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

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jul 31, 2012, 5:29 PM UTC

EternalFury wrote: post #309

javajosh wrote: post #189

Isn't this why, oh, around 2005 CPA was the big thing instead of CPC? Personally, I think CPA is absolutely the right way to do internet advertising, and I wonder why FB doesn't do that.

Because they would not make a tenth of the money they do if they did that, obviously. Most sales or acquisitions originated online are based on rational decisions, not on the appeal of annoying ads. The day advertisers start to use a verifiable CPA system, 80% of online advertising cease to exist and 95% of today's start-ups see their cash vaporize.

Post by bartl » Tue, Jul 31, 2012, 6:26 PM UTC

qntm wrote: post #348

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…

> How about we just make a "blacklist" of these known bots, look up every user agent, and compare against the blacklist? So now every single request to your site has to do a substring match against every single term in this list. Depending on your site's implementation, this is probably not trivial to do without taking some sort of performance hit. Build a finite state machine which only accepts the terms in the blac…

Post by johnvclifford » Tue, Jul 31, 2012, 9:00 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…

Post by qntm » Tue, Jul 31, 2012, 10:50 PM UTC

bartl wrote: post #373

qntm wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How about we just make a "blacklist" of these known bots, look up every user agent, and compare against the blacklist? So now every single request to your site has to do a substring match against every single term in this list. Depending on your site's implementation, this is probably not trivial to do without taking some sort of performance hit. Build a finite state machine which only accepts the terms in the blac…

A perl regular expression will test for a match in less than a microsecond. Other scripting languages have a similar speed. There's no need to program like it's 1985 any more.

Post by publicfig » Wed, Aug 01, 2012, 6:09 AM UTC

monkeypizza wrote: post #363

publicfig wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But in the same respect, the fact that real human social activity is much more random is a reason why this should be easier. Bots are inherently pattern based, and while there are bots that could work to maintain fake interactions in order to pass a wide-sweep analysis of low-socializing accounts with a high ad response rate, it would do quite a bit to take a first attack on some of the more obvious bots, which are t…

I suppose a naive bot would not be "random" enough, and would obviously not be human. But on the other hand, since valid human behavior includes much more senseless, random, and repetitive actions (compared to blogging), a well-done bot would be harder to detect.