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Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots

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Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots

#171

My startup is essentially an advertising aggregator (pooling traffic from a variety of publishers and routing it to advertisers) and dealing with things like bot detection is a HUGE chunk of what we work on, technology-wise. Let me try and give you an idea of how deep the rabbit hole can go. - Okay, you want to detect bots. Well, "good" bots usually have a user agent string like, "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2…

I'm in another field then advertising, but less then 5% of transactions require special handling, but they represent a significant investment in error handling, procedures, accounting and reversal mechanisms. Even then we are still manually dealing with things that represent 0.00001% of activity. Accounting correctly is always a deep rabbit hole, it comes down to how much you plan to right off inside your margins. :) Thanks for writing up this inside perspective of running this type of business.

Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots

#172
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's ascii of the screenshot in case they censor your picture of text. http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=HHeY5nP1

Here's the MD5 of your ascii version of the screenshot of the blog post just in case: 14e34998a7bc46174bccd981ad5f41f6

Alert! The MD5 hash of the ASCII screenshot I computed does not match yours:

$ curl -s http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=HHeY5nP1 | md5sum 7b69269bd0e25daa8e8b171e5d513011

Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots

#173

My startup is essentially an advertising aggregator (pooling traffic from a variety of publishers and routing it to advertisers) and dealing with things like bot detection is a HUGE chunk of what we work on, technology-wise. Let me try and give you an idea of how deep the rabbit hole can go. - Okay, you want to detect bots. Well, "good" bots usually have a user agent string like, "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2…

[deleted]

Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots

#174
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FB does not need do that shady stuff. Here some facts. [1] Bot registration on FB is really easy. If you try register 100 fake users in direct way you need to deal with javascript and web forms with strange ids, cookies and so on in your script. But if you enter fb.com without enabled javascript, they ask you change browser or use mobile version, which is not require* js at all. [2] You can register number of account…

You seem knowledgeable. What is the main purpose of bots on facebook? The article implies they could be used by facebook or competitors to burn up ad revenue, but this approach would just kill the golden pay-per-click goose.

I think reasons is pretty strait forward:

[1] You can win a bunch of contests, competitions like those who have lot of likes can win iphone or other tech.

[2] You can sell likes.. just google and you will see, there are alot of places where you can buy it.

[3] Manipulation of public opinion.

Edit:

From FB side:

[1] they still have growth of users

[2] more bots == more clicks, more likes more FB value "on paper", more revenue

[3] and when they stabilize their market value they can easily kill those bots, just require them activation by phone.

vk.com Russian social network, had same issues, but they enabled phone activation for averybody and its not that easy to buy a lot of phone numbers in Russia, but some hackers just pay to vk.com admins...

Edit2: spelling

Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots

#175
Some background and a disclaimer. First the disclaimer, I've worked at Google (which lives of its search advertising) and now I'm with Blekko (which generates revenue from advertisements as well) so I've been on the 'inside' looking out at this problem.

The background. A lot of the web you see today is automated, which is to say that 'the web' can exert influence in the 'real' world, and influencing the web can be amplified (or leveraged) as traders would say, with automation.

Two examples, in the first example we have a thief who wants to steal money but doesn't want to go out and rob a bank. Instead he 'hires' Google (an unwilling partner here) and creates an AdSense account, makes a web site, fills it with AdSense add javascript, then writes a program that can fetch pages from his web site and click on an ad. He then feeds that to a botnet for hire (generally not an EC2 cloud) and has it go off and click on all his ads. Google congratulates him on what a great web site he launched, pays him anywhere $10,000 to $50,000 from ad revenue. And the party continues until the Advertisers complain or the traffic patterns pop out as suspicious. Obviously Google has a lot of folks who do nothing but look for this sort of abuse but when you're making numbers like they, even if you had 7 or 8 million dollars a month in click fraud it would be rounding error in their quarterly reports. The people who get pounded by this are the Advertisers which lost their $500 or $50 or whatever that month by being charged for clicks from machines that weren't ever going to buy their product.

In the second example we have an ambitious entrepreneur who wants to get the word out on their new thing. They create over time a few hundred thousand 'fake' twitter accounts, they construct a community of fake accounts following each other. Then they write a simple program to have their 'influential' tweeters push out the word and their 'followers' pick it up and retweet it. If they have let the accounts lay there for a bit they pick up their own share of robot followers (from other people doing this) and our ambitious entrepreneur creates what looks like a real groundswell of interest in what ever thing they are trying to push.

There are many rewards to automating web activities, for many different reasons. As a service provider its a full time job trying to insure I can identify the fake ones (I don't want to send ads to robots, they don't buy anything and they make me look bad to my advertising channels) That 80% of the 'clicks' this person got on Facebook fail a simple 'real user' test does not surprise me.

I expect there to be a rise of landing pages which are themselves pages requiring you to click somewhere else and then clients only paying out when a prospect clicks all the way through to some part of the web site. I know that some big names already do this where they bring up a page asking you to identify your location (which helps them bring you to the part of the site for your area) but they also don't pay for the click unless you make it through that page.

Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>...without ANY facts... What about the farking article? Where they proved that 80% of their clicks were from bots. Then several others confirm they ahve the same experience? What about those facts? I also speculated on what FB is doing. Them giving user data to the NSA/CIA - that is a supposed fact, sure, but I am not the only person who believes this. Am I extremely distrustful of Facebook? Of course! Maybe you hav…

If you are into conspiracy theories then how about maybe this is Google directing a massive bot net to make facebook ads useless? > I also speculated on what FB is doing. Them giving user data to the NSA/CIA - that is a supposed fact, sure, but I am not the only person who believes this. Great argument! A lot of people believe it, so it must be true! Are you for real?!

It is not my responsibility to educate you on modern internet history. This has been argued here on HN prior; Do you recall the backdoors that AT&T put at 600 Folsom, in SF?

And the backdoors in Cisco's equipment that are a requirement by the federal government?

Maybe you thin this shit is "conspiracy theory" and if you do, you're simply a naive fool.

Look around you at what governments are doing. The NSA has records on everything you do online. They had a system in 2005 which could trace communications between users to 6 degrees, automatically.

Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots

#177
post #32

Please explain to me why a bot would click on ads? (if anyone knows) Is it crawlers crawling Facebook? Are they alleging that facebook is doing it to boost revenues? Their hypothesis seems secure, given that you can't really use the facebook site at all without javascript enabled. More alarming is Facebook holding their name for ransom for the sum of $24,000 a year!

could be ad spy tools...they crawl around clicking ads and following them to the landing pages and then follow the landing pages to the offer being promoted. Allows affiliates and other advertisers to reverse engineer the competition

Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They refused to overtly accuse them, but the subtext seem to argue exactly that.

While I doubt malicious intent on FB's part there's certainly a financial incentive to ignore this problem. How would their earnings reports change if they stopped charging at least some advertisers for 80% of clicks?

I think Hanlon's Razor is appropriate here: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots

#179
post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem knowledgeable. What is the main purpose of bots on facebook? The article implies they could be used by facebook or competitors to burn up ad revenue, but this approach would just kill the golden pay-per-click goose.

I think reasons is pretty strait forward: [1] You can win a bunch of contests, competitions like those who have lot of likes can win iphone or other tech. [2] You can sell likes.. just google and you will see, there are alot of places where you can buy it. [3] Manipulation of public opinion. Edit: From FB side: [1] they still have growth of users [2] more bots == more clicks, more likes more FB value "on paper", more…

Thank you for that. This is the real story here, IMO.

Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots

#180

Some background and a disclaimer. First the disclaimer, I've worked at Google (which lives of its search advertising) and now I'm with Blekko (which generates revenue from advertisements as well) so I've been on the 'inside' looking out at this problem. The background. A lot of the web you see today is automated, which is to say that 'the web' can exert influence in the 'real' world, and influencing the web can be am…

>In the second example we have an ambitious entrepreneur who wants to get the word out on their new thing. They create over time a few hundred thousand 'fake' twitter accounts, they construct a community of fake accounts following each other. Then they write a simple program to have their 'influential' tweeters push out the word and their 'followers' pick it up and retweet it. If they have let the accounts lay there for a bit they pick up their own share of robot followers (from other people doing this) and our ambitious entrepreneur creates what looks like a real groundswell of interest in what ever thing they are trying to push.

This is exactly what HBGary built. But it wasn't ads they wanted and it wasn't for money. They built sock puppet management apps for the DoD to influence public sentiment about various things the government wanted... except they got caught.

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