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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

#141

Post by kritiko »

themoonisachees wrote: post #74
fdewrewrewf wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The internet and all related technology is largely funded by advertising. It would indeed be very fun to watch that all disappear.

Major websites are ad-funded, the internet isn't. Networking technology, IPV4/6, http, ssl and most website frameworks aren't funded by advertising ( and even if they are eg react, they won't disappear.) Let FAANGs fail. Let them try to disguise ads into content, fail and go off the deep end. What is there to lose, really? Search? Someone will take their place. Instant gratification online ordering (not funded by ads…

Photo & video hosting for all of your major life events that delivers the content to all of your friends and family?

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

#142

Post by ehnto »

seydor wrote: post #117
iKevinShah wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I did always find auto-pricing for ads weird. Why would I trust the one entity that stands to gain from an increase to set my bid? The fact that it's impossible to verify the veracity of the system makes that a no-go for me, but clearly not for everyone.

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

#143

Post by djfjdjduct »

there's two ad clients: small business who want cheap ads to sell, and large incumbent who want expensive ads as a barrier for new competitors.

the players (dsp, ssp, etc) all want expensive ads, more profit.

the second group will gladly pay the inflated cost because that's what they want anyway. and they have weight to force even google to submit to known bogus accreditation that let all bots through.

the first group have to pay because they have no leverage and can't force Google to have a valid accreditation.

ads sales pay huge 20-30pct commission because everyone knows some of that goes back to the large client buyer.

sucks to be a small business.

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

#144

Post by lucideer »

jefftk wrote: post #108
lucideer wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I don't really follow any of this comment. Are you saying perfect solutions are possible on non-adversarial situations?

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

#145

Post by hnburnsy »

To me it feels like companies have these ad budgets, and just feel the need to spend, spend, spend without measuring any sort of ROI.

Example, almost every GM commercial these days are for EV cars\truck that you cannot even buy, some you cannot even put down a deposit or the "pre-order" is meaningless (like refundable $100 for the Lyriq, but no specs, colors or pricing has event been announced). It is like GM needs to spend its marketing budget no matter what.

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

#146

Post by vincnetas »

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.

As parent said, you can see that one sale was made from ../product_google_landing_page and 59 sales were made from ../product_landing_page

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

#147

Post by rr888 »

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...…

> 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!

I agree there is lots of wasted time out there. But the advertising paid for Google, Facebook etc. It pays for Chrome, Android, React, PyTorch etc.

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

#149

Post by shalmanese »

robertlagrant wrote: post #60

If they're getting decent ROI on their ad spend, what does it matter? TV ads were normally shown to empty rooms while their occupants went to make themselves a drink. Still worth buying.

It mainly has an effect on content creators who rely on ads for revenue. They're the only ones providing real conversions but they're forced to share their revenue with bots emulating fake conversions and so their total slice of the pie goes down.

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

#150

Post by gergov »

ekianjo wrote: post #48
gergov wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Marketing ROI is very tricky to measure. On the other end, you would see that the more you spend the more customers you have. The question is: are those new customers due to your increased spend or not? There's all sorts of attribution magic that goes in the background to trace back adcampaigns to converting users (especially across devices). That's why the article mentions that most of the "big fraud" that was uncov…

Its not tricky to measure at all. Thats why we have marketing mix models for like 20 years if not more.

The entire problem with ad fraud is that it's engineered to look good on those models.
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