This is a great piece, but I have to post a correction for this: "It boils down to this: fake websites serving real ads to fake traffic for real money." There

This is a great piece, but I have to post a correction for this: "It boils down to this: fake websites serving real ads to fake traffic for real money." There are, in fact, also real websites serving real ads to fake traffic for real money. When publishers promise an advertiser impressions or downloads or some other metric on a campaign, and then the traffic fails to materialize, the marketing department can always call in the bots. It happens at some of the biggest and most reputable sites out there, and what's crazy is the agencies (middlemen who buy ads on behalf of publishers) know it and don't care because hey, the metrics got met and they got paid their cut!