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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

#211

Post by ravenstine »

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…

Advertising is corrupt, but much of business (and public perception) is corrupt in a much similar way. What you are seeing is a lack of integrity shared by business leaders who don't ask for rigor when their minions report higher rates of "engagement". There's too much of an incentive for the people in charge to be satisfied with someone telling them that something is "up", and too much incentive for those coming up with the numbers to not perform due diligence. I've seen this multiple times firsthand.

Our number of subscribers is through the roof! Mr. Corneroffice will be thrilled! Wait as sec... 90% of them are people we gave away free trials to. Ahh... fuck it. Mr. Corneroffice isn't gonna know or care, and neither will the investors. We're BigCo! Everything we say is considered official by most people anyway. After all, Mr. Corneroffice told us "fail fast, fail early" and "fake it 'til you make it". If he secretly knew I was including the free subscribers, he'd be proud! But he can't know because then I might not get that sweet, sweet bonus. Besides, it's not a lie, right?

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

#212

Post by BeFlatXIII »

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…

That might be a net benefit for the web if it’s more profitable to rent out botnets for ad fraud than sell them for DDoS-on-demand.

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

#213

Post by BeFlatXIII »

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…

Is the “one logical place” a Chrome monoculture with neutered extensions and even textual content being rendered to a DRM-wrapped canvas?

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

#214

Post by jefftk »

ad_versary wrote: post #184
jefftk wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course not! The my parent's company is completely in the wrong, and running an online advertising business with a "pretend they're not there" approach to bots is a terrible idea. I'm just saying it's nowhere near as easy as my parent seems to expect.

> I'm just saying it's nowhere near as easy as my parent seems to expect. Apple could eliminate most ad fraud that pretends to be its platforms, by generating tokens from its secure enclave for advertisers, and providing a REST API to validate the token is from a live device. And of course, as you are in this industry, you know that Apple devices are the highest quality, valuable, converting clicks in the ecosystem.…

> Apple could eliminate most ad fraud that pretends to be its platforms, by generating tokens from its secure enclave for advertisers, and providing a REST API to validate the token is from a live device.

What stops someone from buying an Apple device and generating a zillion tokens?

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

#215

Post by BeFlatXIII »

Nextgrid wrote: post #170
kritiko wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

None of those consent modals are compliant. GDPR compliance requires those modals to make it as easy to decline as it is to accept, and not skew the choice via a pre-ticked checkbox or making one option more prominent than the other. Which again reinforces my point that nobody is interested in seriously enforcing the GDPR.

Also, how effectively can the GDPR be enforced on companies with zero European assets? They can say “stuff it” when the fines are levied. Will the EU force blocking at the ISP level?

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

#216

Post by seti0Cha »

hdjjhhvvhga wrote: post #50
edwnj wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> and now we are getting these accusations thrown at platforms etc. What?! This problem existed for so many years! And it wasn't some niche knowledge but pretty mainstream already in 2014 (Veritassium video "Facebook Fraud" with 6M views): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag

I think the point is, the problem isn't a problem if it is priced into the product. It's cheap as hell to show ads on a cost per delivery model because the value is low, in part because of bots, in part because people don't click on ads much and in part because it's not clear how useful they are for building brand awareness. If there are more bots than previously suspected, sites will need to charge less to account for that. That's how the market functions, not a sign that it is not functioning.

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

#217

Post by actusual »

Ozzie_osman wrote: post #180
dan-robertson wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A problem is that deciding whether or not a customer was converted from an ad viewer is done by the people you pay for ads. Perhaps the conversion numbers are slightly inflated but in general it’s just really hard to tell. If you show a lot of ads to potential customers then chances are, most people who buy things from you saw your ads. Does that mean they came to you because of the ad? I think even if you had perfec…

> A problem is that deciding whether or not a customer was converted from an ad viewer is done by the people you pay for ads. If you rely on their reporting, yes, but you can aleays set up your own basic attribution (with some caveats around ios traffic due to the ATT changes, but in that case the reporting comes from Apple). There are also third-party providers that can do attribution for you, but somewhat costly.

This makes it sound so much easier than it actually is. Tracking where customers from on iOS device is extremely difficult. Now spread that difficulty over 10 different advertising channels (youtube, Facebook, direct visits, google, etc), each with millions of dollars in budget, and the problem quickly becomes impossible to track yourself.

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

#218

Post by midhhhthrow »

steveBK123 wrote: post #167
Retric wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have played serval hours of an ambient ocean sounds vid on YouTube and the only advertising was at the beginning. That was years ago, but I suspect they intentionally avoid inserting advertising in the middle of such videos.

These videos actually have frequent ads throughout the video like any monetized content And because no one is there to skip them after 5 seconds, my cat gets the full length ad served.. It's hilarious

That’s not fair to the kitty. Why can’t they skip ads too? Let’s get the European nut bags to draft up some ridiculous legislation like GDPR that forces advertisers to put another pop up warning potential ata they can’t skip these ads

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

#219

Post by netr0ute »

from wrote: post #174
NoGravitas wrote: post #159

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.

But there’s no free lunch. If businesses realize there is a 0% ROI to ad spend due to all the traffic being bots, they will stop buying ads. At which point sites will just migrate to a subscription model.

That's the endgame! Then websites will have to compete for your dollars, and the cream will rise to the top.
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