset

Yes they would be upset because it wouldn’t work

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

#99

Post by vinay_ys »

With private access tokens demo'ed at WWDC2022 [1] as a better replacement for captchas, this problem can be reduced to a great extent. As this becomes an IETF [2] standard that Google and Microsoft and many others will also implement, this will no-doubt be used to solve bots-in-ads problem.

1. https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2022/10077/

2. https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-private-access-tokens-...

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

#100

Post by recyclelater »

jermaustin1 wrote: post #95
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.

I ran a volunteer bot net that generated legitimate looking traffic to websites. Its incredibly easy for anyone with a large network of gray and black hats to pull it off. My botnet was specifically for the optimization of bounce rates, we kept away from any ads of any sort, and only navigated around the internal website through clicking relative links or absolute links with the same domain. If you wanted lower bounc…

This is one of the more interesting comments I have seen in 15 years of reading hn, care to elaborate anymore?
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