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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

#231

Post by Retric »

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

Could be because some people actually watch these videos and click skip occasionally. The sea sounds was a static image so I doubt people just stared at the empty screen for very long.

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

#232

Post by codegeek »

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…

"assume any UA coming from an IP range owned by a cloud provider was a bot and don't show them ads"

As someone who is trying to get into google ads for their startup, what's the best way to do this ? Is there a nice Google Ads 101 other than Google's own tutorials ?

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

#233

Post by mysterypie »

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"…

> long suspected that google would rank sites with Adsense higher than a website without

Google says that they don't do that. I don't believe Google based on personal experience and it's interesting to see that you had some experimental confirmation.

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

#234

Post by winddude »

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…

We did do that when I worked in adtech. However even 10 years ago there were massive networks of residential proxies.

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

#235

Post by jermaustin1 »

alberth wrote: post #230
jermaustin1 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Your site needed 2 or 3 things to work: Ranking in the top 100 results of Google Search, then Google AdSense and/or Analytics for this to fool Google.

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

#236

Post by bart_spoon »

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

Ironically, it seems like the best indicator an actual human is there to view your ad would be if they skipped them after 5 seconds or watched the whole thing.

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

#237

Post by jermaustin1 »

mysterypie wrote: post #233
jermaustin1 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"…

> long suspected that google would rank sites with Adsense higher than a website without Google says that they don't do that. I don't believe Google based on personal experience and it's interesting to see that you had some experimental confirmation.

It is definitely hard to compare one site ranking vs another and definitively conclude that AdSense made one rank higher than just Analytics, but in every case AdSense+Analytics sites correlated with a better ranking/.

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

#238

Post by semanticjudo »

dan-robertson wrote: post #53
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…

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…

Sounds like a legitimately good application for block chain - both parties can have access to the immutable transaction history. Similar to how Walmart applied block chain to inventory delivery disputes.

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

#239

Post by Viliam1234 »

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.

If businesses actually had the ability to correctly calculate ROI to ad spend, we wouldn't be talking about ad fraud.

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

#240

Post by edmundsauto »

jermaustin1 wrote: post #237
mysterypie wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> long suspected that google would rank sites with Adsense higher than a website without Google says that they don't do that. I don't believe Google based on personal experience and it's interesting to see that you had some experimental confirmation.

It is definitely hard to compare one site ranking vs another and definitively conclude that AdSense made one rank higher than just Analytics, but in every case AdSense+Analytics sites correlated with a better ranking/.

Wouldn't another possibility simply be that that sites which invest in those 2 technologies also invest in SEO?
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