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

#111

Post by leothecool » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 1:05 PM UTC

vinay_ys wrote: post #99

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-...

Botnets create traffic from trusted devices. Would the icloud token provider un-trust compromised devices? Sounds like a nightmare.

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

#112

Post by bombcar » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 1:06 PM UTC

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.

Each layer of difficulty reduces the number of adversaries you have to deal with. Check your spam folders to see how many are incredibly basic and easily caught with the simplest tools.

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

#113

Post by bluGill » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 1:07 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…

Conversion isn't the best metric though for many ads. The big advertisers don't care about conversion because they are not trying for customers today, they are trying for mind share so when someone thinks about buying they are on the list.

Conversion is a lot easier to measure than "buys your car sometime in the next 3 years", and is worth measuring. However it is often only a proxy for the real metric.

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

#114

Post by bombcar » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 1:07 PM UTC

jefftk wrote: post #102

lucideer wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fra…

One AWS device grinding ads is cheap, if you have a full-fledged widespread bot net you may very well make more money selling it as DDOS service.

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

#115

Post by jermaustin1 » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 1:08 PM UTC

recyclelater wrote: post #100

jermaustin1 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Maybe this deserves a blog post, but I'm lazy. So here is the back story from 10,000 feet.

I worked for a company that basically gave me 80% time. 20% of my time was supporting the products we already launched, the other 80% was experimenting and coming up with new products.

I was blogging kind of regularly back then (once every week or so), on a subdomain without any actual backlinks other than from a few "no-index" and "no-follow" links on social media. So technically my website should not have been in the top page for any search term and I shouldn't have had ANY traffic, but it usually was #1 or #2 for various WordPress and jQuery related searches (I had a couple of jQuery plugins and wrote some php hacks that eventually took down millions of websites), and I got 10k monthly visitors on average.

So I started looking into WHY I was the top result of those queries, and it was because when someone landed on my site with that query, the bounce rate was only 10-30% compared to most other sources being 85-90% bounce. The exact technical meaning of a bounce is lost on me now, but it had to do with how long you stayed on the site without leaving or if you click on other internal links for the site.

So I proposed to the owner of the company, I would create a "Click Faker". It would go to google on your local PC, it would then search for a term you wanted to rank, then it would navigate the top 10 pages, if it found you, it would click your link, then spend 2-5 minutes navigating around your site before closing the window.

I first tried this with Selenium (or an equivalent back then), and Google blocked it almost immediately. So then I hacked together a headless version of chromium, with some standard but randomly generated user agent, and eventually expanded it to IE and Firefox as well.

And the marvelous thing is it WORKED! And surprisingly well. BUT you had to get your site in the top 100 results, and be running google AdSense before it would work. It also proved what we had long suspected that google would rank sites with Adsense higher than a website without (probably because of telemetry data they could gather).

The concept worked, we launched the product, and got a few dozen subscribers over the next month, BUT the demand just never materialized, and after 6 months we started seeing diminishing returns as google started captcha-ing our requests, and eventually it was no longer useful and we shuttered it.

Without a large enough network of consumer PCs on consumer internet, it was doomed to fail. The network needed to be around 1000 users before it would work. We even tried giving away free limited accounts (20 visits/day for free if you ran the script, and it stacked, so if you had 3 different PCs on 3 different ISPs - home/work/mom & dads house/etc - you would get 60 visits/day).

Ultimately, I think there wasn't enough education around it, and nothing we did marketing wise really helped.

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

#116

Post by bombcar » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 1:08 PM UTC

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.

When you’re competitive it can be enough to be just a bit harder to crack than the competition. The bots may just choose another advertising platform as the target.

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

#117

Post by seydor » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 1:09 PM UTC

iKevinShah wrote: post #97

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)

There were a bunch of ad marketplaces that were pretty transparent - (buysellads.com? not sure, and many others) because they were pretty basic, you were buying ads directly on websites. Google is not transparent on the publisher or the advertiser side. Advertisers "bid" on "keywords" with the amount that google suggests (pulled out of their ass? who knows). On the publisher side, if you add "auto ads" on any website, a bunch of ads appear all over the place, most of the time breaking your page layout. You are given an RPM for your ads that , as far as i know, could also be pulled out of their ass. They control the inflow and the outflow, and adjust according to their cashflow needs. Advertisers like them because they provide a lot of bloated dashboards with fancy graphs as proof of their work.

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

#118

Post by civilized » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 1:10 PM UTC

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…

Reminds me of Graeber's bullshit jobs theory. We have people generating fake clicks so that the ad departments at big companies can feel important.

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

#119

Post by bombcar » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 1:12 PM UTC

indymike wrote: post #72

ekianjo wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 divide…

This is the dichotomy. The company’s purchasing the ads want to spend based on conversions - the ad companies want to charge based on impression or clicks (if forced).

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

#120

Post by baloki » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 1:14 PM UTC

PaulHoule wrote: post #109

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!

Layout shifts on ad sites are more usually related to the fact that ads come in various sizes and to make sure one is always displayed (and the company makes a tenth of a hundredth of a local denomination of currency) so you can’t prefix the ad space to take out of the page.

Then UX and your ad team will duke it out for if it should be a fixed size or should the company make more money and the user always loses :(