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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

#261

Post by wnevets »

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…

> it would adversely impact their numbers in the current quarter, and well, a significant proportion of their total comp was bonuses tied to those numbers

So much about how terrible things are in general can be tied back to this one simple concept.

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

#262

Post by remram »

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…

Conversion is not even sufficient. Conversions tell you how many people went through your ad and successfully bought something, but the value of ads is *how many people who weren't already going to buy something bought something through the ad*.

E.g. people might be seeing an ad for Target after typing "target" in Google. The number of conversions through that doesn't matter and should be discounted. People might be seeing an ad or hitting an affiliate link for a website they already use regularly, if they go there hours later it doesn't mean your ad is effective.

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

#263

Post by remram »

There are probably more problems about advertisement effectiveness than bots cheating the system. This article from The Correspondent was on the frontpage a few years back and I think about it a lot: https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble-is-h... HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21465873

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

#264

Post by anonyme-honteux »

a1369209993 wrote: post #87
anonyme-honteux wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a useless word though. It's like "all lives matter". Nobody but psychopaths disagree so why do people bring it up? What's the point? Mostly to defend the status quo where some lives matter less than others.

> It's like "all lives matter". Nobody but psychopaths disagree so why do people bring it up? I only have anecdata to go on, but in literally every case I've seen, the reason has been "because of (and in response to) someone else implying otherwise".

Sorry but that's also useless until we know whose lives are in danger and who is an obstacle to their lives being in danger.

Because if the motivation is to save lies, why would you keep that information secret?

Maybe you can ask your friends if they have something more precise and more useful that their ego being hurt?

That could be for example "people who have a tendency to do depression are at a higher risk of suicide because Facebook has been optimizing user engagement like a psychopath".

Now yes I would be interested because that looks like an area where you can have a meaningful positive effect in the real world.

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

#265

Post by reillyse »

nightpool wrote: post #195
doix wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run wireguard on an OVH box that I've had for years as my VPN. I just checked and I still get Google ads. So it's not even automatic on the largest ads network out there. Personally, I'd love it if using a VPN meant that advertisers didn't even try serving ads to me, but unfortunately that's not the case.

What, you just expect Google to show you a giant red box saying "Whoops, we detected that you were trying to do an ad fraud! Better luck next time!". Google will happily show you whatever ads you request, but they won't count them as monetizable impressions and they won't charge advertisers for them. The goal is to make it impossible to tell as a bot operator whether your fraud was successful. So why give bot operato…

They should not charge people for them but they definitely do.

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

#266

Post by ThePowerOfFuet »

MisterTea wrote: post #247
jsonne wrote: post #198

Earlier 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?

The acronym was defined in the post to which they were replying (two levels above your reply), so it would have been a bit redundant for them to define it yet again.

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

#267

Post by syntheticcorp »

jefftk wrote: post #214
ad_versary wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Rate limiting access to the enclave? Somewhat related, I fear this is where we are going to end up with secure attestation, limiting web access to approved devices.

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

#268

Post by ThePowerOfFuet »

MisterTea wrote: post #247
jsonne wrote: post #198

Earlier 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?

The acronym was defined in the comment to which they were replying (thus two levels above your own reply); it would have been redundant to again define it yet again.

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

#269

Post by lifeisstillgood »

iamacyborg wrote: post #27

If anyone wants additional insights, I spoke with an ad fraud researcher on this topic during the pandemic. He had a lot of interesting things to say. https://www.mql.fm/002-60-million-60-billion-ad-fraud-questi...

Just listened to this - it was great. Augustine Fou was a fantastic interviewee and it made so much about the ad fraud market clear. I have bookmarked it by submitting the link on HN - well worth a listen to folks.

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

#270

Post by iamacyborg »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #269
iamacyborg wrote: post #27

If anyone wants additional insights, I spoke with an ad fraud researcher on this topic during the pandemic. He had a lot of interesting things to say. https://www.mql.fm/002-60-million-60-billion-ad-fraud-questi...

Just listened to this - it was great. Augustine Fou was a fantastic interviewee and it made so much about the ad fraud market clear. I have bookmarked it by submitting the link on HN - well worth a listen to folks.

Thanks! Always happy to hear some of the stuff I do is well received!
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