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24B clicks show mobile ad fraud is rampant: 8 networks are 100% fraudulent

• Analemma_ 10y ago
  Do we really need to have this article over and over? The ad market prices in fraud automatically: if fraud goes up, then conversions per click/view goes down and so CPC goes down with it. Whatever advertisers are paying for clicks is the fraud-aware price.
  • Eridrus 10y ago
    IME it is not actually priced in because advertisers, particularly brand advertisers, do not have a good way to link impressions or clicks to conversions, particularly when they happen offline. And even if you have online conversion metrics, if you only get 1 click per 10k impressions, and only a fraction of those convert, you need to run close to millions of impressions on a given domain before you have any statistically significant idea of whether that domain is going to generate more conversions or not. And that's if you can even figure out what domain your ad runs on in the first place after it's been through enough intermediaries.
  • brianwawok 10y ago
    What I never get is who is making money off these? Surely Google doesn't want to risk damage to it's billing dollar brand. So it's fake websites selling fake ads with click robots to make money from Google? Is this really a hard to solve problem?
    • baybal2 10y ago
      It is. The few online ads pioneers went down due to that. Google succeed because they were moderately capable of fighting it.
• pascalxus 10y ago
  This doesn't surprise me. Mostly price insensitive, with no calculation of ROI, the Big Brand names dominate Ad buys, thus setting it's prices and allowing such fraud to thrive.