Ultimately, as long as advertisers see a positive return and receive value for their money, click-fraud continue. Once that changes, then advertisers will take their money elsewhere. Until then profit margins will just keep getting smaller and smaller.
Robots, Not Humans, Fake 23% of Web Video Ad Views, Study Finds
31–40 of 54 posts
Re: Robots, Not Humans, Fake 23% of Web Video Ad Views, Study Finds
#32Someone please explain why this is a problem. The way I see it is that advertisers pay for results. If you spend $100,000 on ads and make less than $100,000 in extra profit - you're paying too much for ads. The fact that 23% of ad views don't convert just pushes down the price of an "ad view", ie those fake views are priced in to your CPM rates already. This does not effect your ad budget however. People that get hur…
Branded campaigns for example have no such easy way to measure conversions - and since multiple advertisers at the same time get hit by a fraud operation at different rates, the loss is not evenly distributed, not easy to track, etc.
Add to that the fact that a lot of companies only care if the ROI is positive, no matter the cost, with the middlemen making money both on bot generated and human generated impressions, and you've got a whole messy business on your hands.
Source: our company just won 500k in investment at Slush to battle this specific problem.
Re: Robots, Not Humans, Fake 23% of Web Video Ad Views, Study Finds
#33I am genuinly curious how they manage that. In a world where every user is followed I don't think the robots have a chance to fool the anti-fraud algorithms. At least with the bigger players (Google, Facebook) they don't.
Most of these bots seem human by traditional tracking systems (Google, Facebook) because they posses the same browser cookies as the human user who's machine is infected.
Re: Robots, Not Humans, Fake 23% of Web Video Ad Views, Study Finds
#34Online marketing/advertising is funny. You'd think once bots could get up to 20% fraud they could be scaled up a bit more and get to 99.9% fraud (the old "machines won't be exactly as smart as people argument", people will be smarter for some time and then machines will be smarter after that). The cynical me also thinks as the fraud isn't likely to be distributed evenly and you don't know if you are the one subsidizing the market you would get a "market for lemons" effect ( http://www.win-vector.com/blog/2008/05/is-search-advertising... ). But I am guessing the desperation of people to be in the market keeps the prices up.
Re: Robots, Not Humans, Fake 23% of Web Video Ad Views, Study Finds
#35To all the people saying this isn't a problem: it really is. Even if advertisers bake a fraud premium into their buys, blindly letting money flow to bad actors creates an incentive to be a bad actor, and bad actors in this space do bad things that hurt everyone: waste massive amounts of bandwidth, spam the web and app ecosystems with worthless content, and worst of all exploit users to build and run botnets.
We've spent a lot of effort over the last few years fighting this stuff, and we're really happy to see the industry as a whole starting to agree that it's a problem. If you'd like to help make the web better by working to remove these incentives, we're hiring engineers; contact info in my profile.
Re: Robots, Not Humans, Fake 23% of Web Video Ad Views, Study Finds
#36To all the people saying this isn't a problem: it really is. Even if advertisers bake a fraud premium into their buys, blindly letting money flow to bad actors creates an incentive to be a bad actor, and bad actors in this space do bad things that hurt everyone: waste massive amounts of bandwidth, spam the web and app ecosystems with worthless content, and worst of all exploit users to build and run botnets. We've sp…
I agree with the above sentiment. To elaborate on who gets hurt, the problem is that small publishers get squeezed. If you're ESPN, you can create a private exchange, keep a strong agency sales force, and keep up your prices. However, the smaller publishers will not have the ability to reach the buyers except through these compromised exchanges. If the buyers flee the open markets, the smaller pubs have to band together into networks again or try their luck with programmatic direct (Pubmatic is making a push for this with their recent acquisitions). We go back to a world of media buying that looks more like TV; we become a lot less fluid.
Re: Robots, Not Humans, Fake 23% of Web Video Ad Views, Study Finds
#37Someone please explain why this is a problem. The way I see it is that advertisers pay for results. If you spend $100,000 on ads and make less than $100,000 in extra profit - you're paying too much for ads. The fact that 23% of ad views don't convert just pushes down the price of an "ad view", ie those fake views are priced in to your CPM rates already. This does not effect your ad budget however. People that get hur…
>Someone please explain why this is a problem. The way I see it is that advertisers pay for results. If you spend $100,000 on ads and make less than $100,000 in extra profit - you're paying too much for ads. The fact that 23% of ad views don't convert just pushes down the price of an "ad view", ie those fake views are priced in to your CPM rates already. This does not effect your ad budget however.
If you negotiate an agreement where you would make a 15% profit on a transaction, and a fraudster swoops in and takes 12%, would you be content about getting the remaining 3%?
Ideally whenever a transaction takes place, both sides would share about half the benefit. Liars should not be able to pull money out of the middle with the sole restriction that both legitimate parties still make some profit.
Re: Robots, Not Humans, Fake 23% of Web Video Ad Views, Study Finds
#38I'm surprised that no-one is talking about accuracy here.
How, exactly, do they determine who is and isn't a bot?
> For the study, researchers put software into the actual ads of 36 members of the advertising association between Aug. 1 and Oct. 1. The software allowed them to tell if viewers of the ads were people or bots.
Re: Robots, Not Humans, Fake 23% of Web Video Ad Views, Study Finds
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most advert buyers are not sophisticated. So fraud matters.
I don't believe that. I've worked with some companies that spend millions per year with online ads. They are sophisticated.
Being sophisticated might just mean you understand that the current cost of fighting fraud is higher than the cost of the fraud. It doesn't mean you're not getting bled.
Re: Robots, Not Humans, Fake 23% of Web Video Ad Views, Study Finds
#40To all the people saying this isn't a problem: it really is. Even if advertisers bake a fraud premium into their buys, blindly letting money flow to bad actors creates an incentive to be a bad actor, and bad actors in this space do bad things that hurt everyone: waste massive amounts of bandwidth, spam the web and app ecosystems with worthless content, and worst of all exploit users to build and run botnets. We've sp…
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