Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots • Hacker News Board

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

#221

Post by kkkrist » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 3:58 PM UTC

I worked for a print ad business many years ago. They were basically running the same business model with the paper. Ads were placed in glossy and cheap/free pos magazines (cheap traffic) that mostly landed in the trash after collecting dust on the shelf. The bots consisted of distributors claiming high quality distribution while throwing the paper right into the trash. Everyone knew and hardly anyone cared because incentives were mostly aligned (mostly big brands).

I was hired to help with the transition to digital. Guess how that worked out. Next I tried running my own online marketing business. I thought not deceiving customers and actually providing real value was something clients would pay for. Some did, but competing with all the fraud became to tiresome eventually. Not going to work in this industry every again unless there are alternatives (includes scrubbing toilets)

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

#222

Post by strangattractor » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 4:04 PM UTC

People that buy ads for companies want to keep their jobs too. And like most jobs the more money the company gives you responsibility for spending the more they pay you. Don't see why they care how many bots see their ads.

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

#223

Post by amai » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 4:06 PM UTC

That is known since the 1990s. And yet, nothing changes.

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

#224

Post by Nextgrid » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 4:06 PM UTC

BeFlatXIII wrote: post #215

Nextgrid wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Realistically it doesn't matter because:

1) the biggest offenders do have EU-based subsidiaries which can be fined.

2) nobody bothers sufficiently enforcing it even against EU-based offenders, so no point talking about outside-EU enforcement for now.

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

#225

Post by seti0Cha » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 4:08 PM UTC

myth2018 wrote: post #206

> “After all, who cares if big brands waste their money showing ads to bots?” I'm not so sure this affects only big brands. I've experienced that in march 2020. I ran ads in a very popular platform and was fairly happy about the results -- modest, but steady. When the pandemics hit, my target-market shifted their focus away from my sort of product, and such shift happened almost overnight. Since I used to get a reaso…

Your bounce rate went up. That's still consistent with your target audience losing interest. It may be that they care enough to click on your ad but don't engage with your content. It could also be that the ratio of bots increased at the same rate as customer interest wained, or it could be the ads were never effective. It kind of doesn't matter. As an ad buyer, the only thing you to need worry about is whether the value of the traffic coming from the ads is worth your money. Uninterested humans and bots are of equally little value.

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

#226

Post by taftster » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 4:12 PM UTC

api wrote: post #210

manigandham wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

12 year adtech veteran here. Ad fraud is a business problem, not a tech problem. All the major solutions are well known but not implemented because of the massive effect it would have on business for everyone down the chain for advertisers. The entire industry meets every year. They can figure this out and fix most big problems in a few hours, but incentives are not aligned for that to happen.

So basically the industry is incentivized to waste money and hide this from the boss, even within companies that are spending on ads?

You mean, hide this from the stock market.

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

#227

Post by chasebank » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 4:14 PM UTC

closewith wrote: post #43

londons_explore wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google adwords does: https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/6268632?hl=en-G...

That’s a targeting strategy. You still pay for every click, whether they convert or not.

Not true. We only pay for conversions in a few of our GA campaigns. I don’t think this options is available to most advertisers though.

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

#228

Post by IggleSniggle » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 4:14 PM UTC

armada651 wrote: post #77

IggleSniggle wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

People using a privacy service are also highly likely to be using an ad blocker, I don't think trying to identify which ones are bots is even worthwhile.

Ads that are pre-rendered by the first-party origin, embedded in the page, cannot be blocked by ad blockers, unless the ad blocker keeps a giant blacklist of rendered advertising content. I don’t know about you but I’ve been starting to see more of this kind of content. Ad blockers are a separate issue from bot traffic.

But more importantly, while your assumption is probably true today, it won’t be soon. On-by-default network privacy enhancement is coming, and already here in places. You can easily have these services in place by accident, today, without knowing the first thing about them or why you might want them.

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

#229

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 4:22 PM UTC

[deleted]

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

#230

Post by alberth » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 4:22 PM UTC

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"…

> So I proposed to the owner of the company, I would create a "Click Faker". It would go to google on your local PC, it would then search for a term you wanted to rank, then it would navigate the top 10 pages, if it found you, it would click your link, then spend 2-5 minutes navigating around your site before closing the window.

Dumb question: how would google know you spent 2-5 minutes on that domain and navigated around it?