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Reverse-engineering Google’s "Skip Button Guarantee"

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Re: Reverse-engineering Google’s "Skip Button Guarantee"

#41

Post by makestuff »

specialist wrote: post #22
Dopameaner wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats correct, in my previous company, we had a full internal infrastructure that provides daily or hourly perforamnce of advertisements that hits all major social media APIs.

Did prev company then compare with performance claimed by google, facebook, etc?

I work in adtech and yeah if there is a discrepancy the advertiser will 100% contact their account manager about it. Same goes for the supply side, publishers maintain what they expect to be paid and will raise any discrepancies as well.

Re: Reverse-engineering Google’s "Skip Button Guarantee"

#42

Post by whatshisface »

makeitdouble wrote: post #38
paxys wrote: post #19

Meh. I read the original report when it was released, and it was a whole lot of nothing. Their claim was basically – "we found some Google video ad fraud!". Well guess what, Google knows and agrees that there is fraud. So do all the advertisers who pay them. The question is really about how much fraud there is. Google says that it actively keeps it under a certain %, and advertisers are generally okay with that numbe…

At the same time, Google is the only entity that could provide the numbers you want to see. Who else could get actual numbers of scams they run vs legit ads ? There's no other entity that sees every single of the ads they serve, so we'd need a trustworthy insider leak to meet your standard.

There is a concept from polling called a "random sample" which would apply here. If you take 10,000 clicks and sort them into legitimate and illegitimate, as long as you were able to rule out any way that your sample would be significantly more or less fraudulent than the whole pool, you would understand (roughly) the ratio in the greater pool.

It's like taking a sample of a swimming pool, to check the chlorine levels.

Re: Reverse-engineering Google’s "Skip Button Guarantee"

#43

Post by eddythompson80 »

paxys wrote: post #19

Meh. I read the original report when it was released, and it was a whole lot of nothing. Their claim was basically – "we found some Google video ad fraud!". Well guess what, Google knows and agrees that there is fraud. So do all the advertisers who pay them. The question is really about how much fraud there is. Google says that it actively keeps it under a certain %, and advertisers are generally okay with that numbe…

> "significant quantities", "many different brands", "appear to have been served", "many ads were served", "Often"...you can keep reading as long as you like, and will not find a single objective number or percentage

I’m a bit confused. The Adalytics report definitely defines numbers and percentages of the samples they looked at. Obviously only Google will have the authoritative final numbers, but they are also the ones most incentivized to keep them as opaque as possible. I admit I’m not very familiar with the ad business, and know that a fraud is rampant, but there is a difference between a rampant 5-10% fraud to 50–60%. The first few paragraph list a lot of percentages from that report

Original report: https://adalytics.io/blog/invalid-google-video-partner-truev...

Re: Reverse-engineering Google’s "Skip Button Guarantee"

#44

Post by ineedasername »

paxys wrote: post #19

Meh. I read the original report when it was released, and it was a whole lot of nothing. Their claim was basically – "we found some Google video ad fraud!". Well guess what, Google knows and agrees that there is fraud. So do all the advertisers who pay them. The question is really about how much fraud there is. Google says that it actively keeps it under a certain %, and advertisers are generally okay with that numbe…

Every thing you said sums up to: "Just trust Google".

Re: Reverse-engineering Google’s "Skip Button Guarantee"

#45

Post by christoph »

The internet feels like a desolate waste ground to me at the moment. I give up pretty quickly these days "surfing the web", as I just get fed up with the constant never ending search results filled with blogspam, news sites that constantly pester you with modal dialogs from the microsecond you land on them, every site begging you for money, your email address or moaning at you because you're running an adblocker. Or sites just plain not loading, because you forgot you're still connected to a VPN, or using Apples private relay.

I occasionally like to look at the DailyMail but when it complains and blocks me for using an adblocker I just nope out. I've seen what that site looks like without serious adblocking and I'm astounded any sane person could ever endure that experience. It's bad enough with adblocking.

The only places I really visit now are small forums, a few Reddits, HN obviously and not much else.

As an example of just how broken and manipulative it all is. Open Google. Search for apples.

It tells me it found 8,540,000,000 results (0.38 seconds). Wow. Big DATA! Click to page 10. Click to page 11. That's the last page for me now and it now says at the top: Page 11 of about 103 results (0.70 seconds).

That seems pretty broken to me for the biggest search engine on the internet. Oh and forget trying to manipulate the query string like the good old days, it's now just a big old long list of encrypted garbage.

Re: Reverse-engineering Google’s "Skip Button Guarantee"

#46

Post by Sai_ »

mwint wrote: post #32
floomk wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google says that it actively keeps it under a certain %, and advertisers are generally okay with that number How about actively keeping that at 0%?

Relevant: Bits About Money, The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero : https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...

Relevant that this is an opinion piece, not a study.

Re: Reverse-engineering Google’s "Skip Button Guarantee"

#48

Post by ineedasername »

whatshisface wrote: post #42
makeitdouble wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the same time, Google is the only entity that could provide the numbers you want to see. Who else could get actual numbers of scams they run vs legit ads ? There's no other entity that sees every single of the ads they serve, so we'd need a trustworthy insider leak to meet your standard.

There is a concept from polling called a "random sample" which would apply here. If you take 10,000 clicks and sort them into legitimate and illegitimate, as long as you were able to rule out any way that your sample would be significantly more or less fraudulent than the whole pool, you would understand (roughly) the ratio in the greater pool. It's like taking a sample of a swimming pool, to check the chlorine level…

>There is a concept from polling called a "random sample"... It's like taking a sample of a swimming pool, to check the chlorine levels.

And maybe the edge of the pool closest to the person taking the sample is the deep end where mostly adults swim, but if they walked a bit further and took the sample from the shallow side with the babies and toddlers they'd find out the water is actually 50% piss with more than trace amounts of feces mixed in as well.

Re: Reverse-engineering Google’s "Skip Button Guarantee"

#49

Post by riku_iki »

makestuff wrote: post #41
specialist wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did prev company then compare with performance claimed by google, facebook, etc?

I work in adtech and yeah if there is a discrepancy the advertiser will 100% contact their account manager about it. Same goes for the supply side, publishers maintain what they expect to be paid and will raise any discrepancies as well.

and does account manager help sometimes, or just retrieve standard template response?

Re: Reverse-engineering Google’s "Skip Button Guarantee"

#50

Post by eddythompson80 »

christoph wrote: post #45

The internet feels like a desolate waste ground to me at the moment. I give up pretty quickly these days "surfing the web", as I just get fed up with the constant never ending search results filled with blogspam, news sites that constantly pester you with modal dialogs from the microsecond you land on them, every site begging you for money, your email address or moaning at you because you're running an adblocker. Or…

> It tells me it found 8,540,000,000 results (0.38 seconds).

Lol, that takes me back to CS101 in college circa 2004. Our professor Loved Google at the time. When he was introducing binary search he opened google and did a search a showed us that top number. Then said “This is the POWER of binary search!!” Ngl, I was impressed at the time. It’s a funny memory.

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