311–320 of 342 posts
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The internet and all related technology is largely funded by advertising. It would indeed be very fun to watch that all disappear.
But that advertising money still come from somewhere and someone, right? Surely there is some other way to make those someones to spend that money on the internet and all related technology?
I'd happily set it if it meant lower ad revenue, and that way, the actual click fraud bots wouldn't be committing fraud.
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.
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Markets are, in a sense, defined by rules. Perhaps the argument goes better if you say competition without rules leads to mafia, ie., people stop competing and form gangs -- since this is more efficient for them . These gangs then monopolise trade, and use violence to stop people competing with them. If they disagree, you can always point to the state itself as an example. But likewise, without a winning mafia to set…
> No group wants to compete, they want to have already won. Or to put it another way: a capitalist fears nothing more than a truly well-functioning market.
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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.
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…
I had friends in college who did door to door sales for a major cable company. At the beginning of every week they had to stop by the office to pick up a stack of flyers and at the end of every week they had to mark off the houses they visited on a map. They got paid per flyer distributed and every flyer was distributed directly into the trash can.
They got paid, no one got harassed by door to door sales people, and the cable company got their marked off maps. Everyone was happy.
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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!
> Bots are computer algorithms designed to execute specific online tasks autonomously and repetitively. They simulate the behavior of human beings in social networks, interacting with other users and sharing information and messages. Millions of bots spread information on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. According to a 2017 estimate, there were 23 million bots on Twitter (around 8.5% of all Twitter accounts), 140 million bots on Facebook (up to 5.5% of all Facebook accounts) and approximately 27 million bots on Instagram (8.2% of all Instagram accounts). These three platforms alone contained 190 million bots—more than half the number of people who live in the entire United States.
I've been wondering (and posting on HN about it) this exact topic for years. All those bots are pretending to be online users and all of them doing everything possible to circumvent detection, including consuming ads.
I would bet that most big advertisers have contractual rebates and reimbursements covering the fake ads - there's no way they'd stand for this sort of graft filling Google and Facebooks bank accounts while they paid millions for ads to fake users.
It's the smaller advertisers that get really shafted. Some small franchise or website buying a few thousand ads only to get little in the way of return on their investment. They have no way to detect the false impressions and rely on the various ad networks to detect bots, of which they have zero incentive to do.
I'm amazed it's taken this long for any news to come out about this, and even more amazed Congress and law enforcement haven't been involved yet. Again, look at the numbers above - this is a huge number of fake users and that only covers the disinformation efforts. Imagine the various networks out there that are focused purely on generating ad revenue and nothing else.
1. https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/ia/ia_c...
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> 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.
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But that advertising money still come from somewhere and someone, right? Surely there is some other way to make those someones to spend that money on the internet and all related technology?
That someone is the one watching the ad by buying products the person sees in ads