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Myspace looked like it was back, but was a pawn in an ad fraud scheme
- Sujan 9y agoAnother article about this kind of click fraud. And again only lots of details where the traffic goes and how it is then used to "spam" impressions on ads. Does anyone understand what devices/users are actually going into this "funnel" and where they come from? Botnet? Junk traffic from porn sites? Iframes?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Eridrus 9y agoAll of the above.
- sogen 9y agohttp://money.cnn.com/2016/12/20/technology/ad-fraud-online-methbot/index.html http://money.cnn.com/2016/12/20/technology/ad-fraud-online-m...
- gowld 9y agoThis is the real Artificial Human Intelligence
- Horatio9000 9y ago> "The Methbot is a beautiful simulacrum of a real browser. It's gotten better over time. And by better, I mean, a more perfect life-like copy," said White Ops CEO Michael Tiffany. Very interesting.
- pault 9y agoDamn, $5MM a day. Even if your network gets broken up after a few weeks that's still a massive win.
- gowld 9y agowhy are porn sites "junk traffic"? the users eyeballs are still eyeballs
- cisanti 9y agoNot for the companies buying the ads, you need the ask the question from them.
- Sujan 9y agoHistorically if you want to pay _lots_ of super cheap traffic, you get it from porn sites. Not the ones with monthly subscription, but the ones where each click leads you to a new domain with a 50/50 (or 95/5 depending on your "value" [US>Bulgaria, Mac>Linux, ...]) chance of landing on some scam site / ad.
- tenaciousDaniel 9y agohttp://www.ana.net/content/show/id/botfraud-2017 http://www.ana.net/content/show/id/botfraud-2017
- jack9 9y agoViant (aka Specific Media) is a well known fraudster. Nobody in the ad industry thought MySpace was "back" after you heard who bought it years ago. The Vanderhooks (the brothers who founded Specific and continue to run all their schemes) pioneered the pop-under and have been running darker scams ever since. I worked for Specific for a few years and the brothers were refreshingly tech savvy. The penchant for fraud was always the dominant strategy (grown from a kernel of organic, like all good ad fraud).
- mratzloff 9y agoWhy did you work for them for a few years if they were engaging in fraud?
- gowld 9y agostolen money spends as good as earned money
- katastic 9y agoTell that to all my pesos.
- kaishiro 9y agoThese things are rarely gone over in the initial ramp up in my experience :) It usually takes some time to see what the actual core values of an organization are.
- mratzloff 9y agoNot years
- jack9 9y agoFraud is generally done at the operational and deal level. When discovered (technically), I made it clear that I would not participate directly. The fraud is so pervasive, that individual departments defraud the company at times. The short answer was that I moved to other projects. I made a couple of enemies by pointing out nasty schemes. The technical challenges were large scale and unlimited budget. Hard to turn down the experience when I was under 30.
- diogenescynic 9y agoFacebook is probably also juking their stats. I don’t trust any of their numbers.
- perfmode 9y agoI doubt they need to at this point.
- asadlionpk 9y agoThey do
- nemothekid 9y agoDoes it matter? Their effectiveness is proven at this point.
- gotrecruit 9y agoWhen have they proven the effectiveness of their ads? From my understanding, in fact it is increasingly being discovered that much of their clicks and likes, etc are fake.
- partiallypro 9y agoYou don't fake your stats, you tell something true that is impressive unless you look under the hood of how the number was formulated. That's how you can get away with it legally. There's a famous old book called "How to Lie with Statistics" (it's on Bill Gates' must read list) that explains some methods companies use.
- shostack 9y agoI dislike how FB presents their data by default, but if you know where to look or how to set things up it is something you can mitigate (unless you need to get view data into your ad server for something using Custom Audiences which they don't allow). It is admittedly less of an issue for performance advertisers than brand advertisers as the former can rely more heavily on conversion tracking to inform quality.
- urlgrey 9y agoCrawlers & bots trigger video playback on the websites they visit, though it's probably unintentional in most cases. At Mux we have taken steps to identify such video views to limit their impact on aggregate video view performance metrics: https://mux.com/blog/do-androids-watch-videos-of-electric-sheep-how-bots-react-to-web-video-2/ https://mux.com/blog/do-androids-watch-videos-of-electric-sh...
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- scientistem 9y agoThis is certainly click fraud. Is that fraud in the legal sense?
- AlexCoventry 9y agoIf it can be demonstrated that your'e intentionally and knowingly deceiving someone in order to separate them from their money, it's fraud.
- scientistem 9y agoIn this case, it’s not clear who the fraudsters deceived. If it’s the advertisers, how do you demonstrate malice rather than, uhh, stupidity? If it’s the consumers, that just seems like effective adertising. I guess, this is certainly colloquial fraud, but is there any evidence this could lead to a criminal suit?