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Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots

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Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots

#361

Post by lance0 »

kirubakaran wrote: post #227
nhashem wrote: post #162

My startup is essentially an advertising aggregator (pooling traffic from a variety of publishers and routing it to advertisers) and dealing with things like bot detection is a HUGE chunk of what we work on, technology-wise. Let me try and give you an idea of how deep the rabbit hole can go. - Okay, you want to detect bots. Well, "good" bots usually have a user agent string like, "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2…

I understand that it is challenging for a third party like you to identify the bots. But Facebook has more than enough signal on each user clicking on an ad (friends, posts, location, 'non ad-click activity' to 'ad-click activity' ratio) to determine if that user is a bot. Looks like they are choosing to not do anything with this information. "FB is turning a blind eye to keep their revenue" seems to stand up to Occa…

I suspect even that signal is not trustworthy. Given that its not 100%, what fraction of the 900+ million Facebook users are actually users? Twitter seemed to be totally plagued with that at one point anyway.

What's the grey area look like? What's the chance of falsely identifying a real user as a fake one?

Rhetorical question. Not sure FB could even answer them accurately.

Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots

#362

Post by rapind »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #360
rapind wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How exactly are they going to know they're being flagged as bots? When all you're doing is discounting those bot clicks to the advertiser it becomes far more difficult to test your limits as a bot (you would need to be a paying advertiser, just to analyze the human to bot threshold). It's similar to hell-banning, in that the user's generally unaware they've been hell-banned. Take a minute to think about the effort a…

It depends whether the bots are creating accounts or hijacking existing ones (via browser plugins or whatnot). The bots will not be able to get accurate statistics without paying, but they might be able to get "good enough" statistics. For example, is the system moving in a direction we like. If you do need to pay , a good bot herder probably has enough stolen credit cards to use. Yes, there are certainly mitigation…

Hijacking browsers? We're getting pretty sophisticated and far fetched. If you've hijacked someone's browser there are many better ways to make a profit than spiking a competitors ad buys.

So basically we've narrowed down the potentially bot makers to:

1) Has a way to hijack thousands of facebook user's browsers, and is more interested in spiking some companies ad buys than other profitable activities they could be doing.

2) Has access to stolen credit cards so they can spend the money required to debug and test their bot's humanity against the defensive algorithms. Spending money in order to indirectly make money because some company is paying them to spike a competitor's ad buys. Obviously this is going to cut into their margins, so the amount they spend should be less than they're being paid.

3) Has the patience and dedication to analyze the bills when they come in to determine how much of their activity is considered botlike and then tweak their behaviour accordingly.

4) Thousands of budding script kiddies are also being payed by companies to spike their competitor's ad buys.

5) Rides a unicorn?

Don't forget there also needs to be companies willing to pay someone to make these bots and don't mind how incredibly difficult it would be to measure it's success. In fact, if there are companies willing to pay for this, then you're going to have a whole bunch of scammers who simply claim they're able to do it that the companies will have to filter out.

We're incredibly far into the realm of unprofitability and edge-casery don't you think? An alien spaceship is going to land in my backyard before this happens.

Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots

#363

Post by monkeypizza »

publicfig wrote: post #340
monkeypizza wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compare it to google's problem filtering out automatically generated splogs, though - it took them years to make progress against that. Real human social activity is a lot more random than real informational content in blogs - so fb's problem seems harder. Also, facebook banning accounts is a much stronger action than google just lowering the pagerank of suspected splogs. So overall I think fb's problem is harder tha…

But in the same respect, the fact that real human social activity is much more random is a reason why this should be easier. Bots are inherently pattern based, and while there are bots that could work to maintain fake interactions in order to pass a wide-sweep analysis of low-socializing accounts with a high ad response rate, it would do quite a bit to take a first attack on some of the more obvious bots, which are t…

I suppose a naive bot would not be "random" enough, and would obviously not be human.

But on the other hand, since valid human behavior includes much more senseless, random, and repetitive actions (compared to blogging), a well-done bot would be harder to detect.

Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots

#364

Post by vampirechicken »

vampirechicken wrote: post #327
jlgreco wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I read it as a slight because it came right after "uphill both ways in the snow" .

Which usually precedes "Get off my lawn!"

Anyway, if I want to take gratuitous pokes at a language, I usually choose XML; sometimes java.

Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots

#365

Post by jiggy2011 »

rapind wrote: post #362
jiggy2011 wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends whether the bots are creating accounts or hijacking existing ones (via browser plugins or whatnot). The bots will not be able to get accurate statistics without paying, but they might be able to get "good enough" statistics. For example, is the system moving in a direction we like. If you do need to pay , a good bot herder probably has enough stolen credit cards to use. Yes, there are certainly mitigation…

Hijacking browsers? We're getting pretty sophisticated and far fetched. If you've hijacked someone's browser there are many better ways to make a profit than spiking a competitors ad buys. So basically we've narrowed down the potentially bot makers to: 1) Has a way to hijack thousands of facebook user's browsers, and is more interested in spiking some companies ad buys than other profitable activities they could be d…

Not really, this is just off the top of my head and I'm sufficiently unfamiliar with bot programming and FB advertising that I'm sure that plenty of better solutions must exist.

You are forgetting that there are growing numbers of programmers in developing nations for whom doing this sort of thing can be an attractive way to earn a living (or at least they are willing to try it). Look on any "hire a freelancer" type sites and you will find hundreds of postings for tasks that sound awfully like scamware development (usually at a couple of dollars an hour).

Browser hijacking is not so uncommon either, I've installed legit software in the past that has come bundled with some crapware that injects extra adverts into web-pages and other things.

The analysis would not be too difficult either, simply set a "click rate" and adjust it downwards until you are being charged > $0. Do facebook offer any method to get free trail credits? If so this could be abused, heavily.

The economics are roughly the same as with spam, if you do enough of it your "hit rate" doesn't matter so much.

Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots

#367

Post by tantalor »

cookiecaper wrote: post #313
kirubakaran wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand that it is challenging for a third party like you to identify the bots. But Facebook has more than enough signal on each user clicking on an ad (friends, posts, location, 'non ad-click activity' to 'ad-click activity' ratio) to determine if that user is a bot. Looks like they are choosing to not do anything with this information. "FB is turning a blind eye to keep their revenue" seems to stand up to Occa…

It's just as easy to invest in several fake profiles that act just like real users. Pay people to work from home maintaining fake accounts for you, posting stuff that seems real, interacting with your other fake accounts and celebrity/business pages, etc. Then, run bots with these accounts, click around on a subset of good links randomly, and throw in a reasonable ratio of ad clicks per account, then move on to the n…

Google seems to handle click fraud pretty well: http://www.google.com/intl/en_ALL/ads/adtrafficquality/index...

I couldn't find any resources on how Facebook handles this.

Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots

#368

Post by valejo »

rapind wrote: post #362
jiggy2011 wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends whether the bots are creating accounts or hijacking existing ones (via browser plugins or whatnot). The bots will not be able to get accurate statistics without paying, but they might be able to get "good enough" statistics. For example, is the system moving in a direction we like. If you do need to pay , a good bot herder probably has enough stolen credit cards to use. Yes, there are certainly mitigation…

Hijacking browsers? We're getting pretty sophisticated and far fetched. If you've hijacked someone's browser there are many better ways to make a profit than spiking a competitors ad buys. So basically we've narrowed down the potentially bot makers to: 1) Has a way to hijack thousands of facebook user's browsers, and is more interested in spiking some companies ad buys than other profitable activities they could be d…

Where there is an affiliate program there will be bots. Insofar as Facebook creates a way for developers to monetize their apps through a revenue share on ad revenue, developers will have an incentive to falsify app usage and ad clicks.

Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots

#369

Post by javajosh »

EternalFury wrote: post #309
javajosh wrote: post #189

Isn't this why, oh, around 2005 CPA was the big thing instead of CPC? Personally, I think CPA is absolutely the right way to do internet advertising, and I wonder why FB doesn't do that.

Because they would not make a tenth of the money they do if they did that, obviously. Most sales or acquisitions originated online are based on rational decisions, not on the appeal of annoying ads. The day advertisers start to use a verifiable CPA system, 80% of online advertising cease to exist and 95% of today's start-ups see their cash vaporize.

Well then there's a huge market opportunity. When advertisers realize that their getting played by Facebook (and Google), paying for bad clicks, they'll look elsewhere - and CPA is pretty obvious solution (heck it's not even innovative).

Is CPAFacebook.com taken I wonder? :)

Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots

#370

Post by [deleted] »

EternalFury wrote: post #309
javajosh wrote: post #189

Isn't this why, oh, around 2005 CPA was the big thing instead of CPC? Personally, I think CPA is absolutely the right way to do internet advertising, and I wonder why FB doesn't do that.

Because they would not make a tenth of the money they do if they did that, obviously. Most sales or acquisitions originated online are based on rational decisions, not on the appeal of annoying ads. The day advertisers start to use a verifiable CPA system, 80% of online advertising cease to exist and 95% of today's start-ups see their cash vaporize.

[deleted]
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