9 ms·

Awesome to see that subject #1 on HN. At my startup Confiant [1], we block bad ads in stream on behalf of publishers. Cedato aka Algovid aka TLVMedia is one of

by jdangu 9y ago

Awesome to see that subject #1 on HN. At my startup Confiant [1], we block bad ads in stream on behalf of publishers. Cedato aka Algovid aka TLVMedia is one of our prime targets, we block millions of their ad impressions daily. They are essentially buying cheap display ad placements to resell them as fake video preroll ad placements. They sell on video exchanges like AOL's AdapTV and others. To maximize their yield, they resend ad requests in a loop to multiple parties every few seconds until an ad clears, leading to this massive network load. We're on a mission to drive them out of business (and we're hiring ;) ) [1] https://www.confiant.com https://www.confiant.com (edit forgot link)

driverdan 9y ago
How is that not fraud?
- jdangu 9y ago
  it's fraud.
- phamilton 9y ago
  It absolutely is fraud. I worked on one of those big video exchanges and we'd sometimes see ads run through our own system multiple times. We couldn't spot it until after the ad ran because of the way the ad actually plays. It ends up a bunch of black box Russian dolls, where the spec says you call methods on the ad unit you are playing, which will just wrap another ad unit, which in turn wraps another ad unit. We could piece together what happened sometimes after the fact, but not reliably.
  - Macha 9y ago
    As an example, I'm currently diagnosing an issue where an ad refuses to play in our player as it incorrectly identifies itself as being adblocked. We load the advertiser provided ad (really a DoubleVerify fraud protection module) which loads a custom video player which eventually loads the advertiser's media file. The DoubleVerify script is downloading a bootstrap JavaScript file from their server, which then randomly chooses some other JavaScript to eval to check for whatever they think indicates fraud. It's this JavaScript, dynamically downloaded from their server (possibly even dynamically generated) that thinks our ad player is an ad blocker. And that's just diagnosing a bug, now imagine if you were trying to find some malicious JS.
    - phamilton 9y ago
      It was definitely worse when it was all flash. At least JavaScript has ubiquitous debug tooling. VPAID 3.0 (or is it 4.0?) has some proposals to fix this. It makes fraud analysis a first class citizen of the spec, sort of like companion ads. This allows them to be downloaded separately, as well as cached.
alphapapa 9y ago
Good grief, it's like an invisible war going on inside your browser. > We're on a mission to drive them out of business But if you succeed, won't you go out of business? It's like antivirus vendors: if there were no malware, there'd be no need for AV software. How do you remain ethical? If you win, will you close up shop?
- jdangu 9y ago
  Ad security is very weak by design because it allows any fourth-party to serve html/javascript on any website. As long as this is the norm, we'll be around to protect publishers and their audience. Beyond ads, everything we built applies to the web in general so if we ever run out of bad ads, we'll expand in different directions. edited for clarity
- mmmpop 9y ago
  I think that "effectively rid the world of shitty ad fraudsters" is a strong credential in one's CV. Jobs won't be hard to find!
- samplatt 9y ago
  >Good grief, it's like an invisible war going on inside your browser. I find it incredibly interesting that the evolutionary-arms-race of ads and viruses versus blockers is mimicking the development of actual genetic evolution. There's that XKCD comic that mentions if you want to look at 20 years of code evolution, look the source for the google homepage. Now imagine what your genetic code looks like after 800 million years. I don't have any insight or education to back me up here, but I believe that even if we were to re-engineer the internet from the ground up we'd still get an evolutionary arms race, simply because a space with potential to exploit a system will always exist.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
malchow 9y ago
Great stuff. We do similar work at Publir [1] on behalf of high-traffic news publishers, although we do this largely by maintaining our own exchange. We filter for bad actors on the intake side. [1] http://publir.com http://publir.com
boundlessdreamz 9y ago
> fake video preroll ad placements Can you explain this further? Who is getting defrauded here?
- jdangu 9y ago
  Everyone feels the pain: Publisher gets paid on a $1 CPM basis while Cedato gets paid $5-10 CPM and pockets the difference. Advertiser thinks they paid for quality video content preroll but it's actually a tiny rectangle normally used for "display" ads. Audience is infuriated. Think about what happens on a 4G mobile plan now that VPAID has been fully migrated from Flash to JS...
  - erikb 9y ago
    And you can't even install ad blockers on the phone.
    - shakna 9y ago
      Firefox Mobile, uBlock Origin. Adblockers are here.
      - devcpp 9y ago
        Or root and AdAway if you're looking to block them in other apps as well.
      - _pmf_ 9y ago
        Or Brave on Android; it's basically indistinguishable from Chrome (or whatever the Android standard browser currently is called).
        bnolsen 9y ago
        Just tried this. Other than having to redo all my forums passwords again this browser looks to be a winner. On my phone firefox ran very slowly and hogged too many resources.
baybal2 9y ago
>To maximize their yield, they resend ad requests in a loop to multiple parties every few seconds until an ad clears, leading to this massive network load. They are stalling for time in every allowed way to get more bids. A standard tactic for company like theirs is to send duplicate lots for a single impression, and reload the ad few times per second once they get overriding bids even if one of lots was already sold.
oasfboasbfos 9y ago
The only good ad is a dead one. With very few exceptions, especially in the consumer space, you won't need advertising if you actually need something. You'll search it out or your friends will tell you what to buy. Advertising serves as a way for the capitalist class to exert veto power over other aspects of society by yanking funding at opportune moments (see the current Google snafu or Bill O'Reilly's departure from FOX (which was an example of this power being used for good indirectly via public pressure)). It also allows for shows of dominance, strength, and to move fucking product by creating an awareness moat vs your competitors. This means that people often already know they want to buy something, but they'll pick you instead of the other one which is fundamentally different from advertising performing a public service.
- cft 9y ago
  An anecdote from 2010: my company had racks of Rackable Systems servers. Every month a server went dead- power supply, board or some such. Rackable Systems were unreliable. Then on Slashdot I saw a square ad for IBM System X servers (unfortunately they have been sold to Lenovo a couple of years ago). That somehow made me do research- although I was aware of IBM System X before. Between 2010 and 1013 we bought perhaps 20 IBM System X servers (rock solid and beautifully engineered). Cost per that ad impression was perhaps $75,000.
  - oiboabfljasbfo 9y ago
    I won't deny this has occasionally happened to me, but look at your example: it's B2B when my claim is primarily for B2C. B2B ads tend to be more targeted, aimed at corporations, and purchases are for higher dollar amounts. The product being sold was also competing based on build quality, a material improvement. Businesses often make more rational decisions because they can assign someone to do research (like you did of your own volition) who will make comparisons and think about it. Imagine the same process happening for shampoo. I'm sure there are some people that want "the best" shampoo, but most of the products are going to be nearly interchangeable and the marketing will try focus on various kinds of manipulation to dig that moat. These manipulations aren't what most people think of, like a sex symbol hypnotizing you. Instead they work to increase brand familiarity, social proof, and provide a life style narrative you can tell yourself and show off to other people with. The capital hiding behind these campaigns funds newspapers, television, radio, and civic centers. It acts as a filter on the public discourse. If you're interested, look up Manufacturing Consent for more information. Here's a clip from a documentary based on the book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTBWfkE7BXU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTBWfkE7BXU
manigandham 9y ago
This happens because it's a business problem with perverse incentives across the entire advertising supply chain - and no amount of technical solutions will solve it. It's the same issue with every anti-fraud vendor and the new hyped blockchain nonsense. Until buyers and agencies vote with their dollars, nothing will change.
- avaer 9y ago
  The thing is people are voting with their dollars, but it's on credit. People don't want to pay for "free" content, and "free" software. So instead they pay with malware, insane data charges, markups to pay for ads, markups to pay for dealing with fraud, the indefinite privacy tax of their data, markups extracted from monopoly positions, and much more. The problem is people don't see all of these exorbitant fees, but they see that dollar in their wallet.
  - manigandham 9y ago
    I'm not talking about consumers but advertisers who are the clients and the media agencies they hire to produce and execute these media campaigns. The internet has increased efficiency and lowered prices but this also has an effect of amplifying any misaligned incentives - so now agencies which are bonused on clicks will deliver cheap clicks, whether it's actually producing sales or not.
    - thecrazyone 9y ago
      What's your point? If they don't drive sales, they'll stop advertising or go out of business. Not sure what's your concern here
      - manigandham 9y ago
        Marketing is a 12 figure industry and billions are spent with little accountability and incentives that drive bad intrusive ads that break privacy and extract data at all costs. That's my concern, as stated in my original comment describing why this situation exists and why companies working on purely technical anti-fraud measures will accomplish much of nothing.
dannyw 9y ago
This is a scam that should be investigated by the FTC.
- exikyut 9y ago
  To be clear, what exactly are you referring to by "this"?
magic_beans 9y ago
Where's your hiring page?
jwitko 9y ago
Went to your website, don't see a careers or jobs page?
ep103 9y ago
Who is your market? I've built a product that collects data like this, but we couldn't find any buyers. The short end of it, was no one in the market has an incentive to pay for it, except for the advertisers, and the advertisers just chalk it up to an efficiency loss in a growing market. If I don't get upvoted enough for a reply,I keep a spam account at no.good.email.names.left.16534 a t gmail
celestialcheese 9y ago
You're doing gods work. We're a small-ish publisher, and i constantly am battling these pre-roll video ads getting stuffed into display ad placements. The biggest offender I've seen, apart from Cedato, is C1Exchange. At one point, they were serving preroll video ads into 100% of our display units, completely disregarding A) that we turned off video display units and B) that all of the units on the page are 728x90. It's straight-up fraud.

by jdangu 9y ago

driverdan 9y ago

How is that not fraud?

jdangu 9y ago
it's fraud.
phamilton 9y ago
It absolutely is fraud. I worked on one of those big video exchanges and we'd sometimes see ads run through our own system multiple times. We couldn't spot it until after the ad ran because of the way the ad actually plays. It ends up a bunch of black box Russian dolls, where the spec says you call methods on the ad unit you are playing, which will just wrap another ad unit, which in turn wraps another ad unit. We could piece together what happened sometimes after the fact, but not reliably.
- Macha 9y ago
  As an example, I'm currently diagnosing an issue where an ad refuses to play in our player as it incorrectly identifies itself as being adblocked. We load the advertiser provided ad (really a DoubleVerify fraud protection module) which loads a custom video player which eventually loads the advertiser's media file. The DoubleVerify script is downloading a bootstrap JavaScript file from their server, which then randomly chooses some other JavaScript to eval to check for whatever they think indicates fraud. It's this JavaScript, dynamically downloaded from their server (possibly even dynamically generated) that thinks our ad player is an ad blocker. And that's just diagnosing a bug, now imagine if you were trying to find some malicious JS.
  - phamilton 9y ago
    It was definitely worse when it was all flash. At least JavaScript has ubiquitous debug tooling. VPAID 3.0 (or is it 4.0?) has some proposals to fix this. It makes fraud analysis a first class citizen of the spec, sort of like companion ads. This allows them to be downloaded separately, as well as cached.

alphapapa 9y ago

Good grief, it's like an invisible war going on inside your browser. > We're on a mission to drive them out of business But if you succeed, won't you go out of business? It's like antivirus vendors: if there were no malware, there'd be no need for AV software. How do you remain ethical? If you win, will you close up shop?

jdangu 9y ago
Ad security is very weak by design because it allows any fourth-party to serve html/javascript on any website. As long as this is the norm, we'll be around to protect publishers and their audience. Beyond ads, everything we built applies to the web in general so if we ever run out of bad ads, we'll expand in different directions. edited for clarity
mmmpop 9y ago
I think that "effectively rid the world of shitty ad fraudsters" is a strong credential in one's CV. Jobs won't be hard to find!
samplatt 9y ago
>Good grief, it's like an invisible war going on inside your browser. I find it incredibly interesting that the evolutionary-arms-race of ads and viruses versus blockers is mimicking the development of actual genetic evolution. There's that XKCD comic that mentions if you want to look at 20 years of code evolution, look the source for the google homepage. Now imagine what your genetic code looks like after 800 million years. I don't have any insight or education to back me up here, but I believe that even if we were to re-engineer the internet from the ground up we'd still get an evolutionary arms race, simply because a space with potential to exploit a system will always exist.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

malchow 9y ago

Great stuff. We do similar work at Publir [1] on behalf of high-traffic news publishers, although we do this largely by maintaining our own exchange. We filter for bad actors on the intake side. [1] http://publir.com http://publir.com

boundlessdreamz 9y ago

> fake video preroll ad placements Can you explain this further? Who is getting defrauded here?

jdangu 9y ago
Everyone feels the pain: Publisher gets paid on a $1 CPM basis while Cedato gets paid $5-10 CPM and pockets the difference. Advertiser thinks they paid for quality video content preroll but it's actually a tiny rectangle normally used for "display" ads. Audience is infuriated. Think about what happens on a 4G mobile plan now that VPAID has been fully migrated from Flash to JS...
- erikb 9y ago
  And you can't even install ad blockers on the phone.
  - shakna 9y ago
    Firefox Mobile, uBlock Origin. Adblockers are here.
    - devcpp 9y ago
      Or root and AdAway if you're looking to block them in other apps as well.
    - _pmf_ 9y ago
      Or Brave on Android; it's basically indistinguishable from Chrome (or whatever the Android standard browser currently is called).
      - bnolsen 9y ago
        Just tried this. Other than having to redo all my forums passwords again this browser looks to be a winner. On my phone firefox ran very slowly and hogged too many resources.

baybal2 9y ago

>To maximize their yield, they resend ad requests in a loop to multiple parties every few seconds until an ad clears, leading to this massive network load. They are stalling for time in every allowed way to get more bids. A standard tactic for company like theirs is to send duplicate lots for a single impression, and reload the ad few times per second once they get overriding bids even if one of lots was already sold.

oasfboasbfos 9y ago

The only good ad is a dead one. With very few exceptions, especially in the consumer space, you won't need advertising if you actually need something. You'll search it out or your friends will tell you what to buy. Advertising serves as a way for the capitalist class to exert veto power over other aspects of society by yanking funding at opportune moments (see the current Google snafu or Bill O'Reilly's departure from FOX (which was an example of this power being used for good indirectly via public pressure)). It also allows for shows of dominance, strength, and to move fucking product by creating an awareness moat vs your competitors. This means that people often already know they want to buy something, but they'll pick you instead of the other one which is fundamentally different from advertising performing a public service.

cft 9y ago
An anecdote from 2010: my company had racks of Rackable Systems servers. Every month a server went dead- power supply, board or some such. Rackable Systems were unreliable. Then on Slashdot I saw a square ad for IBM System X servers (unfortunately they have been sold to Lenovo a couple of years ago). That somehow made me do research- although I was aware of IBM System X before. Between 2010 and 1013 we bought perhaps 20 IBM System X servers (rock solid and beautifully engineered). Cost per that ad impression was perhaps $75,000.
- oiboabfljasbfo 9y ago
  I won't deny this has occasionally happened to me, but look at your example: it's B2B when my claim is primarily for B2C. B2B ads tend to be more targeted, aimed at corporations, and purchases are for higher dollar amounts. The product being sold was also competing based on build quality, a material improvement. Businesses often make more rational decisions because they can assign someone to do research (like you did of your own volition) who will make comparisons and think about it. Imagine the same process happening for shampoo. I'm sure there are some people that want "the best" shampoo, but most of the products are going to be nearly interchangeable and the marketing will try focus on various kinds of manipulation to dig that moat. These manipulations aren't what most people think of, like a sex symbol hypnotizing you. Instead they work to increase brand familiarity, social proof, and provide a life style narrative you can tell yourself and show off to other people with. The capital hiding behind these campaigns funds newspapers, television, radio, and civic centers. It acts as a filter on the public discourse. If you're interested, look up Manufacturing Consent for more information. Here's a clip from a documentary based on the book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTBWfkE7BXU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTBWfkE7BXU

manigandham 9y ago

This happens because it's a business problem with perverse incentives across the entire advertising supply chain - and no amount of technical solutions will solve it. It's the same issue with every anti-fraud vendor and the new hyped blockchain nonsense. Until buyers and agencies vote with their dollars, nothing will change.

avaer 9y ago
The thing is people are voting with their dollars, but it's on credit. People don't want to pay for "free" content, and "free" software. So instead they pay with malware, insane data charges, markups to pay for ads, markups to pay for dealing with fraud, the indefinite privacy tax of their data, markups extracted from monopoly positions, and much more. The problem is people don't see all of these exorbitant fees, but they see that dollar in their wallet.
- manigandham 9y ago
  I'm not talking about consumers but advertisers who are the clients and the media agencies they hire to produce and execute these media campaigns. The internet has increased efficiency and lowered prices but this also has an effect of amplifying any misaligned incentives - so now agencies which are bonused on clicks will deliver cheap clicks, whether it's actually producing sales or not.
  - thecrazyone 9y ago
    What's your point? If they don't drive sales, they'll stop advertising or go out of business. Not sure what's your concern here
    - manigandham 9y ago
      Marketing is a 12 figure industry and billions are spent with little accountability and incentives that drive bad intrusive ads that break privacy and extract data at all costs. That's my concern, as stated in my original comment describing why this situation exists and why companies working on purely technical anti-fraud measures will accomplish much of nothing.

dannyw 9y ago

This is a scam that should be investigated by the FTC.

exikyut 9y ago
To be clear, what exactly are you referring to by "this"?

magic_beans 9y ago

Where's your hiring page?

jwitko 9y ago

Went to your website, don't see a careers or jobs page?

ep103 9y ago

Who is your market? I've built a product that collects data like this, but we couldn't find any buyers. The short end of it, was no one in the market has an incentive to pay for it, except for the advertisers, and the advertisers just chalk it up to an efficiency loss in a growing market. If I don't get upvoted enough for a reply,I keep a spam account at no.good.email.names.left.16534 a t gmail

celestialcheese 9y ago

You're doing gods work. We're a small-ish publisher, and i constantly am battling these pre-roll video ads getting stuffed into display ad placements. The biggest offender I've seen, apart from Cedato, is C1Exchange. At one point, they were serving preroll video ads into 100% of our display units, completely disregarding A) that we turned off video display units and B) that all of the units on the page are 728x90. It's straight-up fraud.