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“35-50% of clicks on Reddit Ads are fraudulent”

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Re: “35-50% of clicks on Reddit Ads are fraudulent”

#231

Post by Scoundreller »

atian wrote: post #130
ufmace wrote: post #94

What I don't get here is - who is doing this? I'm not sure who has the motivation to falsify clicks on Reddit ads. For Google ads, somebody might want to falsify clicks on the ads displayed on their site because they get paid by the click, but who other than Reddit would want to do that here?

Let’s not first assume intent. There are tons of scrapers running on Reddit. Reddit ads are presented inline rather than iframed/complex load behavior like Google Ads. Also browser extensions, browser behaviors (which smartly preload pages, prefetching) all cannot differentiate a Reddit ad url vs a regular link. Reddit makes it much easier for any web traffic to follow through to ads. The issue is that Reddit doesn’t…

As long as it’s constant between ads, the scraper effect should all be a wash in the end, no?

Ad buyers will pay half as much for double the traffic when half of the traffic is bots.

Re: “35-50% of clicks on Reddit Ads are fraudulent”

#232

Post by cbsmith »

danpalmer wrote: post #7

I get the impression that Reddit's ad network is just immature. We're finding that Reddit ads perform well and are cheap, suggesting that there isn't much competition for clicks. More mature ad networks such as Google's and Facebook's are better at reducing spam clicks. Google bought a company focused on this about 10 years ago, I'm sure Facebook put similar effort in. I'm sure this is something they'll work to impro…

> I get the impression that Reddit's ad network is just immature.

I get more the impression that Reddit's advertiser community is just immature. ;-)

> We're finding that Reddit ads perform well and are cheap, suggesting that there isn't much competition for clicks.

Also reinforcing my perception.

> More mature ad networks such as Google's and Facebook's are better at reducing spam clicks. Google bought a company focused on this about 10 years ago, I'm sure Facebook put similar effort in.

I doubt either of us know that either of their ad networks does a better job. They certainly have invested more money in it, but they also run much bigger ad networks that are likely much more aggressively targeted for fraud (particularly because of their revenue models). So they may have more of the clicks that get through being fraud than Reddit.

> I'm sure this is something they'll work to improve over time as their ad network gains traction.

Yeah, but what I think is needed right now is a more mature perspective on click fraud. For starters, the underlying subtext that "click fraud" means that the ad network is profiting at the advertiser's expense fails to appreciate the context. If there was no fraud, the clicks would cost proportionately more (likely more than proportionately more), so the advertiser would save no money and Reddit would not lose any revenue.

More than that though, the poster doesn't seem to appreciate that what they are describing as obviously fraudulent is likely filled with a lot of false positives (I'd speculate that they are labeling at least a third of their real traffic as fraud using this heuristic). They also do not seem to understand that just because they are using a technique to detect fraud that Reddit isn't employing the same technique on their side; click fraudsters have a strong incentive to fool ad network detection mechanisms, but no incentive to fool the landing pages. They might follow redirects, load images, use unique IPs, etc. on the ad network, but they have no incentive to fool the operator of the site the ad is sending traffic to (in fact, sometimes their objective is to convince the advertiser that the ad network isn't providing quality traffic).

Re: “35-50% of clicks on Reddit Ads are fraudulent”

#233

Post by remram »

malwrar wrote: post #122
lorthemar wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Pay for ad time slots, not user impressions. This is probably the worst thing you can do to online advertising. It's probably one of the only good things about the online ad industry. If you book time slots, only the biggest players will be able to compete for that slot. Essentially killing the entire selling point of online ads, which is giving a chance to smaller players a chance at the game. I don't want to, ever…

You don’t necessarily need to implement bidding on a dedicated slot—-the TV comparison assumes you’re sending the same thing to each user. This isn’t TV though, you can display different ads to different people of you wanted. How about a system where probability of seeing an ad is weighted by how much money an advertiser pays? Then you just normalize across bidders and choose on that curve. Then perhaps the time slot…

If you're bringing in those buckets, you are already in the slippery slope bringing you to the current system. Why not a bucket for people who visit the site often? A bucket for people using advanced site feature A, feature B? A bucket for people who subscribe to /r/teen?

Re: “35-50% of clicks on Reddit Ads are fraudulent”

#234

Post by dheera »

jamiequint wrote: post #190
staplers wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people just don't want malicious code being run on their computers.

What malicious code are first-party ad networks running on your computer?

0. The vast majority of websites are running third-party ad networks, not first-party.

1. Even first-party ad networks often track and fingerprint users without consent, and may even share the data they have with other websites. This has personally happened to me, specifically in which eBay and Amazon serve their own first-party ads, but shared data about my searches, purchases, and clicks with other platforms. Even though it may have been a part of their ToS to do that, I consider that type of cross-business sharing of user data, without a clear opt-in/opt-out option presented to the user, to be a malicious term and effectively user bullying by monopolies in e-commerce.

Re: “35-50% of clicks on Reddit Ads are fraudulent”

#235

Post by the8bit »

proverbialbunny wrote: post #212
jamiequint wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you believe that people providing a service should not be able to choose how to charge for it in any other context outside of websites?

It doesn't work the way you think it does. Ads are paid for my the click. Some people never click on ads. The kinds of people who are likely to consider running an ad blocker are the same type who never click on ads regardless if they have ads or not. The ideal situation is never advertising ad blockers, never bragging about them, never making a big deal about them, and keeping some mild barrier of entry. This way th…

Ads are not just charged by click. Some campaigns pay by impression served and some pay by conversion. It depends on what the advertiser is trying to accomplish. Pepsi might pay per impression because their goal is brand awareness. Local Pizza joint might pay per click b/c they want to drive business off the web. AFKArena wants to pay by conversion because their ultimate goal is to get app installs.

Ads of all of these types generally compete for the same slot in an auction.

So yes, a user who has adblock is worth less than a user who doesn't have adblock but also doesn't click ads.

Re: “35-50% of clicks on Reddit Ads are fraudulent”

#237

Post by GhostVII »

Does this actually matter? If you are doing online advertising, you should be able to attribute a particular visit to a specific ad campaign, so you can calculate your conversion rate. If Reddit has lots of bots, it just means your conversion rate for those ads will be lower, and you can adjust your spending accordingly. There are a lot of things that can significantly affect clicks other than fraudulent clicks (popups people click on by accident, small "close" buttons, mobile vs desktop, etc.), so I think evaluating your success based on just clicks is going to be pretty useless regardless.

I'm not in advertising though so I have no idea.

Re: “35-50% of clicks on Reddit Ads are fraudulent”

#238

Post by the8bit »

zokier wrote: post #73

I find it so weird idea that people really click on ads. I don't know if I've ever done so (intentionally). As such I would have expected more like 90% of clicks to be fraudulent.

People do click them but unsurprisingly the rate is pretty low. Often times ~0.5% - 1% for a reasonably well targeted ad. So 1 in 100-200.

Re: “35-50% of clicks on Reddit Ads are fraudulent”

#239

Post by benlivengood »

weare138 wrote: post #161
jamiequint wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost all bidding on FB is oCPM and Google is tCPM, which means that clicks don't really matter at all in terms of Google/FB's ability to monetize. Transparency shouldn't matter for people bidding for conversions. The only transparency you need is to know where the visitors are coming from. If anything fraud (really misclicks for FB and Google search since there is no fraud incentive) is also bad for them as well as…

> which means that clicks don't really matter at all in terms of Google/FB's ability to monetize What? They get paid for the clicks, not the impressions. Serving ad impressions costs money, the clicks make money. I don't quite follow your line of reasoning here. > Transparency shouldn't matter for people bidding for conversions Why wouldn't it? How do we know the bidding process is fair and the clicks we're paying fo…

Disclosure: I used to work on the pipelines counting this stuff at Google.

> What? They get paid for the clicks, not the impressions. Serving ad impressions costs money, the clicks make money. I don't quite follow your line of reasoning here.

Google has display ads (nee double-click) and search ads (adwords). Display ads can be pay per click or pay per impression (https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/2454058?hl=en). Search ads are pay per click.

> Why wouldn't it? How do we know the bidding process is fair and the clicks we're paying for are valid? We don't and that's the problem. We wouldn't tolerate this type of behavior from companies in other industries. We need to quit giving tech companies a free pass and start holding them accountable.

For cost per click there's an economic argument that the auction is fair. Google has limited ad slots and leaves money on the table if it serves low bid or low quality ads instead of higher-bid or higher-quality ads, and if Google pretended low-quality ads were high quality the advertiser would see it as an insanely high cost per conversion. Click validity is also easy to measure; count how many clicks you're charged for and compare that with how many referrals with gclid from google.com show up in your logs (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/35813737/matching-google...).

Impression ads are trickier which is why there are fancy cross-device conversion/attribution metrics to correlate purchases with impressions, but ultimately that is the problem with pay-per-impression in general.

> It only has to be good enough to convince people to keep using it. There's no financial incentive to eliminate fraud completely, or even try, without regulation.

Here I mostly agree; I was pretty disappointed to find out Google was serving those stupid "Download Now"-button ads on various software distribution sites. I think that particular insanity has been fixed now, but "not against the rules" was the answer for most of the time I was there.

Trust is also a financial incentive and is the primary incentive to prevent outright fraud. Ad-blockers or moving to another ad network are the proper responses to indicate lowered trust.

Re: “35-50% of clicks on Reddit Ads are fraudulent”

#240

Post by dec0dedab0de »

shiftpgdn wrote: post #124
dec0dedab0de wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

she will just have to buy ads on smaller websites, maybe during lesser traffic time periods.

Small publishing sites are all but dead. The internet used to be a lovely village where everyone was on about the same playing field and now it's a handful of skyscrapers surrounded by slums.

sure, but its only been that way for a little over a decade, it could change back just as quicky.
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