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Reverse-engineering Google’s "Skip Button Guarantee"

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

#71

Post by colinsane »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #23
muppetman wrote: post #7

Oh no the people pumping this fetid garbage at me are being ripped off? Be still my beating heart.

You're also paying for it, indirectly.

i pay for the effects of questionable ad platform practices far more directly anytime i shop online. Amazon's "sponsored" product listings which forces sellers to compete away all their margins -- but not in the historic "competition leads to lower prices" but "competition leads to a greater take for Amazon" sense -- and makes the actual products i'm looking for arbitrarily harder to find.

the fact that the in your face malpractices are so foregranted that people reach for indirection or edge cases when throwing shade at the ad industry just highlights how one-sided the battle's become.

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

#72

Post by spondylosaurus »

makestuff wrote: post #40
codedokode wrote: post #25

As I understand, the problem here is that Google wants to run your ads on third-party sites (to earn more), but you don't want to run ads there because third-party sites employ every trick possible to generate impressions even if real user never sees the ads. If you care about money spent, you should calculate ROI for each third-party site and filter out those which give low returns. And not expect that Google will d…

I would be surprised if there wasn’t some SAAS offering that did this for you.

There's a whole cottage industry of ad quality/anti-fraud filtering tools. Some better than others.

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

#73

Post by autoexec »

alvarezbjm-hn wrote: post #55
ineedasername wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 trac…

Strawman. Parent was talking about [(Cl^(-1))] If you care about excrement content, that should be another study. Bottom line: Representative sample https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_(statistics)

I think the point was that you need to ensure a representative sample and that requires an idea of the scale of the fraud taking place to be able to measure its impacts. I have no idea if that's possible without insider data or not, but I suspect that was the point of the argument, and not which substance was being tested for in the imaginary body of water being used as an example.

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

#74

Post by autoexec »

nkozyra wrote: post #24
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…

Yeah they really want to sell this as a bombshell but don't provide enough specifics or quantified data to do anything but say "well yeah ... and?" I'm trying to find them motivations behind this thing.

> I'm trying to find them motivations behind this thing.

They aren't exactly shy about their motivations. The site says their mission is:

> "holding the surveillance adtech industry accountable for abuses against advertisers and consumers, and spearheading the development of a transparent, efficient and privacy-focused digital advertising marketplace. "

Google is the #1 game in town (arguably the only game) so they need to convince advertisers that Google's ads are not serving their interests so that they'll be receptive to an alternative. It's entirely possible that they are correct and that Google is actually screwing over advertisers, I have no idea, but I suspect that it'd be more persuasive to demonstrate that their new ad platform actually serves advertisers better in real world scenarios than to just complain about whatever crap google is pulling.

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

#75

Post by ocdtrekkie »

colinsane wrote: post #71
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're also paying for it, indirectly.

i pay for the effects of questionable ad platform practices far more directly anytime i shop online. Amazon's "sponsored" product listings which forces sellers to compete away all their margins -- but not in the historic "competition leads to lower prices" but "competition leads to a greater take for Amazon" sense -- and makes the actual products i'm looking for arbitrarily harder to find. the fact that the in your f…

The reason I dislike whataboutism is that it's so easily dismissed: I think we should regulate both bad practices! Both companies are a blight on our society and we should enforce our existing laws to deal with them.

However I do feel Google's cost is more universally applicable. Tons of product types aren't commonly procured via Amazon: All business types, whether products or services, end up paying the Google tax.

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

#76

Post by fireflash38 »

paxys wrote: post #69
hedora wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The title doesn’t generalize to “the optimal illegal ad spend at sanctioned websites and countries is non-zero”. They’re running EU ads on household-name Russian government propaganda sites in the middle of a war. Manual curation of a block list should’ve caught that!

Is there a block list of every Russian propaganda site in existence? Who maintains such a list? Or should Google have to manually review every website every day to check if it is part of that set?

They're some of the biggest ones, and easily discernable by the most cursory glances. Are you trying to say that their efforts will catch more hidden ones but not the obvious ones? If they can't even get the easy ones, why do you think they get any of them?

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

#77

Post by colinsane »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #75
colinsane wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i pay for the effects of questionable ad platform practices far more directly anytime i shop online. Amazon's "sponsored" product listings which forces sellers to compete away all their margins -- but not in the historic "competition leads to lower prices" but "competition leads to a greater take for Amazon" sense -- and makes the actual products i'm looking for arbitrarily harder to find. the fact that the in your f…

The reason I dislike whataboutism is that it's so easily dismissed: I think we should regulate both bad practices! Both companies are a blight on our society and we should enforce our existing laws to deal with them. However I do feel Google's cost is more universally applicable. Tons of product types aren't commonly procured via Amazon: All business types, whether products or services, end up paying the Google tax.

i didn't mean to be what-about-ist. from my perspective there's a huge, glaring, impossible thing to miss right in front of us, and you reached specifically to the indirect issue. from my perspective, that's you being what-about-ist (ignoring the blatant bad thing in favor of the more distant bad thing).

anyway, i don't disagree with the rest. just feel that being called out for whataboutism here is a bit unfair.

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

#78

Post by macNchz »

codedokode wrote: post #34
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…

It is obvious to me that third-party sites are motivated to employ every trick to increase ad views. Google cannot show ads to bots, because it will be a fraud, but a third-party site can because they are in a different country and you won't hold them responsible anyway.

I’ve never run video ads on Google, but I have run a lot of search ads, and if the 3rd party sites where they show the videos are anything like the “search partners” network, you’re correct, the sites are total trash.

Several years ago I looked through our referrers and immediately disabled search partners for all of our ads when I saw the actual sites.

Many were just clones of the Google search results UI but with ads indistinguishable from search results. Their play is to buy ads on Google themselves, while showing partner network ads on their own confusing “search results” page. They arbitrage traffic by buying ads on cheaper keywords and then getting visitors to click a more expensive ad they serve by being in the partner network.

From what I saw, I can only imagine the vast majority of human clicks through these pages are totally unintentional or confused.

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

#79

Post by TAForObvReasons »

hsjqllzlfkf wrote: post #67
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…

Of COURSE google says "yeah tottally below %". I'm reminded of that quote "a man doesn't understand when his pay depends on him not understanding". Do you by any chance work in the advertising industry? (To be absolutely clear, if you work for google the answer to that question is yes) Edit: not just a rhetorical question, I'm genuinely waiting for an answer to this.

> It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

- Upton Sinclair

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

#80

Post by floomk »

x-complexity wrote: post #66
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%?

> How about actively keeping that at 0%? Practically impossible. A sufficiently well-developed bot is indistinguishable from the least technically-savvy legitimate users that clicked on an ad. Unless you have a novel way of filtering out the 2 from each other, the costs for performing such filtrations compound linearly at best & exponentially at worst.

It should still be their goal, instead of some arbitrary percentage. Or I suppose they could offer everyone a blanket discount for the fraud percentage.
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