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

#271

Post by jefftk » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 5:51 PM UTC

syntheticcorp wrote: post #267

jefftk wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I wonder if there are ways to trick the enclave into thinking time is passing faster...

Pegging the rate limiter to 100% on an old iphone is also going still give you a lot of tokens very cheaply.

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

#272

Post by excalibur » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 6:00 PM UTC

If a company counts as a person for purposes of filing lawsuits, why doesn't another company count for purposes of viewing web pages? Why do they have to be human? That's racist.

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

#273

Post by nickphx » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 6:01 PM UTC

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…

If you're hoping to participate in the SEO game, you have to utilize google's javascript analytics code. Their code collects and reports on a variety of user activity. It's safe to assume (based on google published articles [1]) that the data collected is used to influence the site's rankings.

1. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9205520?hl=en

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

#274

Post by lofaszvanitt » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 6:03 PM UTC

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 is wonderful that after cable TV, where a few thousand of individuals' viewing habits determined who watched what, we now have an absolute stellar system where everything can be measured, yet, nobody wants to see the real numbers. :D

...

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

#275

Post by convexfunction » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 6:13 PM UTC

I worked for a while on an online ad measurement product, specifically on identifying and helping our clients avoid "invalid traffic", which is almost but not exactly a synonym for "bots". Reading this article, you'd come away with the impression that companies doing this work don't even exist? (Besides the venerable Dr Fou, who excels at getting his name in print whenever this subject comes up.)

I can't vouch that all the third party ad measurement vendors do a good job -- in fact I know from experience that some of our competitors did not -- but it was weird to not see any acknowledgement that there's a whole competitive field of the adtech industry with lots of talent behind it working specifically on this problem and which any serious advertiser, publisher, or exchange in the open web ad ecosystem is already a client of. (The "walled gardens" like Google/FB/etc also work with these measurement vendors, though the measurement itself is neutered to the point of uselessness, basically just passing their definitely totally trustworthy numbers through to another dashboard. Now that's a topic I'd like to see a journalist dive into!)

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

#276

Post by cwkoss » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 6:27 PM UTC

jefftk wrote: post #79

josteink wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If bot operators are being forced to use botnets, I'd say the solution is working very well. If ad-fraud goes from "We accidentally ran these 'indexing-bots' against some websites, causing some counters to be off. Sorry about that!" to "We deployed our code to run on stolen or hacked machines through botnets paid for in crypto on the dark web", you've moved from legally gray to clearly illegal. I can see no down-si…

I'm not objecting to making the move (definitely do it) but about selling it as a "solution" when it's really beginning a perpetual fight. People often don't recognize that they are in an adversarial situation, where taking a step that looks like it solves the problem does much less than you expect because other people will later counter your work.

I'd argue it's prosocial to mislead ad spenders into thinking they are reaching more humans than they actually are.

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

#277

Post by omgomgomgomg » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 6:28 PM UTC

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…

After speaking to many sales reps for ad networks I have decided to to so,however, these Cpa deals have negative value, say if you provide a service that will or with not have better customer life time value than the cost for the cpa, what would be a useful idea about that?

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

#278

Post by lucideer » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 6:34 PM UTC

jefftk wrote: post #162

lucideer wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really follow any of this comment. Are you saying perfect solutions are possible on non-adversarial situations?

I like to divide solutions into four approximate categories based on what sort of scenario they're applying to: 1. Collaborative situations: your solution works better and better, because people notice and work with you. Ex: designing an icon or coining a word for a new concept; over time more and more people recognize it, use it, etc. 2. Indifferent situations: your solution continues working about the same, because…

It's nice that you have a framework but you still haven't addressed my (I think fairly simple) question about how any of it applies here.

I realise this probably comes of a little snarky but I've tried following your comments in good faith and it just seems like a very abstract hammer looking for a nail without really reading/listening to the quite literal/simple/not-very-abstract discussion being had here.

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

#279

Post by lofaszvanitt » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 6:34 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…

And have you checked what was the ip range they came from?

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

#280

Post by cwkoss » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 6:34 PM UTC

rr888 wrote: post #147

emaro wrote: post #49

If you ask me, we should simply delete the entire advertisement sector—influencers included—and start from scratch. The amount of wasted resources (i.e. attention, money, electricity, bandwidth, time, smart people) is just insane ! The benefits I see are mostly lot's of jobs and means for the biggest businesses to sell more stuff. That can hardly be worth it. I know I'm dreaming and it will never happen, but still...…

> If you ask me, we should simply delete the entire advertisement sector—influencers included—and start from scratch. The amount of wasted resources (i.e. attention, money, electricity, bandwidth, time, smart people) is just insane! I agree there is lots of wasted time out there. But the advertising paid for Google, Facebook etc. It pays for Chrome, Android, React, PyTorch etc.

That's a small sacrifice for ending pervasive thought manipulation and surveillance.