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I worked at an ad network about a decade ago and we had a partner spending about $10k/day buying traffic that was directly from click/bot farms. They were fully
by meritt 9y ago
I worked at an ad network about a decade ago and we had a partner spending about $10k/day buying traffic that was directly from click/bot farms. They were fully aware of this fact and continued buying as much as possible. We couldn't understand why.
Later we figured it out: Their revenue model was selling display advertising on their own website. The bot traffic inflated their Comscore/Hitwise/Alexa rankings and as a result they could negotiate significantly higher deals.
- shostack 9y agoGoing one further, when I was in the agency world there was a major publisher whose goals were buying traffic for $.01. they did not care about quality. When I found out about this and pressed the agency team, I learned it was because they were arbitraging it into inflated reach for justifying their CPMs and then selling the garbage traffic. This stuff is pretty pervasive and the reason why savvy media buyers bill off their own IAP certified numbers with some quality/viewability vendor in place.