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

#101

Post by Dave3of5 » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 12:49 PM UTC

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…

> If you are paying any bill for ads, make sure you only pay for conversions

Others have already pointed out that this is actually impossible. The big ad platforms charge on impressions you can setup any targeting you want but they charge on impressions that's it.

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

#102

Post by jefftk » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 12:50 PM UTC

lucideer wrote: post #90

jefftk wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Definitely! I was taking issue with your counting "forced to use botnets" as a success, but it sounds like you're actually saying it's just a decent proxy for success, because it is hard enough that you expect this to massively cut down on fraud?

(I think of botnets as not actually that hard a step for fraudsters, and fraudsters as being very determined, but it depends a lot on how much money people can make with fraud against your particular situation)

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

#103

Post by c7b » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 12:52 PM UTC

Oarch wrote: post #42

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..."

> No. You see, the thing is, we really need the eggs.

Isn't that the opposite of the problem here? If the bots actually generated sales, the adbuyers would likely be quite happy. This seems more like the Emperor's New Clothes, if you're looking for a metaphor.

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

#104

Post by marginalia_nu » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 12:55 PM UTC

JCM9 wrote: post #84

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.

I sometimes when an advertisement annoys me, I punish it clicking on it, clicking around on the website, maybe adding items to the cart or going through half of the click funnel, and then I close the tab and never come back.

It's great.

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

#105

Post by Joker_vD » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 12:58 PM UTC

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.

But that advertising money still come from somewhere and someone, right? Surely there is some other way to make those someones to spend that money on the internet and all related technology?

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

#106

Post by mjburgess » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 12:58 PM UTC

bostik wrote: post #81

mjburgess wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, because a capitalist (in the friedman, etc. sense) distinguishes between free markets and ancap-competition. A free market is a construct of a state with a functioning legal system, requiring as it does, property rights (, limited liability, etc.).

Capitalism is not ancap libertarianism. Indeed, it seems quite clear that ancap is an iterative contradiction, as "rule-free competition" cannot produce free markets.

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

#107

Post by PaulHoule » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 1:00 PM UTC

heatmiser wrote: post #91

blfr wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s very hard to attribute sales correctly.

I might see an ad today, think about it for a week, then come back and buy the product later. I might keep buying it for years afterwards. The ad is often just one step in the process that gets somebody to buy.

I think of how I got turned on to Monster Energy drinks because I saw them at the store and liked the product and the portion size compared to Red Bull. A few years later Monster started spending heavily on sponsorships and other marketing but by that point I had lost interest and moved on.

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

#108

Post by jefftk » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 1:01 PM UTC

lucideer wrote: post #92

jefftk wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Only in adversarial games, and most of engineering isn't adversarial. Enabling compression on your website or designing your UI to make things clear to users give real improvements that don't degrade with time. Other sorts of improvements like optimizing your JS delivery or your server specs decay with time, because people make incidental changes elsewhere, but this is a slow process. Adversarial situations are very different because there's a motivated person on the other end trying to counter what you're doing, and gains are especially short-lived.

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

#109

Post by PaulHoule » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 1:02 PM UTC

I think fraud is ubiquitous in advertising and often the publishers are to blame. Frequently on mobile devices the ads cover the content and you wind up clicking on the ad when you are trying to hide it.

Also I think it is not so accidental that mobile web sites have so many layout shifts because each layout shift is a chance you click on the wrong link and ka-ching!

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

#110

Post by bluGill » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 1:02 PM UTC

golergka wrote: post #89

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…

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.

What if the customers you want to attract use a cloud provider?