8 ms·

Publishers Bought Millions of Website Visits They Found Out Were Fraudulent

107 points by tysone 9y ago

reustle 9y ago
> An estimated $16 billion will be lost to ad fraud this year, and a significant portion of that will go to criminals who use bots and other nefarious means to siphon money out of the digital ad ecosystem. That's a mind bogglingly big number, if true. I don't really find myself feeling sorry for advertisers, though.
- ghostbrainalpha 9y ago
  You shouldn't feel bad for the advertisers, but you should be worried about the content producers you love who provide you free content based on advertisements. If true fraud levels were exposed it could shift the digital economy in a massive way. Say you have an unpopular dishwasher and it breaks. It's great to go to Youtube and find someone showing you how to fix the problem even for a relatively niche dishwasher. But if the ad money dries up for that content producer, that video won't be there the next time you look for it. Or you will be forced to pay $1.00 to watch it.
  - striking 9y ago
    I pay for YouTube Red. So that person could be making money and I'm not seeing ads.
    - chiefalchemist 9y ago
      And? Worth it? I don't spend a lot of time on YT but sometimes I wonder how much I'd save in time, inconvenience and distractions if I did Red.
      - striking 9y ago
        I use an adblocker for most sites, but I enjoy the fuzzy feelings Red gives me. Also, I get Google Play Music All Access, and adblocking doesn't work on mobile.
      - bastawhiz 9y ago
        I have it because I pay for Google Play Music. I don't know how people use YouTube without it. If I load a YouTube video in a private browsing window or on a friend's device, I can't imagine what it must be like watching all those ads.
      - hateful 9y ago
        I pay $15/mo for Google Play family. Even though I don't use the Music service, it comes with YouTube Red for you and 4 other family members.
  - userbinator 9y ago
    It's great to go to Youtube and find someone showing you how to fix the problem even for a relatively niche dishwasher. But if the ad money dries up for that content producer, that video won't be there the next time you look for it. Not everyone who makes YouTube videos is doing it for ad money, especially the sort of content you're referring to. A lot of people just do it to document things for themselves and use YT as a "convenient place to put videos"; the fact that everyone else can see is incidental.
    - chamakits 9y ago
      Very true. But the only reason that YouTube is there as a platform that allows people to upload videos for free is that they expect to make money either off of that video through ads, or through other videos through ads.
      - manmal 9y ago
        Not necessarily true. Some want to get famous with their videos, some want to express themselves in a creative way, or spread ideas, or build an online following to capitalize later on...
        mikebenfield 9y ago
        I think the point is that Youtube expects to make money off that video. If Youtube could not make money from people's content, it wouldn't exist.
        nightcracker 9y ago
        For a while now I've been thinking about the idea of having a state-funded free and open video and image sharing platform. In the modern world I view sites such as imgur and youtube as vital infrastructure, and would really like to see them removed from commercial influence. Just like roads need to be created regardless of their profitability, I think it's important for society that we have means to share and view image and video content regardless of profitability.
  - dooglius 9y ago
    I'd be shocked if the ad revenue per video view were even a cent, and I'd happily pay a cent to see the video in the scenario you described.
    - manmal 9y ago
      Indeed, content creators are often better off with a patreon account.
      - ghostbrainalpha 9y ago
        You are right Patreon is great, but in the case I mentioned above, I would never support someone on Patreon after my specific dishwasher issue was fixed. Patreon works great when you enjoy someone content on a continual basis. These 1 off trouble shooting type of content producers need to find their own way.
  - stetrain 9y ago
    It could cause short-term shocks, but I feel like over the long run things would recover. If the advertisers thought they were paying $500 for 10000 clicks resulting in $1000 worth of visible revenue, the fact that they really only got 5000 "real" clicks resulting in the same $1000 worth of visible revenue doesn't really change the equation much. Over the long run companies spending money on advertising are going to hone in on how much they can spend compared to how much revenue they get can trace back to that advertising spend. The pay-per-click model and the current cost-per-click pricing is just an implementation detail of the current state of web advertising. Advertising still works when those stats aren't available, like in Podcasts.
    - cujo 9y ago
      It does matter though. They don't say they want 10000 clicks in a vacuum. They pay for that many clicks because the math tells them it should be worth $1k in revenue. In reality someone is manipulating the math They should have been able to dedicate half the money for the same revenue, or the same money for double the rev, in your scenario. Put another way, the estimate is that they pay out $500 for $2k in revenue, then someone came in and dumped a bunch of bots in the way and ate away half their revenue. It's not like those empty clicks are people who just weren't compelled to buy what they were selling. They are bots intentionally disrupting commerce.
    - tyingq 9y ago
      "Over the long run companies spending money on advertising are going to hone in on how much they can spend compared to how much revenue they get can trace back to that advertising spend." In some niches, there's an unending new supply of get-rich-quick newbies that will pay for underperforming ads. There's really no incentive for Google's AdSense team to focus on fraud in these spaces. Because the suckers just keep coming. Google profits from it, so there's little incentive to fix the glitch.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - QAPereo 9y ago
    That would lead to massive piracy... it is not a solution. A business model needs work like a business, not a charity, and you’re always competing its free. It’s simple... ad value or die as a business. Is that easy? No, but why should it be?
  - Sir_Substance 9y ago
    >You shouldn't feel bad for the advertisers, but you should be worried about the content producers you love who provide you free content based on advertisements. You're getting paid with advertising dollars for posting on hacker news? Surprise: you (and all the other posters on hacker news) are the content producers I love. We've never been paid for this nonsense, and I doubt we ever will be. Won't stop us posting though. I'm really not that worried if buzzfeed and medium go under.
  - manmal 9y ago
    The typical dish washer repair video on YT with 10-100k views makes $10-100 in total. And many don’t even have ads enabled. So these are hardly going to be affected. Now, I‘m not sure YouTube itself will survive in its current form if ad money dries up.
  - fendmark 9y ago
    Publishers are buying traffic that is too good to be true from dubious networks and then it is being laundered through the programmatic ad tech machine at scale. Brands looking to build awareness are buying access to this fraudulent traffic. Advertising agencies, ad tech companies, and publishers more times than not are incentivized to look the other way and not investigate what is going on too closely as long as it is profitable. Digital display advertising has long been considered a channel of questionable effectiveness. But the current state of programmatic advertising has made things much worse and will ultimately lead to Advertisers pulling billions of dollars out of this space unless there are significant improvements in getting more transparency into their advertising investments.
- LeifCarrotson 9y ago
  It's not that large a number. All of advertising is a $500-$800 billion business depending on where you get the numbers, so that represents 2.5% lost to fraud. That is believable to me. Larger than fraud in a lot of markets, but not particularly large, and everyone knows the market is full of bots, bad stats, and scams.
  - tinymollusk 9y ago
    As someone who has run a lot of decent sized FB campaigns, the norm would be for me to receive about 60-70% of the clicks I paid for. Not saying that was all fraud, maybe some people clicked and changed their mind... but I suspect the real "fraud" number is much, much higher than 2.5%. My guess is around 25%.
    - soared 9y ago
      Clicks aren't sessions so you can't compare them and claim most of the missing sessions are fraud.
      - tinymollusk 9y ago
        I was matching my advertising reports with server logs, GA, and piwik. I wasn't trying to naively compare two different metrics.
        soared 9y ago
        Well still, even in a perfect set up something like 20% of your display clicks still won't be counted as sessions. Lots of misclicks, exits before analytics loads, etc. Edit: Oh did you mean advertising reports for sessions?
        tinymollusk 9y ago
        I tried all kinds of things. The most interesting thing (to me) was the clicks_paid_for / clicks_landed changed, depending on different targeting mechanisms I used. I may have forgotten to acknowledge that I never really cared I didn't get all the clicks -- I was doing a CPA campaign, so I just baked in the non-visits. Depending on targeting and platform, there was almost always a 20-70% discrepancy between the clicks I paid for (reported by the ad platform), and the visits that landed on my site (reported by GA, server logs, piwik, and analytics.js). Also interesting - AdWords was always within 5%.
- Feniks 9y ago
  You should feel sorry for yourself as a consumer. Were do you think advertising money comes from? At the end of the day its all priced in the product.
  - imh 9y ago
    Is it? I don't mean that facetiously. If you and I are both selling the same product and you spend more on marketing, does that mean you can raise your price that much more, or is it just a little, where the primary spending comes at the expense of your margins? I'm sure it differs case by case, but I would naively expect the latter is more common if you have competitors.
    - philipodonnell 9y ago
      People in tech tend to look down on MBAs, but these are the kind of pricing decisions you learn how to make. It depends on your brand strategy, the strategies of competing brands, the anticipated lift, your margins, your assumptions about the margins of your competitors, the advertising channels available, your ability to enforce pricing discrimination (the innocous version), the macroeconomic environment... And on and on. There's never a right answer to "am I charging the best price", it's always a guess.
      - manmal 9y ago
        Sure, but are the MBAs really good at this, or are they not also just winging it, finding the right strategies via hit and miss? I don’t look down on them, but find them full of strange ideas and dogma that falls apart when tested in real world situations. (Just my n=1 observation, and I probably have it all wrong)
        philipodonnell 9y ago
        In any discrete instance it may seem like that, but what you interpret as "strange ideas and dogma that falls apart when tested in real world situations" to a practitioner is a history of different approaches to a problem that have been tried in the past, a few standard ones that are sort of your go-to, and a huge amount of case studies and research about why different approaches worked or not and what might make it work or not again in the future. The problem always is that it very difficult for an observer to tell the difference between an educated guess and just a, like, regular guess. So I don't fault anyone for interpreting it like that.
- nradov 9y ago
  That $16 billion figure is bullshit. Even if there was zero fraud most of that money would have been "lost" anyway.
- chiefalchemist 9y ago
  And now...Take out the spam emails. Take out the porn. Geez, how much of the internet is mainstream legit?
thisisit 9y ago
Why is it legal to buy any amount of traffic and specifically "view" ? Most of the time even if the traffic is "real" it actually originates from some developing country. Edit: Here's the part I am referring to: > Publishers often buy traffic at the end of the month or quarter to ‘make its numbers.’ Traffic sellers often promise the publisher that the traffic is human and will pass through all ad fraud detection filters. So I am not questioning advertising but blatantly buying traffic.
- elorant 9y ago
  Nine out of ten times paying for traffic means that your money ends in someone who spreads malware and controls a botnet of infected machines. The traffic is as real as it gets in this context considering that you get residential IPs from the majority of western countries but in the same time you legitimize the use of malware. In my view, none of these publishers have the right to complain, they got what they deserved.
- jasonkostempski 9y ago
  By "legal" do you mean within the service agreement? It's probably not, but this isn't something that should be illegal. Ad networks should have realized on day one their business model was stupid and payout shouldn't be based on views and clicks.
- soared 9y ago
  Are you asking why advertising is legal? Edit: In response to OP's edit. "Buying traffic" is literally just advertising. You spend x dollars and that drives y traffic. Its worded like that so it sounds bad.
  - eric_h 9y ago
    As someone who's built a few sites that relied on "buying traffic" to increase user growth, we always called it "buying traffic" and I don't really think it sounds all that bad. The problem is when you're paying per impression in advertising, as that's the easiest to game - the number of shitty impressions I've seen coming from small, not-well-known data centers has taught me that cost per impression is so prone to advertising fraud as to not be worth it.
acchow 9y ago
A bank spends $1000 on advertising and it ends up with dozens of accounts and credit cards opened and they decide it's a good ROI. So they spend another $1000 on advertising and get the same results again. Why does it matter that millions of the ad impressions were fake?
- snissn 9y ago
  For one the "fake" impressions represent actual revenue brought into the ecosystem that's taken out by fakers aka fraudulent parties aka criminals. Banks don't want to be funding criminals.
  - acchow 9y ago
    Ah got it. Thanks for the explanation.
- Eridrus 9y ago
  This assumes that they can actually track advertising impressions to events they care about, many advertisers don't have this, either for technical reasons (i.e. just not implemented), or fundamental reasons (e.g. you sign up for a credit card offline). It also assumes you have enough impressions from a single source to actually be able to make a statistically significant decision - if you only get 1000 impressions from a single site, not getting any conversions may not be out of the ordinary.
  - soared 9y ago
    If you aren't tracking conversions then buying fraudulent impressions is your fault. Regardless of how your site/business works you should attribute some valuable actions to your ads and optimize against that.
    - Eridrus 9y ago
      That sounds great, except how is Coca-Cola meant to advertise? Or any car company? Or McDonalds? And why is crediting the last advertisement a user saw the right thing to do when it is usually a totality of advertising that causes people to buy things, rather than a single ad.
vernie 9y ago
My favorite part of this article is the block of bright red text advertising their tip line. Who has any interest in snitching for the benefit of advertisers?
- yodon 9y ago
  That sort of banner is trying to get reports from disgruntled former employees of the ad-fraud business
jumpkickhit 9y ago
Ages ago when I'd see something like this, I'd grab their affiliate code from the URL, then email the advertiser the site and offending affiliate code to them as an FYI. No idea if anyone ever bothered to look, I just moved on.
anonymous5133 9y ago
If the stats are true then the whole internet ecosystem is at risk. Just look at where the big internet services get their money. It is all advertising. If the ad impressions are bunk then eventually advertisers will pull their budgets due to declining sales or adjusting their ad budgets. Also consumers are getting smarter by using ad blockers. The only thing left is these schemes making the illusion that real people are watching.
- tzakrajs 9y ago
  Yeah I was also thinking (orthogonal to this specific post) that if you show people ads of things they were already going to buy, then you can attribute your impressions to the conversion. The business can become predicting what people will buy versus directly influencing what they buy. That isn't to say that there is no value to advertisers, but it might be oversold, especially for large brands.
skywhopper 9y ago
Every layer of abstraction and complexity is another chance for fraud and the advertising and content generation industries are layered like onions. These business models seem like they’ve been modeled after real world JIT manufacturing logistics. Deliver X units of product A to site B on this schedule to meet these quotas and fulfill this growth pattern. But real world manufacturing chains deal in real physical goods that can be easily verified at the point of use. But in the world of online content manufacturing, all the intermediary products are ephemeral electronic side effects of human action that are easily duplicated artificially. I hate to say that this world is due for a bubble burst but I hope it happens sooner rather than later. Because if it’s working as envisioned currently then our world is going to get more and more unpleasant.
rak00n 9y ago
Why can't we do ad payments based on location? I know it's not foolproof but that will at least not reward click farms or IOTs from third world countries.
seem_2211 9y ago
Surely part of the reason that this is the case is that online ad impressions are a fraction of the price of traditional media. You can "reach" thousands of people for less than $200 online, whereas conventional advertising is substantially more expensive. This has to be one of the underappreciated reasons that traditional media has been savaged so badly by the internet - the price difference is stark, especially on a CPM level. But that price difference is also jacked up by massive fraud everwhere - for example Facebook has told advertisers they have access to more people in the US, than live in the US. That's not to say that traditional media is clean in how they measure their audience, but at least with a traditional ad you can turn on the TV and watch it, or pick up a newspaper and read it, or drive past it. How many digital ads never get seen by a human?
vonnik 9y ago
Talking Points Memo put out this great piece on the glut of publishers and how advertisers want video more than website visitors do: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/theres-a-digital-media-crash-but-no-one-will-say-it http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/theres-a-digital-media-c... Fraud seems to happen more frequently in situations of distress. Like Madoff, who had to expand his fraudulent operation to hide his past wrongdoing.

107 points by tysone 9y ago

> An estimated $16 billion will be lost to ad fraud this year, and a significant portion of that will go to criminals who use bots and other nefarious means to siphon money out of the digital ad ecosystem. That's a mind bogglingly big number, if true. I don't really find myself feeling sorry for advertisers, though.

ghostbrainalpha 9y ago
You shouldn't feel bad for the advertisers, but you should be worried about the content producers you love who provide you free content based on advertisements. If true fraud levels were exposed it could shift the digital economy in a massive way. Say you have an unpopular dishwasher and it breaks. It's great to go to Youtube and find someone showing you how to fix the problem even for a relatively niche dishwasher. But if the ad money dries up for that content producer, that video won't be there the next time you look for it. Or you will be forced to pay $1.00 to watch it.
- striking 9y ago
  I pay for YouTube Red. So that person could be making money and I'm not seeing ads.
  - chiefalchemist 9y ago
    And? Worth it? I don't spend a lot of time on YT but sometimes I wonder how much I'd save in time, inconvenience and distractions if I did Red.
    - striking 9y ago
      I use an adblocker for most sites, but I enjoy the fuzzy feelings Red gives me. Also, I get Google Play Music All Access, and adblocking doesn't work on mobile.
    - bastawhiz 9y ago
      I have it because I pay for Google Play Music. I don't know how people use YouTube without it. If I load a YouTube video in a private browsing window or on a friend's device, I can't imagine what it must be like watching all those ads.
    - hateful 9y ago
      I pay $15/mo for Google Play family. Even though I don't use the Music service, it comes with YouTube Red for you and 4 other family members.
- userbinator 9y ago
  It's great to go to Youtube and find someone showing you how to fix the problem even for a relatively niche dishwasher. But if the ad money dries up for that content producer, that video won't be there the next time you look for it. Not everyone who makes YouTube videos is doing it for ad money, especially the sort of content you're referring to. A lot of people just do it to document things for themselves and use YT as a "convenient place to put videos"; the fact that everyone else can see is incidental.
  - chamakits 9y ago
    Very true. But the only reason that YouTube is there as a platform that allows people to upload videos for free is that they expect to make money either off of that video through ads, or through other videos through ads.
    - manmal 9y ago
      Not necessarily true. Some want to get famous with their videos, some want to express themselves in a creative way, or spread ideas, or build an online following to capitalize later on...
      - mikebenfield 9y ago
        I think the point is that Youtube expects to make money off that video. If Youtube could not make money from people's content, it wouldn't exist.
        nightcracker 9y ago
        For a while now I've been thinking about the idea of having a state-funded free and open video and image sharing platform. In the modern world I view sites such as imgur and youtube as vital infrastructure, and would really like to see them removed from commercial influence. Just like roads need to be created regardless of their profitability, I think it's important for society that we have means to share and view image and video content regardless of profitability.
- dooglius 9y ago
  I'd be shocked if the ad revenue per video view were even a cent, and I'd happily pay a cent to see the video in the scenario you described.
  - manmal 9y ago
    Indeed, content creators are often better off with a patreon account.
    - ghostbrainalpha 9y ago
      You are right Patreon is great, but in the case I mentioned above, I would never support someone on Patreon after my specific dishwasher issue was fixed. Patreon works great when you enjoy someone content on a continual basis. These 1 off trouble shooting type of content producers need to find their own way.
- stetrain 9y ago
  It could cause short-term shocks, but I feel like over the long run things would recover. If the advertisers thought they were paying $500 for 10000 clicks resulting in $1000 worth of visible revenue, the fact that they really only got 5000 "real" clicks resulting in the same $1000 worth of visible revenue doesn't really change the equation much. Over the long run companies spending money on advertising are going to hone in on how much they can spend compared to how much revenue they get can trace back to that advertising spend. The pay-per-click model and the current cost-per-click pricing is just an implementation detail of the current state of web advertising. Advertising still works when those stats aren't available, like in Podcasts.
  - cujo 9y ago
    It does matter though. They don't say they want 10000 clicks in a vacuum. They pay for that many clicks because the math tells them it should be worth $1k in revenue. In reality someone is manipulating the math They should have been able to dedicate half the money for the same revenue, or the same money for double the rev, in your scenario. Put another way, the estimate is that they pay out $500 for $2k in revenue, then someone came in and dumped a bunch of bots in the way and ate away half their revenue. It's not like those empty clicks are people who just weren't compelled to buy what they were selling. They are bots intentionally disrupting commerce.
  - tyingq 9y ago
    "Over the long run companies spending money on advertising are going to hone in on how much they can spend compared to how much revenue they get can trace back to that advertising spend." In some niches, there's an unending new supply of get-rich-quick newbies that will pay for underperforming ads. There's really no incentive for Google's AdSense team to focus on fraud in these spaces. Because the suckers just keep coming. Google profits from it, so there's little incentive to fix the glitch.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- QAPereo 9y ago
  That would lead to massive piracy... it is not a solution. A business model needs work like a business, not a charity, and you’re always competing its free. It’s simple... ad value or die as a business. Is that easy? No, but why should it be?
- Sir_Substance 9y ago
  >You shouldn't feel bad for the advertisers, but you should be worried about the content producers you love who provide you free content based on advertisements. You're getting paid with advertising dollars for posting on hacker news? Surprise: you (and all the other posters on hacker news) are the content producers I love. We've never been paid for this nonsense, and I doubt we ever will be. Won't stop us posting though. I'm really not that worried if buzzfeed and medium go under.
- manmal 9y ago
  The typical dish washer repair video on YT with 10-100k views makes $10-100 in total. And many don’t even have ads enabled. So these are hardly going to be affected. Now, I‘m not sure YouTube itself will survive in its current form if ad money dries up.
- fendmark 9y ago
  Publishers are buying traffic that is too good to be true from dubious networks and then it is being laundered through the programmatic ad tech machine at scale. Brands looking to build awareness are buying access to this fraudulent traffic. Advertising agencies, ad tech companies, and publishers more times than not are incentivized to look the other way and not investigate what is going on too closely as long as it is profitable. Digital display advertising has long been considered a channel of questionable effectiveness. But the current state of programmatic advertising has made things much worse and will ultimately lead to Advertisers pulling billions of dollars out of this space unless there are significant improvements in getting more transparency into their advertising investments.
LeifCarrotson 9y ago
It's not that large a number. All of advertising is a $500-$800 billion business depending on where you get the numbers, so that represents 2.5% lost to fraud. That is believable to me. Larger than fraud in a lot of markets, but not particularly large, and everyone knows the market is full of bots, bad stats, and scams.
- tinymollusk 9y ago
  As someone who has run a lot of decent sized FB campaigns, the norm would be for me to receive about 60-70% of the clicks I paid for. Not saying that was all fraud, maybe some people clicked and changed their mind... but I suspect the real "fraud" number is much, much higher than 2.5%. My guess is around 25%.
  - soared 9y ago
    Clicks aren't sessions so you can't compare them and claim most of the missing sessions are fraud.
    - tinymollusk 9y ago
      I was matching my advertising reports with server logs, GA, and piwik. I wasn't trying to naively compare two different metrics.
      - soared 9y ago
        Well still, even in a perfect set up something like 20% of your display clicks still won't be counted as sessions. Lots of misclicks, exits before analytics loads, etc. Edit: Oh did you mean advertising reports for sessions?
        tinymollusk 9y ago
        I tried all kinds of things. The most interesting thing (to me) was the clicks_paid_for / clicks_landed changed, depending on different targeting mechanisms I used. I may have forgotten to acknowledge that I never really cared I didn't get all the clicks -- I was doing a CPA campaign, so I just baked in the non-visits. Depending on targeting and platform, there was almost always a 20-70% discrepancy between the clicks I paid for (reported by the ad platform), and the visits that landed on my site (reported by GA, server logs, piwik, and analytics.js). Also interesting - AdWords was always within 5%.
Feniks 9y ago
You should feel sorry for yourself as a consumer. Were do you think advertising money comes from? At the end of the day its all priced in the product.
- imh 9y ago
  Is it? I don't mean that facetiously. If you and I are both selling the same product and you spend more on marketing, does that mean you can raise your price that much more, or is it just a little, where the primary spending comes at the expense of your margins? I'm sure it differs case by case, but I would naively expect the latter is more common if you have competitors.
  - philipodonnell 9y ago
    People in tech tend to look down on MBAs, but these are the kind of pricing decisions you learn how to make. It depends on your brand strategy, the strategies of competing brands, the anticipated lift, your margins, your assumptions about the margins of your competitors, the advertising channels available, your ability to enforce pricing discrimination (the innocous version), the macroeconomic environment... And on and on. There's never a right answer to "am I charging the best price", it's always a guess.
    - manmal 9y ago
      Sure, but are the MBAs really good at this, or are they not also just winging it, finding the right strategies via hit and miss? I don’t look down on them, but find them full of strange ideas and dogma that falls apart when tested in real world situations. (Just my n=1 observation, and I probably have it all wrong)
      - philipodonnell 9y ago
        In any discrete instance it may seem like that, but what you interpret as "strange ideas and dogma that falls apart when tested in real world situations" to a practitioner is a history of different approaches to a problem that have been tried in the past, a few standard ones that are sort of your go-to, and a huge amount of case studies and research about why different approaches worked or not and what might make it work or not again in the future. The problem always is that it very difficult for an observer to tell the difference between an educated guess and just a, like, regular guess. So I don't fault anyone for interpreting it like that.
nradov 9y ago
That $16 billion figure is bullshit. Even if there was zero fraud most of that money would have been "lost" anyway.
chiefalchemist 9y ago
And now...Take out the spam emails. Take out the porn. Geez, how much of the internet is mainstream legit?

thisisit 9y ago

Why is it legal to buy any amount of traffic and specifically "view" ? Most of the time even if the traffic is "real" it actually originates from some developing country. Edit: Here's the part I am referring to: > Publishers often buy traffic at the end of the month or quarter to ‘make its numbers.’ Traffic sellers often promise the publisher that the traffic is human and will pass through all ad fraud detection filters. So I am not questioning advertising but blatantly buying traffic.

elorant 9y ago
Nine out of ten times paying for traffic means that your money ends in someone who spreads malware and controls a botnet of infected machines. The traffic is as real as it gets in this context considering that you get residential IPs from the majority of western countries but in the same time you legitimize the use of malware. In my view, none of these publishers have the right to complain, they got what they deserved.
jasonkostempski 9y ago
By "legal" do you mean within the service agreement? It's probably not, but this isn't something that should be illegal. Ad networks should have realized on day one their business model was stupid and payout shouldn't be based on views and clicks.
soared 9y ago
Are you asking why advertising is legal? Edit: In response to OP's edit. "Buying traffic" is literally just advertising. You spend x dollars and that drives y traffic. Its worded like that so it sounds bad.
- eric_h 9y ago
  As someone who's built a few sites that relied on "buying traffic" to increase user growth, we always called it "buying traffic" and I don't really think it sounds all that bad. The problem is when you're paying per impression in advertising, as that's the easiest to game - the number of shitty impressions I've seen coming from small, not-well-known data centers has taught me that cost per impression is so prone to advertising fraud as to not be worth it.

acchow 9y ago

A bank spends $1000 on advertising and it ends up with dozens of accounts and credit cards opened and they decide it's a good ROI. So they spend another $1000 on advertising and get the same results again. Why does it matter that millions of the ad impressions were fake?

snissn 9y ago
For one the "fake" impressions represent actual revenue brought into the ecosystem that's taken out by fakers aka fraudulent parties aka criminals. Banks don't want to be funding criminals.
- acchow 9y ago
  Ah got it. Thanks for the explanation.
Eridrus 9y ago
This assumes that they can actually track advertising impressions to events they care about, many advertisers don't have this, either for technical reasons (i.e. just not implemented), or fundamental reasons (e.g. you sign up for a credit card offline). It also assumes you have enough impressions from a single source to actually be able to make a statistically significant decision - if you only get 1000 impressions from a single site, not getting any conversions may not be out of the ordinary.
- soared 9y ago
  If you aren't tracking conversions then buying fraudulent impressions is your fault. Regardless of how your site/business works you should attribute some valuable actions to your ads and optimize against that.
  - Eridrus 9y ago
    That sounds great, except how is Coca-Cola meant to advertise? Or any car company? Or McDonalds? And why is crediting the last advertisement a user saw the right thing to do when it is usually a totality of advertising that causes people to buy things, rather than a single ad.

vernie 9y ago

My favorite part of this article is the block of bright red text advertising their tip line. Who has any interest in snitching for the benefit of advertisers?

yodon 9y ago
That sort of banner is trying to get reports from disgruntled former employees of the ad-fraud business

jumpkickhit 9y ago

Ages ago when I'd see something like this, I'd grab their affiliate code from the URL, then email the advertiser the site and offending affiliate code to them as an FYI. No idea if anyone ever bothered to look, I just moved on.

anonymous5133 9y ago

If the stats are true then the whole internet ecosystem is at risk. Just look at where the big internet services get their money. It is all advertising. If the ad impressions are bunk then eventually advertisers will pull their budgets due to declining sales or adjusting their ad budgets. Also consumers are getting smarter by using ad blockers. The only thing left is these schemes making the illusion that real people are watching.

tzakrajs 9y ago
Yeah I was also thinking (orthogonal to this specific post) that if you show people ads of things they were already going to buy, then you can attribute your impressions to the conversion. The business can become predicting what people will buy versus directly influencing what they buy. That isn't to say that there is no value to advertisers, but it might be oversold, especially for large brands.

skywhopper 9y ago

Every layer of abstraction and complexity is another chance for fraud and the advertising and content generation industries are layered like onions. These business models seem like they’ve been modeled after real world JIT manufacturing logistics. Deliver X units of product A to site B on this schedule to meet these quotas and fulfill this growth pattern. But real world manufacturing chains deal in real physical goods that can be easily verified at the point of use. But in the world of online content manufacturing, all the intermediary products are ephemeral electronic side effects of human action that are easily duplicated artificially. I hate to say that this world is due for a bubble burst but I hope it happens sooner rather than later. Because if it’s working as envisioned currently then our world is going to get more and more unpleasant.

rak00n 9y ago

Why can't we do ad payments based on location? I know it's not foolproof but that will at least not reward click farms or IOTs from third world countries.

seem_2211 9y ago

Surely part of the reason that this is the case is that online ad impressions are a fraction of the price of traditional media. You can "reach" thousands of people for less than $200 online, whereas conventional advertising is substantially more expensive. This has to be one of the underappreciated reasons that traditional media has been savaged so badly by the internet - the price difference is stark, especially on a CPM level. But that price difference is also jacked up by massive fraud everwhere - for example Facebook has told advertisers they have access to more people in the US, than live in the US. That's not to say that traditional media is clean in how they measure their audience, but at least with a traditional ad you can turn on the TV and watch it, or pick up a newspaper and read it, or drive past it. How many digital ads never get seen by a human?

vonnik 9y ago

Talking Points Memo put out this great piece on the glut of publishers and how advertisers want video more than website visitors do: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/theres-a-digital-media-crash-but-no-one-will-say-it http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/theres-a-digital-media-c... Fraud seems to happen more frequently in situations of distress. Like Madoff, who had to expand his fraudulent operation to hide his past wrongdoing.