> Yet the digital advertising industry has grown so accustomed to working with inflated numbers that few are willing to unmask the fake clicks That is a funny reason for why this phenomenon might have grown so big in the first place. The people in the ad-buying company who are in the best position to 'smell' when the numbers are off are also the ones most likely to individually benefit from inflated numbers (KPIs, nu…
Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots
291–300 of 342 posts
Re: Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 Ad fraud is an adversarial game, and you can't 'solve' it with simple things like this. You'll temporarily cause a lot of pain for the bot operators (yay!) but then they'll adjust and start sending the traffic from botnets (hacked consumer devices). Which is already what they do when…
> they'll adjust and start sending the traffic from botnets I'm not saying using a botnet is "hard", per se, but the difference in difficulty compared to using a hosting provider is significant. If bot operators are being forced to use botnets, I'd say the solution is working very well.
Ever wondered how free VPN services make their money? Lots of them use a portion of your traffic to proxy these types of requests.
Re: Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots
#293If 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.
Re: Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots
#294The following article explains the mechanics:
https://www.anura.io/blog/king-of-ad-fraud-sentenced
But who were these partners who were paying media methane for (fraudulent) clicks?
Re: Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots
#295Re: Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there any cloud that is ad-supported? AFAIK, all of them (including google) is supported by charging directly for it and/or bundling it a different purchase (physical phone, software subscription, etc.)
I'm referring here to Instagram / Facebook. How are you going to send your wedding or vacation or dog photos to your network? Mass email? The social platforms have a utility for most people at this point.
Re: Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots
#297If 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…
Can you share which services allow to pay for conversions?
There are many affiliates for online casinos, crypto exchanges etc, they usually have a cpa + revshare deal.
They scrap the non converting audience, its vastly more expensive, but I imagine converting an impression from an add somewhere on an app or such to a paying depositor with life time values north of 200usd is just not going to be economically viable.
So far, all I have spoken to ended up a cpm model slightly shuffled.
Re: Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
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-defaul…
I'd implemented a variant of this as banner ads began increasing in prevalence in the late 1990s / early aughts, using CSS to filter out standard banner sizes and path elements. Tools such as uBlock Origin incorporate far more sophisticated variants of this. It's also possible to block (or selectively permit) specific page elements with a CSS editor (e.g., Stylus), with web proxies (including SSL/TLS terminating proxies), or other means.
My experience is that if a site tries excessively hard to cram ads down my throat, I'll kill it and look elsewhere.
For a long time the argument was that this was a limited technically-sophisticated niche response, and that "the average person" didn't care and wouldn't bother. The increasing prevalence of ad-blocking tools and default incorporation (e.g., in the iOS platform) suggests that the barrier is knowledge and skill rather than of caring, and that people who can block ads in general will.
This itself should be a cautionary note to both advertisers and advertising platforms, as the trend will be to drive the audience bar further down sophistication and means capabilties, meaning what ad content is shown aims at less remunerative segments, and tends toward ever-increasingly noxious methods. That story ends poorly, as do most Gresham's Law dynamics.
(A similar point is made more pithily here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33067889>)
Re: Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots
#299If 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...…
I have spoken with many of them and they come up with ideas regarding gamification, retention and acquisition being far superior to the ad networks.
They have a community and I would hire some of them on the spot, no need, though, some of them earn my salary many times over.
The ad networks might be ok for flight by night ops like selling viagra copies on porn websites, but they will always be that annoying pop up, I am not sure it they count towards the result if people have ad blockers.
Or let me ask, which businesses can actually convert measurably from ad networks? Assuming life time value of customers being more than 50 usd.
Its always sold as for "brand propagation", an excuse to inform you ahead that no conversion at all will happen.
If you have a fast paces business which relies on large throughput and a constantl flow of new customers it is not very useful.
I know facebook could convert very well, but they will not allow any product.