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Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots

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Re: Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots

#171

Post by coldtea »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #6

When I worked in adtech, I proposed a simple solution to ad fraud on our platform - assume any UA coming from an IP range owned by a cloud provider was a bot and don't show them ads, don't count their impressions. Worst case, people using a VPN hosted on EC2 might not see an ad, but I was certain they'd cope. Best case, higher quality traffic increases yields. The business team vetoed that, it would adversely impact…

Ad businesses are in the business of selling ads. Not of selling less, but good, ads, if they can sell more but bad...

Re: Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots

#173

Post by emaginniss »

steveBK123 wrote: post #151
tomhallett wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I made an ad fraud startup which ran into the exact same problem. With video ads, advertisers will pay 10x more to be in a “user initiated” video player (the user clicked or there was a reasonable expectation there’d be a video on that page - YouTube, camera icon on preceding link, etc). But more often then not, those ads are running in an autoplay context (sticky video players in the bottom corner, large players in…

A funny anecdote that's not fraud but puts a bit more ambiguity into the alleged targeted ad eyeballs even from the big players. There's a good amount of "ambient" content on YouTube these days. Some not targeted at adults or even humans. I have been playing YouTube videos on my TV of birds & wildlife, for my house cats to enjoy. There is one guy who makes 8 hour long videos. There is one content creator basically ta…

That's why my cat recently ordered a casper mattress

Re: Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots

#174

Post by from »

NoGravitas wrote: post #159

Honestly, I'd much rather they show their ads to bots than to humans. Hopefully, the day will come when every human is using a competent adblocker, but the ad industries numbers don't go down thanks to the bots, and people can get paid for content that everyone enjoys for free.

But there’s no free lunch. If businesses realize there is a 0% ROI to ad spend due to all the traffic being bots, they will stop buying ads. At which point sites will just migrate to a subscription model.

Re: Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots

#175

Post by doix »

nonasktell wrote: post #155
EdwardDiego wrote: post #6

When I worked in adtech, I proposed a simple solution to ad fraud on our platform - assume any UA coming from an IP range owned by a cloud provider was a bot and don't show them ads, don't count their impressions. Worst case, people using a VPN hosted on EC2 might not see an ad, but I was certain they'd cope. Best case, higher quality traffic increases yields. The business team vetoed that, it would adversely impact…

>When I worked in adtech, I proposed a simple solution to ad fraud on our platform - assume any UA coming from an IP range owned by a cloud provider was a bot and don't show them ads, don't count their impressions. Wait, is that not automatic on every single Ad network out there? WTF? How long ago was that?

I run wireguard on an OVH box that I've had for years as my VPN. I just checked and I still get Google ads.

So it's not even automatic on the largest ads network out there.

Personally, I'd love it if using a VPN meant that advertisers didn't even try serving ads to me, but unfortunately that's not the case.

Re: Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots

#176

Post by manigandham »

robertlagrant wrote: post #60

If they're getting decent ROI on their ad spend, what does it matter? TV ads were normally shown to empty rooms while their occupants went to make themselves a drink. Still worth buying.

Because the bad actors are bad and extracting illicit gains from the industry. Removing the fraud will lower ad costs, cost of goods and as a result the cost of products for consumers.

Re: Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots

#177

Post by mountainb »

Oarch wrote: post #42

The digital economy would doubtless take a hard hit if we knew the true scale of synthetic engagement out there. It's just easier not to look too hard. Reminds me of a joke: "Doctor, my brother has lost his mind. He think he's a chicken." "Have you tried telling him he's not a chicken?" "No. You see, the thing is, we really need the eggs..."

No one really wanted to do much digging when the market was good, but now that the market is bad, expect a lot of digging and a lot of suing.

Re: Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots

#178

Post by manigandham »

seydor wrote: post #56

That's not my problem. Advertisers are part of the problem, they take in huge sums of money and feed the Google+fb monopoly, without ever knowing how their money is wasted, they "trust" them. There is nothing more opaque than google, the company that controls both the supply and demand of search ads. If you willingly participate in that market,i m sorry, not sorry

Its not trust so much as monopoly access to the digital ad market. Google has so much prime inventory (search results + youtube) that it's impossible to avoid it if you want any kind of scale for your campaigns.

Re: Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots

#179

Post by stephen_g »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #6

When I worked in adtech, I proposed a simple solution to ad fraud on our platform - assume any UA coming from an IP range owned by a cloud provider was a bot and don't show them ads, don't count their impressions. Worst case, people using a VPN hosted on EC2 might not see an ad, but I was certain they'd cope. Best case, higher quality traffic increases yields. The business team vetoed that, it would adversely impact…

I’ve worked for a company that used an Azure hosted internet gateway/firewall that all their sites connected through using an MPLS VPN. So there are definitely some non-not users with traffic coming from there. But yeah, happy enough to not see ads when piping traffic through those ranges!

Re: Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots

#180

Post by Ozzie_osman »

dan-robertson wrote: post #53
londons_explore wrote: post #11

If you are paying any bill for ads, make sure you only pay for conversions . Ie. unless the customer actually buys your product, then don't pay anything. Eg. instead of paying $0.002 per view of your ad, or $0.10 per click of your ad, pay $6 per person who clicks your ad and then buys your product. That way, ad fraud doesn't affect you. Plenty of ad providers allow such an option. Internally, they convert your paymen…

A problem is that deciding whether or not a customer was converted from an ad viewer is done by the people you pay for ads. Perhaps the conversion numbers are slightly inflated but in general it’s just really hard to tell. If you show a lot of ads to potential customers then chances are, most people who buy things from you saw your ads. Does that mean they came to you because of the ad? I think even if you had perfec…

> A problem is that deciding whether or not a customer was converted from an ad viewer is done by the people you pay for ads.

If you rely on their reporting, yes, but you can aleays set up your own basic attribution (with some caveats around ios traffic due to the ATT changes, but in that case the reporting comes from Apple). There are also third-party providers that can do attribution for you, but somewhat costly.

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