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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

#131

Post by otikik »

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…

This is like burglars. You don't need to scare all the burglars, you just need to make your house slightly more inconvenient to rob than your neighbor's door.

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

#132

Post by otikik »

axlee wrote: post #24
tpetry wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. When the ad spent increases the sales person, manager etc. get a bonus. And you don‘t do anything to improve quality which would reduce ad spend.

What kind of rational system would ever incentivize spending rather than results (aka sales?). Sounds like the marketing equivalent of being paid by the line of code.

It takes a really good salesman to convince customers that they need to pay for something they don't need.

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

#134

Post by ClumsyPilot »

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 ?

> ". Crypto prices fell and GPUs are now affordable without any government intervention"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_failure

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullwhip_effect

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demerit_good

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_asymmetry

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Avoid_Parkinson%27...

And countless others.

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

#135

Post by PaulHoule »

baloki wrote: post #120
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 :(

I dunno.

Half of the problem is knowing where people will click, the other half is knowing when.

People into Black Hat SEO circa 2008 would often practice "blending" where the point was fitting the Google text ads into places on your site where people would be likely to mistake them for content. This is related tactically to a certain kind of landing page which seems to make no sense, but some users will get confused and click on a random link which goes "ka-ching".

In that kind of site all the links are paid links, on the real web it is not too different, it is maybe 10 or 20 paid links per real link. Fitts' law is on their side. I guess the only reason they don't put mini-banners between the navigation links (as Fitts would have you do) on the bottom of the page is that goes too far and gets you kicked out of the ad network.

I have noticed the layout shifts that happen on certain sites when I am just about to touch a link on my tablet and thought... "I wonder if you can predict some clicks based on the accelerometer trace" but then, nah, they'd have to ask permission to use the accelerometer wouldn't they?

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

#136

Post by ClumsyPilot »

edwnj wrote: post #28
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

The markets are working. 1. Even with the bots, the price made sense for advertisers for so long because of how cheap ads were. 2. Its starting to not make as much sense and now we are getting these accusations thrown at platforms etc. TLDR: Markets work but just not real time and not very perfectly. The issue with rules (esp excessive rules) is the corruption of the rule maker. To enforce these rules, the rule maker…

Sounds like to you, even the casting couch and sexual favours are an example of working free market.

Something along the lines of secretary that provides blowjobs for the CEO ensures they are always at the top of their game?

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

#137

Post by kritiko »

Nextgrid wrote: post #85
bigbillheck wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is why all websites have big cookie consent modals that appear before you can view content now. Most people just accept all. (And even when doing that, things like Apple Tracking Transparency have broken fingerprinting for a lot of adtech.)

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

#138

Post by ryan93 »

anm89 wrote: post #20

And how much of tech valuations are based off of the bs revenues this genetates? Id venture a lot since a lot of tech valuations are levered up based on other tech valuations in a daisy chain

I think a insane fraction of google revenue comes from lawyers, insurance and car sales. But maybe you are talking about smaller companies that buy ads being overvalued.

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

#139

Post by Disruptive_Dave »

barbariangrunge wrote: post #130

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?

Broadly - conversions that you can validate. It's kind of that simple. Depends on the channel, as well. For LI and FB/IG, have tight targeting, tighter tracking, and really really good creative. As long as I'm making more than I spend, there's something there. Every now and then we turn off our ads for a month or so and analyze traffic and sales to make sure those ads aren't capturing leads that would've come in organically. Advertising is work - you have to constantly investigate and experiment and optimize and refresh. Then do it all over again when that particular well runs dry.

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

#140

Post by mcosta »

IggleSniggle wrote: post #70
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…

Currently working in ad tech. Your solution wouldn’t work today because so many current and upcoming privacy solutions being rolled out across platforms are run through a VPN or VPN-like service, and many with IP rotation. Many of the bots are using these services so that their IP appears as coming from a legitimate privacy service like Cloudflare. The privacy service providers don’t have good incentives to attempt t…

What percentage of people uses these privacy solutions?
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