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Advertisers scramble as ‘non-human traffic’ eats up online budgets

theglobeandmail.com

11–20 of 98 posts

Re: Advertisers scramble as ‘non-human traffic’ eats up online budgets

#11
post #3

I envision a future where a significant share of the advertising market is comprised of automated ad-bots pitching services and wares to automated web-crawlers. There's something obtusely philosophical about that and what it says about us, though I am not sure what that is.

Somewhat related: http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358

Re: Advertisers scramble as ‘non-human traffic’ eats up online budgets

#12
I've wondered about this before if advertising was just designed to be a big negative sum game for advertisers.

Interestingly if these same bots were capable of making real purchases and were run by ad companies this behavior may be sustainable because some people are making money. Almost like wall street.

Re: Advertisers scramble as ‘non-human traffic’ eats up online budgets

#13
post #8

There are two pretty obvious approaches: only pay per conversion, or accept that not all views are human. Just like when you advertise in a classical news paper, you only know how many copies are typically sold, not how many humans actually look at your ad.

Except not all conversions are human either. That's the "new" problem.

Re: Advertisers scramble as ‘non-human traffic’ eats up online budgets

#14
post #3

I envision a future where a significant share of the advertising market is comprised of automated ad-bots pitching services and wares to automated web-crawlers. There's something obtusely philosophical about that and what it says about us, though I am not sure what that is.

William Gibson could probably give you some ideas on what that says about us. He started writing about this fictionally decades ago.

Charles Stross, too.

Re: Advertisers scramble as ‘non-human traffic’ eats up online budgets

#16
post #3

I envision a future where a significant share of the advertising market is comprised of automated ad-bots pitching services and wares to automated web-crawlers. There's something obtusely philosophical about that and what it says about us, though I am not sure what that is.

reminds me of Google Will Eat Itself: http://www.gwei.org/

Re: Advertisers scramble as ‘non-human traffic’ eats up online budgets

#17
Besides the non-human traffic, most online ads are created to not be seen. I was even thinking about creating a blog post to call out the marketers out there to change this, but I am too lazy... specially to make them make more money. I am so used to how ads that cover the entire page work that I manage to pass by them without even knowing which brand was advertising there.

Ads that force you to watch a video for X seconds, but in those X seconds they don't even show a logo or something, are money wasted indeed, again, IMHO.

Another example, ads that follow me. Oh god how I hate these. I visit a website, usually for a product that I already own, and the freaking ad from that company follows me wherever I go. This is money wasted.

Another example, I use Waze almost everyday to figure out the best route for my comute. My 4" screen phone sits there right on top of the radio. Whenever I stop the car, an ad pops up. But they make this ad so tiny that if I need to know what brand or product it is for, I have to pick my phone and look closer. This is money wasted.

The online advertising system is pretty broken... can I fix it?

Re: Advertisers scramble as ‘non-human traffic’ eats up online budgets

#18
There's a lot of room for innovation in this space. Some friends (well, clients) of mine have a startup (Unlockable, https://www.unlockable.com/) that embeds advertising-based games into other games. The level of interactivity is way more than a bot could handle.

Re: Advertisers scramble as ‘non-human traffic’ eats up online budgets

#19

There's a lot of room for innovation in this space. Some friends (well, clients) of mine have a startup (Unlockable, https://www.unlockable.com/ ) that embeds advertising-based games into other games. The level of interactivity is way more than a bot could handle.

So are bots playing games as well? I mean, are they also having ad fraud inside games?

Re: Advertisers scramble as ‘non-human traffic’ eats up online budgets

#20
I've been in the online advertising world for 10 years and it still befuddles me to see that most ad dollars still haven't switched to cost-per-action (CPA), i.e. only paying for actual conversions. One big benefit of advertising online after all is that tracking conversions and their referrers is much easier than with offline.
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