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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

#151

Post by steveBK123 »

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…

A funny anecdote that's not fraud but puts a bit more ambiguity into the alleged targeted ad eyeballs even from the big players. There's a good amount of "ambient" content on YouTube these days. Some not targeted at adults or even humans.

I have been playing YouTube videos on my TV of birds & wildlife, for my house cats to enjoy. There is one guy who makes 8 hour long videos. There is one content creator basically targeting this market of "birds for your cats to watch".

I have noticed that the YouTube app on my Samsung TV will play for an unbelievable number of hours without any "are you still watching" prompt. Easily 6 hours!!

I've been playing them videos almost daily for weeks and only got this prompt this weekend finally.

So some companies probably think they are paying for targeted ads to some category like "people interested in cats / wildlife", YouTube collects a cut and pays the content creator a cut. All this for feline-only eyeballs.

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

#152

Post by from »

hnburnsy wrote: post #145

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 t…

I think for bigger brands like Coca-Cola it becomes harder to measure. Because it’s not like you see an ad for Coke Zero on Facebook and order it right away, whereas you might if there was a new company with a cool new product. That’s why they run “awareness ads” to make sure they stay in people’s heads but I don’t think anyone knows exactly how effective those are.

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

#153

Post by raunak »

vincnetas wrote: post #146
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.

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

People come back on different devices, different browsers, clear cookies, shop at a later date etc.

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

#154

Post by from »

devonallie wrote: post #5

Huge companies that exploit their workers are themselves being exploited. Sounds like maybe there is a god.

Ad fraud overwhelmingly victimizes companies that pay for ads many of whom are small businesses whereas the big companies like Google benefit because it means more volume.

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

#155

Post by nonasktell »

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…

>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.

Wait, is that not automatic on every single Ad network out there? WTF?

How long ago was that?

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

#156

Post by danielmorozoff »

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…

Can you share which services allow to pay for conversions?

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

#157

Post by makestuff »

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…

Did they renew?

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

#158

Post by max51 »

kritiko wrote: post #141
themoonisachees wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Is there any cloud that is ad-supported? AFAIK, all of them (including google) is supported by charging directly for it and/or bundling it a different purchase (physical phone, software subscription, etc.)

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

#159

Post by NoGravitas »

Honestly, I'd much rather they show their ads to bots than to humans. Hopefully, the day will come when every human is using a competent adblocker, but the ad industries numbers don't go down thanks to the bots, and people can get paid for content that everyone enjoys for free.

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

#160

Post by nonasktell »

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.

Well it:

-cuts their profits in half or more because they have to pay for the proxies(or if they own them they can't sell them since they need them)

-it prevents most low skilled people from doing it

-it prevents them from doing on it on an infinite scale, AWS have more than a 100 millions IPs, it's rare to see a grey market proxy provider with more than a few millions clean IPs, and it usually cost like 40 cents per IP, where it can be FREE on AWS

You add basic protection against headless browsers, behavioral analysis etc...And now 99% of the people who can fool you are already making 6 figures in legitimate jobs and won't risk 10 years of jail to earn just a bit more money.

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