This is sorta a self-correcting problem because bot traffic is imputed into the price/bids for ads. Bot traffic lowers ROI, hence lower bid. If ads converted really well and were 100% human traffic, they would be much more expensive on a CPC or CPM basis than they already are (even though they are plenty expensive still). Evidently in spite of bots, companies still derive enough value to keep spending tons of money on ads and pay really high CPM and CPC rates.
Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots
251–260 of 342 posts
Re: Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots
#252Earlier 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…
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.
How do you verify the information being put into the blockchain is correct?
Re: Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots
#253When 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…
> and don't show them ads
Wee, I'm tunneling by browser session through IP address on a cloud provider so I don't have to see ads!
Meanwhile, ads are shown to my cracked residential router which has been enlisted into a botnet.
Re: Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots
#254Even the smol internet is not immune. At Floodgap, I estimate about 2/3rds of the Gopher traffic is automated, based on the nature, spacing and progression of IPs through the site. Some of it comes from HTTP->gopher proxies that allow web bots to index through them (can't imagine how much money that can cost), but much of it seems to be connected to no known proxy.
Re: Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots
#255A few years ago, I tried to help out a locally owned gym do an experiment with Google Ad-Words. The place small storefront in a run-down strip mall straight out of the 1960s, but it had very good equipment for people that were in the know and it was 24 hours.
The owner was a nice guy but he relied entirely on word-of-mouth and his technical skills extended to making expletive laced, 128-point-font signs reminding people to put equipment away in Word. I got the sense the business was not going well after a protracted battle with a former business partner, where the business partner just wanted to liquidate the assets and call it a day. He managed to buy the business partner out and continued to operate the place---sans a few treadmills. I decided to try and help him out by volunteering my time and some money to see if a small, targeted ad buy from Google could help him out. It sure beat finding another place like this.
The dashboard made it look very targeted geographically. But, when I investigated where they were all coming from it was 95% international and from affiliates listings from very low quality sites with no information on them. A month and $300 later, I discontinued this experiment because the traffic was entirely bot driven.
From that experience, I've come to the conclusion that online Ad Tech is 99% a scam.
Re: Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots
#256If 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.
Conversions should be tracked differently to (and weighted higher than) impressions, though?
Re: Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Amidst all this fraud there must be a huge opportunity for a startup with a different model that actually delivers verifiable results (eg. higher fee for a cut of affiliated sales would better align incentives and perhaps encourage a reduction of unwanted spam to end users).
But it isn't even a problem that experts don't know how to solve it. We know how to solve this issue. The problem is that at basically every large company someone's bonus is tied to keeping the current status quo. There are all these measures and statistics around ad revenue and spending, but the problem is that a lot of it is naïve and outdated, but nonetheless John's quarterly bonus is tied to a program that is defunct and wasteful, and often these are business people, they are not going to blatantly work against their own interests.
It is like with Google. They have a huge issue with the company spinning up new projects and then abandoning them at the drop of a pin, and it is crystal clear why this happens (people take on impactful[i.e. visible] projects for their promotion packet, but the incentives are for heading a project, not for maintaining it). It isn't a matter of figuring out a solution, the problem is that the problem will persist as long as important stakeholders are financially incentivized to resist change.
Re: Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots
#258If 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.
Because the bad actors are bad and extracting illicit gains from the industry. Removing the fraud will lower ad costs, cost of goods and as a result the cost of products for consumers.
I now realise I should've read the article, instead of clicking back as soon as it auto-played a video. I didn't realise it was deliberate, and fraud.
Re: Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ta…
Maybe the ads are really effective, but you just need a cat translator to know how effective the ads are on your cats? https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5JuVHCJVYf4
Actual cat translator: "I want to kill those pretty birds".
Re: Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
See I run a DSP and I'm not sure what incentive we would have to be against this? My primary goal is to keep advertisers spending, and the better their results the longer they hang around. I have a vested interest in eliminating fraud if followed to that conclusion. Then again we focus on performance campaigns not brand awareness so we're a bit a different. Most of our inventory too comes from large sandboxed audio a…
> See I run a DSP Digital Signal Processor?
Another post mentioned "Demand Side Platform", which Wikipedia explains like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand-side_platform
But yeah - I'm totally out of my depth here, and while the Wikipedia articles makes some sense if anyone here wanted to throw out (or suggest) a quick primer on this industry I know that _I_ would learn a lot :)