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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

#321

Post by jklinger410 »

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…

> ...make sure you only pay for conversions...Plenty of ad providers allow such an option

This is untrue.

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

#322

Post by EdwardDiego »

jefftk wrote: post #34
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…

> 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…

That's fair, it wouldn't have prevented all fraud, but it would've excised a decent segment of obvious fraud, and tbh, we weren't Google, so the transition from t2.micros to bot nets may have proven economically unviable for the cut-rate scammers.

All "well, actually" aside, my point was, and remains... ...we could've taken some action against obvious fraud, but we didn't, because the business team didn't want their numbers to go down.

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

#323

Post by lossolo »

jefftk wrote: post #271
syntheticcorp wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Most of serious implementations have their own clocks or incremented counters, which makes tricking them very hard even for a state actor.

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

#324

Post by Schroedingersat »

kritiko wrote: post #202
max51 wrote: post #158

Earlier 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.

Is this a joke? This is a joke, right? We're being poed.

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

#325

Post by iamacyborg »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #317
iamacyborg wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No worries - if you have a moment please post about the hideen side of making the podcast (equipment, finding / persuading guests, fitting it in the day etc) Always interested in the real how to

I’ve written a few bits about that here https://www.jacquescorbytuech.com/writing/starting-a-podcast...

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

#326

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

from wrote: post #174
NoGravitas wrote: post #159

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.

No. Ads will be inserted server-side. Like in the old days of print magazines and TV.

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

#327

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

anonyme-honteux wrote: post #4

"How xxx Corrupted Advertising" is a really strange titlre. It seems to assume that Advertising being corrupted is a new thing? And that the Elon guy is somehow a genius for noticing a part of the problem? The whole history of advertising seems to indicate that in fact Advertising was designed to make us buy things we don't need, not designed to talk to the better angels of our nature. Edward Bernays, aka Freud nephe…

Ad tech is applied sociology. What you're talking about is a different advertising industry, one that deals with human psychology.

Ad fraud is essentially incorrect/fraudulent sampling that leads to biased results. (Usually with a hidden motive.)

Which is why in traditional advertising sampling and data collection is done by government-mandated entities. Digital advertising has been "disrupted" by entities like Google and Facebook, but eventually we'll get there too.

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

#329

Post by mileshampson »

boxed wrote: post #161
mcosta wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What percentage of people uses these privacy solutions?

It'll soon be most iPhone and mac users. The mac userbase can be ignored, but iPhones? Those are the people you want to target the most!

OP mentioned blocking cloud providers but didn’t explicitly mention CDNs, and at least with AWS their IP list allows you to filter out CloudFront. I don’t know of a list of second tier relay operators for iCloud Private Relay but I do know that Fastly[1] and Cloudflare[2] were going to be participating, and presumably other CDNs with their larger number of POPs compared to most VPS providers would be logical choices to run it. So blocking only VPS IP ranges might not necessarily affect iCloud Private Relay. 1: https://www.fastly.com/blog/icloud-private-relay-and-a-priva... 2: https://blog.cloudflare.com/icloud-private-relay/

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

#330

Post by grandpoobah »

wccrawford wrote: post #122
c7b wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No. You see, the thing is, we really need the eggs. Isn't that the opposite of the problem here? If the bots actually generated sales, the adbuyers would likely be quite happy. This seems more like the Emperor's New Clothes, if you're looking for a metaphor.

I read that as his brother doesn't actually lay eggs, they're just hoping against hope for it. Same as the ads and the bots.

"We could really use the eggs" might have been a better way of phrasing it then.
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