Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots • Hacker News Board

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

#221

Post by eblume » Mon, Jul 30, 2012, 8:20 PM UTC

xentronium wrote: post #191

rio517 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And here is a screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/4hu66.png

What happened? Is reddit offline again or something?

There is (subjectively) a marked deterioration of comment quality on front-page discussions in the past few days, I feel. I have also noticed that HN articles are getting linked on reddit more frequently (I use both networks, but for highly disparate purposes - gotta get those funny .gif's somewhere). No data supporting this but I fell it's a trend and I'm not liking it.

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

#222

Post by rscale » Mon, Jul 30, 2012, 8:24 PM UTC

dredmorbius wrote: post #198

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…

We've found that identifying sources of traffic and patterns of usage is superior to simple user-agent detection, particularly as, since you've noted, user-agent spoofing is trivial, and/or some bot traffic is driven through user-based tools (say, script-driven MSIE bots). Instead of that, we'll watch for patterns of use in which high volumes of traffic come from unrecognized non-end-user network space. "Unrecognized…

One as-yet-unmentioned technique is to adjust a bot score by taking an OS fingerprint, and comparing that to the listed user agent.

It's not perfect for a variety of reasons, but I found it to be a useful input for a similar bot detection problem. That said, this was a long time ago so I'd need to re-run some experiments to see if the hypothesis remained valid.

For those not familiar with OS fingerprinting, it's a method of looking at the details of a connection and determining which operating system is most likely to have created packets with those options and flags. In BSD, it's built into pf.

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

#223

Post by saraid216 » Mon, Jul 30, 2012, 8:31 PM UTC

eranation wrote: post #186

tatsuke95 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>" 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 :)

HN's opinion of anything is not remotely significant to FB's PR, really.

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

#224

Post by joshlegs » Mon, Jul 30, 2012, 8:36 PM UTC

I wonder if this piece of news will make it to mainstream news outlets .... If it does, I would guess it will be a week or so. In any case, it really should get out because FB is a horrible platform of any sort. I don't even use the site; Facebook, no me gusta.

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

#225

Post by kirubakaran » Mon, Jul 30, 2012, 8:46 PM UTC

When a Facebook user clicks on an ad, Facebook already knows the likelihood of that user being a bot, based on information like their friends and other activity in that user account. Looks like Facebook chooses to not use this information as it will reduce their revenue.

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

#226

Post by downandout » Mon, Jul 30, 2012, 8:48 PM UTC

Facebook, like Google, uses a bidding system and expects the free market to compensate for invalid clicks/impressions. This should theoretically work - advertisers should be bidding lower since the clicks/impressions are worth less. However, unnatural market forces, like companies that are (at least for a while) willing to lose money on their their advertising continue to drive unrealistic pricing for their advertising. As long as Facebook can continue to convince new advertisers to try their system, and (perhaps more importantly) keep brand advertisers measuring ROI in terms of Likes instead of cash, prices will remain unnaturally high.

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

#227

Post by kirubakaran » Mon, Jul 30, 2012, 8:50 PM UTC

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…

I understand that it is challenging for a third party like you to identify the bots. But Facebook has more than enough signal on each user clicking on an ad (friends, posts, location, 'non ad-click activity' to 'ad-click activity' ratio) to determine if that user is a bot. Looks like they are choosing to not do anything with this information. "FB is turning a blind eye to keep their revenue" seems to stand up to Occam's Razor.

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

#228

Post by brador » Mon, Jul 30, 2012, 8:55 PM UTC

tlrobinson wrote: post #124

seiji wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We built a page logger. Any time a page was loaded, we'd keep track of it. They reinvented the access log? By hand? Are people really that detached from how servers work?

I assumed this just meant they built something on top of access logs that told them what percentage of page loads also loaded JavaScript. I don't know about your webserver, but mine doesn't tell me this kind of thing out of the box. Anyway, it's pretty irrelevant whether they added logging in their app (one line of code?) or enabled their webserver's built in logging.

Surprised no ones mentioned the noscript plugin.

Since the user is on facebook they'd have facebook unblocked, but noscript still blocking everything else.

How would you discern a noscript user from bot?

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

#229

Post by shalmanese » Mon, Jul 30, 2012, 8:55 PM UTC

I don't understand, who are the people profiting from click fraud on Facebook? Obviously Facebook is but we can pretty safely presume they're not coding bots on their own ad network. A competitor could maybe profit from it but this seems like a rather roundabout way to damage your competitors. What other rational business case is there to build click bots on Facebook?

This is not like Google with AdSense where they pay out 3rd parties, the motivation there is clear.

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

#230

Post by dangrossman » Mon, Jul 30, 2012, 9:05 PM UTC

pherk wrote: post #205

rotten wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

All that is really no excuse for not developing a foolproof system. And if you know that you don't have a great system to catch fraud, then you should simply leave some money on the table. See, the essence here is not to come up with a great algorithm. This is not a programming contest. But to create a system where everyone (publisher, advertiser, ad-network and customer) wins. In this very early stage, the success o…

> And that number has to be consistently better than Google's.

Why's that? This isn't a zero sum game. You don't advertise only on Google or only on Facebook; as much as your budget allows, you advertise on every channel you can achieve a positive ROI on.

For any advertiser looking for a direct response, like a signup or purchase, I doubt anything Facebook can do would make the ROI better than advertising on search. No amount of demographic and interest targeting will make advertising to people as effective as advertising to intent. You can pay Google to send you people while they're in the process of looking for your product; Facebook doesn't do that.