How much of your audience is fake? • Hacker News Board

Re: How much of your audience is fake?

#91

Post by pherq » Fri, Sep 25, 2015, 8:10 AM UTC

davidgerard wrote: post #90

mattmanser wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The gizmodo reporter herself admitted she was wrong. And then launched another attack to try and hide her cockup.

[citation still needed]

The link is http://www.gizmodo.co.uk/2015/09/ashley-madison-code-shows-m... (which doesn't exactly paint Ashley Madison in glowing terms, despite the number of bots being lower than originally thought).

While quite a lot more women used the service then the analyst initially thought, it is still true that AM did a lot to encourage men to pay them based on contact with fake accounts, and it apparently worked: http://www.gizmodo.co.uk/2015/09/one-chart-that-shows-how-mu...

Re: How much of your audience is fake?

#92

Post by davidgerard » Fri, Sep 25, 2015, 8:26 AM UTC

pherq wrote: post #91

davidgerard wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[citation still needed]

The link is http://www.gizmodo.co.uk/2015/09/ashley-madison-code-shows-m... (which doesn't exactly paint Ashley Madison in glowing terms, despite the number of bots being lower than originally thought). While quite a lot more women used the service then the analyst initially thought, it is still true that AM did a lot to encourage men to pay them based on contact with fake accounts, and it apparently worked: http://w…

Indeed. "What I have learned from examining the site’s the source code is that Ashley Madison’s army of fembots appears to have been a sophisticated, deliberate, and lucrative fraud. The code tells the story of a company trying to weave the illusion that women on the site were plentiful and eager. Whatever the total number of real, active female Ashley Madison users is, the company was clearly on a desperate quest to design legions of fake women to interact with the men on the site."

Ashley Madison was still a sad, exploitative scam.

Re: How much of your audience is fake?

#93

Post by marwann » Fri, Sep 25, 2015, 2:58 PM UTC

Negitivefrags wrote: post #51

marwann wrote: post #13

Any clever advertiser doesn't judge the success of a campaign by its number of clicks, but by its number of conversions (and ultimately, revenue). What's become a new pain in the advertising space are spam/ghost referrals, messing your analytics only for the sole purpose of making you visit their websites, also adding up to the stack of fake audience of your site (which the article fails to mention).

The whole problem is really just the age old issue that if you track the wrong metric, people will optimise for something you don't want. It's like paying programmers per line of code written and then getting bloated and shitty code. You need to be doing CPA (Cost per Acquisition) deals not CPM or CPC.

CPM can drive your costs down on a highly targeted niche. Let's say you want to target a female tech journalist living in SF and using Slack, you'd rather use CPM than CPC as you're pretty sure there are only 20 people that match the criteria and even though you'd pay 50 USD per 1000 impressions, you'd only pay 5 dollars to ensure each person in this particular niche sees your ad 5 times!

Re: How much of your audience is fake?

#94

Post by emodendroket » Mon, Sep 28, 2015, 6:51 PM UTC

mattmanser wrote: post #71

emodendroket wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course not, because it's false.

http://techcrunch.com/2015/08/31/ashley-madison-refutes-clai... http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/statement-from-avid-... Care to apologise?

Wow, press releases from the company accused of fraudulently generating data in the first place -- how could I not be convinced by that evidence?