4 ms·

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 developin

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.
  - soared 9y ago
    Yeah, so blacklist that data center. You can't just spend money and assume everyone will give you a good deal. Optimize your campaign to buy good traffic.
    - eric_h 9y ago
      > Yeah, so blacklist that data center. The most egregious fraudulent traffic came from at least a dozen different no-name data centers, and it was actually easier for us to cut out the fraudsters selling us the traffic than to blacklist the traffic itself (even though it was several steps away from the original source the traffic was purchased from). The traffic itself was actually rather easy to identify independently of its actual network source, because they were using Selenium locked to a specific, outdated version of Firefox that also happened to consistently throw some errors that our standard infrastructure monitoring caught and alerted us to. I still think that cost per impression is a difficult traffic source to properly verify (especially if you end up with a traffic source that is botting from compromised PCs) and as such should be treated with skepticism. Cost per conversion/install/etc. generally seem to be slightly less gameable (excluding, of course, the farms spread around economically disadvantaged areas where workers have hundreds of actual devices on which they are installing apps to game the cost per install ad traffic)
      - soared 9y ago
        Yeah cpa is less gameable for sure. I don't have any exposure to that.. I've only ever seen cpm. (Or cpm converterted to ecpa after the fact)
  - dingaling 9y ago
    I guess I'm naive but how did you think that a "traffic provider" could, er, provide traffic? Go out in the street and give people $2 each to view the website?
walshemj 9y ago
So newspaper adds have been brought in that way for decades based on the readership and also on the quality of the paper the Washington Post or any other broadsheet can charge more because its read by ABC1's ie Middle and Upper class readers
- mtnygard 9y ago
  I'm not clear on the parallel there. The article is about publishers buying "traffic" from traffic providers. They do that so the publisher can tell their advertisers "your ad was viewed X many times this month" even if 25% of X comes from bots or scripted traffic. In the print world, it would be like WaPo selling its advertisers on 100K copies circulated to ABC1's, but actually handing a quarter of the papers out for free on Skid Row. Publishers who buy traffic should absolutely know that the traffic is unqualified, unknown viewers... the least valuable. That means the publisher is selling ads based on their best qualified customers but delivering a fraction of dregs along with them. The publisher plays an arbitrage game with their reputation. That practice can't help but make the advertisers discount the value of digital ads.
  - Chaebixi 9y ago
    > In the print world, it would be like WaPo selling its advertisers on 100K copies circulated to ABC1's, but actually handing a quarter of the papers out for free on Skid Row. Not inconceivable. This past Thanksgiving I got the local paper's black-Friday deals edition delivered for free to my doorstep. I am not nor have every been a customer of that particular paper. For a while, Best Buy was handing out free Sports Illustrated subscriptions any costumer with a pulse who'd give them their address.

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.
- soared 9y ago
  Yeah, so blacklist that data center. You can't just spend money and assume everyone will give you a good deal. Optimize your campaign to buy good traffic.
  - eric_h 9y ago
    > Yeah, so blacklist that data center. The most egregious fraudulent traffic came from at least a dozen different no-name data centers, and it was actually easier for us to cut out the fraudsters selling us the traffic than to blacklist the traffic itself (even though it was several steps away from the original source the traffic was purchased from). The traffic itself was actually rather easy to identify independently of its actual network source, because they were using Selenium locked to a specific, outdated version of Firefox that also happened to consistently throw some errors that our standard infrastructure monitoring caught and alerted us to. I still think that cost per impression is a difficult traffic source to properly verify (especially if you end up with a traffic source that is botting from compromised PCs) and as such should be treated with skepticism. Cost per conversion/install/etc. generally seem to be slightly less gameable (excluding, of course, the farms spread around economically disadvantaged areas where workers have hundreds of actual devices on which they are installing apps to game the cost per install ad traffic)
    - soared 9y ago
      Yeah cpa is less gameable for sure. I don't have any exposure to that.. I've only ever seen cpm. (Or cpm converterted to ecpa after the fact)
- dingaling 9y ago
  I guess I'm naive but how did you think that a "traffic provider" could, er, provide traffic? Go out in the street and give people $2 each to view the website?

walshemj 9y ago

So newspaper adds have been brought in that way for decades based on the readership and also on the quality of the paper the Washington Post or any other broadsheet can charge more because its read by ABC1's ie Middle and Upper class readers

mtnygard 9y ago
I'm not clear on the parallel there. The article is about publishers buying "traffic" from traffic providers. They do that so the publisher can tell their advertisers "your ad was viewed X many times this month" even if 25% of X comes from bots or scripted traffic. In the print world, it would be like WaPo selling its advertisers on 100K copies circulated to ABC1's, but actually handing a quarter of the papers out for free on Skid Row. Publishers who buy traffic should absolutely know that the traffic is unqualified, unknown viewers... the least valuable. That means the publisher is selling ads based on their best qualified customers but delivering a fraction of dregs along with them. The publisher plays an arbitrage game with their reputation. That practice can't help but make the advertisers discount the value of digital ads.
- Chaebixi 9y ago
  > In the print world, it would be like WaPo selling its advertisers on 100K copies circulated to ABC1's, but actually handing a quarter of the papers out for free on Skid Row. Not inconceivable. This past Thanksgiving I got the local paper's black-Friday deals edition delivered for free to my doorstep. I am not nor have every been a customer of that particular paper. For a while, Best Buy was handing out free Sports Illustrated subscriptions any costumer with a pulse who'd give them their address.