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>Adam Simmons, the VP of content and marketing for DingIt, told BuzzFeed News that the site uses “4 independent traffic verification tools that monitor each vie

by f2n 9y ago

>Adam Simmons, the VP of content and marketing for DingIt, told BuzzFeed News that the site uses “4 independent traffic verification tools that monitor each view on our video player” and prevents any fraudulent traffic from viewing content or ads on the site. I wonder what the hell a "traffic verification tool" is.

shostack 9y ago
Probably something like IAS's video viewability tools[1]. There are some big players in the traffic verification space as advertisers like myself don't want to pay for garbage traffic. [1] https://integralads.com/capabilities/video/ https://integralads.com/capabilities/video/
manigandham 9y ago
Vendors like WhiteOps, Integral Ad Science, Moat, Forensiq, DoubleVerify, etc. that are used to see if visitors to a website viewing the ads are actually people during normal browsing or whether they are bots or other fraudulent behavior. None of them work well.
- f2n 9y ago
  What do they do to decide if a user if real or fake? I am not remotely surprised that none of them work well
  - sandworm101 9y ago
    Pages viewed/clicked per second. Some sites contain tiny little links that no human should every click, but a bot might. Others get more advanced by comparing visors. If a group of visitors all display the same pattern (think near identical behavior) then they are bots.
    - paxy 9y ago
      There are lots of other ways used as well. Client-side JavaScript that tracks mouse movement, for example. A combination of all of these combined with ML models give surprisingly accurate results.
  - manigandham 9y ago
    That's their trade secret but distills down to measuring all the various factors that a person actually reading a page would do: time, scroll speed/depth, click rate/location, previous history, mouse movements, http, ip, network traffic, browser profiles, etc. Although these days with headless chrome and how easy it is to just record and replay someone's session, it becomes incredibly hard to detect with accuracy, especially while trying to not affect browsing behavior beyond the typical ad load experience. There is lots of overlap with this and other security-focused companies that work with financial and government companies to protect their own websites and apps, although it's easier when you own and control the site, proxies and backend.
    - aw3c2 9y ago
      Jesus Christ, that is creepy and perverted.
      - pixl97 9y ago
        Welcome to marketing! Get out while you are still sane.
      - manigandham 9y ago
        What is exactly? It's an industry with lots of money (100s of billions USD) flowing through with little oversight and cheap startup costs thanks to cloud vendors and commodity tech. If there are criminals willing to invest intense effort committing physical crimes, it's expected that there would be a just as much put into something like this. Similar to a lot of the bitcoin/crypto dealings where there is plenty of organized crime involved.

by f2n 9y ago

shostack 9y ago

Probably something like IAS's video viewability tools[1]. There are some big players in the traffic verification space as advertisers like myself don't want to pay for garbage traffic. [1] https://integralads.com/capabilities/video/ https://integralads.com/capabilities/video/

manigandham 9y ago

Vendors like WhiteOps, Integral Ad Science, Moat, Forensiq, DoubleVerify, etc. that are used to see if visitors to a website viewing the ads are actually people during normal browsing or whether they are bots or other fraudulent behavior. None of them work well.

f2n 9y ago
What do they do to decide if a user if real or fake? I am not remotely surprised that none of them work well
- sandworm101 9y ago
  Pages viewed/clicked per second. Some sites contain tiny little links that no human should every click, but a bot might. Others get more advanced by comparing visors. If a group of visitors all display the same pattern (think near identical behavior) then they are bots.
  - paxy 9y ago
    There are lots of other ways used as well. Client-side JavaScript that tracks mouse movement, for example. A combination of all of these combined with ML models give surprisingly accurate results.
- manigandham 9y ago
  That's their trade secret but distills down to measuring all the various factors that a person actually reading a page would do: time, scroll speed/depth, click rate/location, previous history, mouse movements, http, ip, network traffic, browser profiles, etc. Although these days with headless chrome and how easy it is to just record and replay someone's session, it becomes incredibly hard to detect with accuracy, especially while trying to not affect browsing behavior beyond the typical ad load experience. There is lots of overlap with this and other security-focused companies that work with financial and government companies to protect their own websites and apps, although it's easier when you own and control the site, proxies and backend.
  - aw3c2 9y ago
    Jesus Christ, that is creepy and perverted.
    - pixl97 9y ago
      Welcome to marketing! Get out while you are still sane.
    - manigandham 9y ago
      What is exactly? It's an industry with lots of money (100s of billions USD) flowing through with little oversight and cheap startup costs thanks to cloud vendors and commodity tech. If there are criminals willing to invest intense effort committing physical crimes, it's expected that there would be a just as much put into something like this. Similar to a lot of the bitcoin/crypto dealings where there is plenty of organized crime involved.