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

Or Frederick Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Space_Merchants

(Or Alvin Lucier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Sitting_in_a_Room)

Back in July, hundreds (thousands?) of sites noticed a surge in traffic in their analytics. Hundreds to thousands of additional visits per day above their normal traffic rates. Curiously, all this traffic identified as Internet Explorer 7 on various version of Windows, but each visit came from a different residential IP, and viewed only one page per session.

Eventually the common thread between all these sites was identified -- they had retargeting tags from sites like AdRoll: http://www.thesempost.com/adroll-retargeting-bot-attack-behi...

For months now, huge botnets have been producing huge amounts of fake web traffic, picking up retargeting cookies in order to later be served ads and have whoever's behind the network paid for those views. That surge has never ended. It's only grown (including becoming less easy to spot), yet nobody seems to be talking about it anymore, including the retargeting companies.

I'd love to know who's behind it and how they control so many computers.

If you can get a business plan from those observations, yes, you can fix it. The advertising industry seems to be much talentless, despite the image they advertise.

The ads that follow you are called retargeting and the reason why they are used is... because they work! They get dramatically more clicks and conversions than other ads. There are also less obvious retargeting ads where websites trade their audiences with advertisers.

But yes, the ad system is completely broken. It's a complete security nightmare - they track you, in plain text, without telling you, they sell data about you without your consent, they are a great way to deliver exploits to millions of people (and their security policies are a complete joke). There are click-farms everywhere, pricing is not transparent, there are less-than-honest practices against advertisers all over the place, inventory gets sent to networks where they don't belong, then there are the intrusive ads, the dark pattern ads...

It would be nice to have an online ads industry that is safe and secure and honest to fund Internet content, but so much about (mass) advertising is so inherently anti-customer that I don't think that will ever happen. I hope we'll figure out ways to directly pay for content instead.

Yes. You can. Google has made some acquisitions lately in this anti-fraud space.

Most of the Valley does not care, and seems to be invested in maintaining and expanding the scale of the fraud. The market will eventually punish this when conditions change to be less frothy. It will be 2000 redux, for similar reasons as to why SV lost so much credibility the last time around (pervasive traffic fraud).

>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.

Well, they do work for some people. They just have to be managed in a way that doesn't create this annoyance. You cap the frequency or make it so that the offer is actually attractive and useful to the user. Or you limit what it triggers on to only go off when the user does something that signals their intent to become a customer (like adding certain items to their cart and then abandoning without buying).

Many things that people hate about online advertising as a whole is more caused by people mismanaging the ads than is caused by platform problems.