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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

#121

Post by tomhallett »

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 made an ad fraud startup which ran into the exact same problem. With video ads, advertisers will pay 10x more to be in a “user initiated” video player (the user clicked or there was a reasonable expectation there’d be a video on that page - YouTube, camera icon on preceding link, etc).

But more often then not, those ads are running in an autoplay context (sticky video players in the bottom corner, large players in the footer, etc).

I built a mechanism which could tell the difference (viewport, fixed positioning, fingerprint elements on the page, provide a screenshot of the offended page with your ad on it, and various other signals).

We ran tests with advertisers, agencies, demand side platforms (dsps), server side platforms (ssps). We’d compare their existing fraud numbers (very low) with our reports (80% fraud).

Within each company, we’d have a champion saying “this is going to change everything. Quality supply, better performance metrics, etc etc”. Then we’d get introduced to a team whose compensation was driven by “percentage of spend” - every deal died at this stage.

My opinion: if your company is using online advertising tied to conversions (someone buying something, or potentially signing up for something) then you’ll be fine as long as it’s economical. But if your ads are for brand awareness, be extremely careful running on any website which isn’t in the top 10 sites on the internet.

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

#122

Post by wccrawford »

c7b wrote: post #103
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.

I read that as his brother doesn't actually lay eggs, they're just hoping against hope for it.

Same as the ads and the bots.

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

#123

Post by recyclelater »

jermaustin1 wrote: post #115
recyclelater wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"…

The word volunteer is what caught my attention so much, sounds like you were making a product to sell, so why use the word volunteer?

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

#124

Post by londons_explore »

PaulHoule wrote: post #107
heatmiser wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I might see an ad today, think about it for a week, then come back and buy the product later.

In general, unless a specific sale can be affirmatively linked to a user who has clicked an ad for a specific product, then it is excluded. Basically, the ad providers stats won't count people like you who clear cookies regularly, so the business benefits from those sales and the ad provider loses out.

So, in general, stats collection and reporting errors are in favor of the business selling goods.

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

#126

Post by aliqot »

kylebyproxy wrote: post #86
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

> Anytime I receive an ad I didn't explicitly request, I boycott that company.

Can we see your list? Is it in Git somewhere?

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

#127

Post by jermaustin1 »

recyclelater wrote: post #123
jermaustin1 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"…

The word volunteer is what caught my attention so much, sounds like you were making a product to sell, so why use the word volunteer?

Because we didn't forcefully take over anyone's computer. You voluntarily signed up and installed the bot. And it was free if you installed the script to use the botnet to crawl your own websites.

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

#128

Post by paulgb »

bombcar wrote: post #112
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.

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.

Moreover, fraudsters are generally lazy. If fraud that works against somebody else doesn't work for you, the fraudster won't go after you until they've saturated all the “somebody elses”, which may be a long time. I used to work in fraud detection in adtech, there was a lot of low-hanging fruit.

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

#129

Post by barbariangrunge »

tomhallett wrote: post #121
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 made an ad fraud startup which ran into the exact same problem. With video ads, advertisers will pay 10x more to be in a “user initiated” video player (the user clicked or there was a reasonable expectation there’d be a video on that page - YouTube, camera icon on preceding link, etc). But more often then not, those ads are running in an autoplay context (sticky video players in the bottom corner, large players in…

By top 10, do you mean google / Facebook ads? I have some friends whose online store got a lot do traffic from Facebook but I don’t know much personally

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

#130

Post by barbariangrunge »

I’m going to ask the dumb question: if you had a newsletter or some online store that you wanted to promote, and you had at least some budget for ads, what actually works in terms of ads?

All anyone talks about is how ads never work, but I know a couple of people who, for example, thrive on Facebook ads. Are they outliers then?

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