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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

#181

Post by ChuckMcM »

samstave wrote: post #180
ChuckMcM wrote: post #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 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…

Yup, and there are several perhaps as many as a dozen 'sock puppet' systems out there today.

Generally I refer to any program which is using APIs intended for humans in order to achieve a result for the person who ran it, a 'bot'. Comes from folks who build scripted clients for computer games.

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

#182

Post by Halienja »

What's a sure way of determining that the clicks are not coming from a proxy? I have to launch an online campaign. There are some many services that provide a high anonymous proxy and sometimes services like http://www.ip.cc/check-proxy-basic.php report a real ip as proxy. So how do I distinguish real clicks from fake users. During the signup, I can only collect Name and Email.

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

#183

Post by bhangi »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #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 am…

This just begs the question -- how difficult is it to do a reasonable job of detecting bots before passing through the "click"? If it is really hard to do during the request processing, surely it is not hard to do before billing?

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

#184

Post by jlgreco »

vampirechicken wrote: post #119
wpietri wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This could be a businessperson's interpretation of what happened. Or they might have indeed reinvented it. Kids these days and their Heroku! Back in my day we'd process each HTTP request by hand. And we'd do it uphill both ways in the snow.

using awk.

Hey now, awk is simply lovely. It's ridiculous how popular it is to slight it these days.

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

#185

Post by rotten »

nhashem wrote: post #162

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…

And then there are the "wet bots" - Amazon Turks and overseas humans (lowly) paid to use a regular browser and PC and manually click on stuff for whatever purpose (rig internet voting, drive fake advertising charges, steal data, skew hit counters - whatever).

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

#186

Post by eranation »

tatsuke95 wrote: post #149
fchollet wrote: post #121

Very unlikely to have been bots from FB, they're not yet quite that desperate. They would be 90% sure of getting busted, and it would be a huge deal breaker for a lot of their clients. A suicide move. The more plausible reality is that there are just a lot of bots crawling FB fan pages, poorly programmed bots that will just follow every single link they come across. That's very much in line with my personal experienc…

>" Hopefully they'll take care of this issue soon. " Much like the multiple account issue, it's beneficial for Facebook to turn a blind eye. That is, unless it escalates into a PR issue.

First page in HN, for some people this is considered a PR issue :)

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

#187

Post by flatline3 »

jokermatt999 wrote: post #153
bigdubs wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my mind having an in-house bot network and being totally ignorant that you're charging for bot traffic via ads amount to the same thing. This is very, very bad.

How? In house bot network implies active fraudulent charging, while being unaware of bot clicks is simply neglect or ignorance.

Negligence

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

#188

Post by dboat »

samstave wrote: post #176
heelhook wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's odd to me that your posts aren't more downvoted than they are.

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

#190

Post by mattmaroon »

mojowo11 wrote: post #160
mattmaroon wrote: post #157

These bots, if they do exist, wouldn't be operated by Facebook. It's a market-based ad bidding system. If 80% of clicks are worthless, clicks will be worth 80% less, and advertisers will bid accordingly. Facebook won't make anything in the long run by doing this, and there's clearly risk of getting caught doing something illegal. If there is a bot, it's likely one of their competitors, though even that seems unlikely…

> Also none of this explains why they're taking down their Facebook page. I think it pretty clearly explains why they're taking down their Facebook page. Just because you don't agree with them doesn't mean it's not explained. They're shutting down their Facebook page because (according to them) it's sitting around with outdated branding but they can't change the name unless they spend $2000/mo. Also because their use…

Couldn't they just make another page with the correct name?
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