Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots

wired.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 342 posts

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

#191

Post by kome »

jefftk wrote: post #34
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 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 Ad fraud is an adversarial game, and you can't 'solve' it with simple things like this. You'll temporarily cause a lot of pain for the bot operators (yay!) but then they'll adjust and start sending the traffic from botnets (hacked consumer devices). Which is already what they do when…

there is some big logical fallacies in this line of thinking. better to say that google is totally fine bots traffic. that's what you said, after all.

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

#192

Post by toss1 »

>>In June, the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), a US industry group, published a blog post that estimated that ad fraud is costing US advertisers $120 billion each year. Hours after it was published, those statements were removed. John Wolfe, the ANA’s director of communications, tells WIRED that the figures were removed because they were out of date, but declines to provide any new figures.

Right, because the up-to-date fraud numbers are higher.

>>But the industry is letting ad dollars flow into the pockets of cybercriminals, he adds, who can then use it to fund other illicit activities. It’s a major problem, he argues. “One that no one talks about, no one writes about, everyone thinks it’s someone else’s problem.”

Exactly, everyone is incentivized to accept the inflated numbers, and disincentivized to look at reality, so the result is unsurprising.

>>Fou believes the industry was corrupted around a decade ago, when a series of opaque middlemen entered the scene. “Prior to that, advertisers would buy ads from publishers like The New York Times,”

It's said in software that 'Everything can be solved by another layer of indirection'. Everything evidently includes inserting a fraud layer.

Solution? De-scaling and going back to advertising directly with specific platforms instead of ad "networks". What about paying for conversion instead of clicks? That concept seems to have completely disappeared. Anyone inside know why or what could be done to get back to that?

As a small biz owner developing physical products, I'd be interested in advertising, but I sure don't want to blow $$thousands out the door in hours for a mere illusion...

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

#194

Post by tommek4077 »

raunak wrote: post #153
vincnetas wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As parent said, you can see that one sale was made from ../product_google_landing_page and 59 sales were made from ../product_landing_page

People come back on different devices, different browsers, clear cookies, shop at a later date etc.

And that is whos problem? You dont pay for that either.

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

#195

Post by nightpool »

doix wrote: post #175
nonasktell wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

What, you just expect Google to show you a giant red box saying "Whoops, we detected that you were trying to do an ad fraud! Better luck next time!". Google will happily show you whatever ads you request, but they won't count them as monetizable impressions and they won't charge advertisers for them. The goal is to make it impossible to tell as a bot operator whether your fraud was successful. So why give bot operators more info about how to evade your detections?

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

#196

Post by propogandist »

caseysoftware wrote: post #172

It's amazing how much compute time - both hardware and humans - is dedicated to figuring out how to show which ads to people.. and it turns out that many of the "views" aren't even people.

there is no incentive to figure out the solution to this problem. The largest players in this space (Google, Facebook) require advertisers to spend money to make money.

If the big players were to solve the ad fraud problem, beyond a superficial level, it would hurt their bottom line —- which hurts stock price, which is tied to compensation for their employees.

Ad fraud is usually a niche conversation that doesn’t get much traction (esp as most publications are reliant on ads), but the twitter / musk lawsuit is helping more people pay attention.

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

#198

Post by jsonne »

tomhallett wrote: post #121
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 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…

See I run a DSP and I'm not sure what incentive we would have to be against this? My primary goal is to keep advertisers spending, and the better their results the longer they hang around. I have a vested interest in eliminating fraud if followed to that conclusion. Then again we focus on performance campaigns not brand awareness so we're a bit a different. Most of our inventory too comes from large sandboxed audio apps so while not perfect on the fraud front there is less potential for it from less players.

Then again I am a startup and I have seen how some people at very large adtech companies operate. Less sophisticated clients (many of them with huge budgets) can't properly evaluate what they are buying and thus default to cheapest CPMs possible. It's unfortunate and a symptom of the incredibly opaque ads stack and inventory.

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

#199

Post by [deleted] »

kritiko wrote: post #141
themoonisachees wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Major websites are ad-funded, the internet isn't. Networking technology, IPV4/6, http, ssl and most website frameworks aren't funded by advertising ( and even if they are eg react, they won't disappear.) Let FAANGs fail. Let them try to disguise ads into content, fail and go off the deep end. What is there to lose, really? Search? Someone will take their place. Instant gratification online ordering (not funded by ads…

Photo & video hosting for all of your major life events that delivers the content to all of your friends and family?

[deleted]

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

#200

Post by jonnat »

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…

Even if it would be easy only pay per conversion, you would create a different type of perverse incentive in which ad platforms would exclusively want to target consumers their models attach a high preexisting (before exposure to ads) probability of conversion. That is OK for lower funnel tactics but it would severely reduce your ability to put your brand in front of a new audience.
Post reply on HN