16 ms·
Facebook lured advertisers by inflating video ad-watch times: lawsuit
- jsemrau 8y agoI have mentioned that several times before, but I always believed that FB's but also Google's metrics are at least borderline fraudulent. Inflated by bots and apps that simulate DAUs and clicks. I only have anecdotal evidence from Google, where I was frequently charged over my campaign limit on ad clicks that I could never validate on my own site. I believe FB is same.
- village-idiot 8y agoI personally suspect that’s why Twitter has failed to deal with their bot problem, fixing it would make their usage metrics plumit.
- m_ke 8y agoAlso the reason why reddit went through the redesign. It lets them hide ads in the infinite scroll and pretend that people looked at them.
- village-idiot 8y agoI really can’t help but wonder if our entire online ecosystem is built entirely on fraudulent ad sales.
- dragonsky67 8y agoShhh, don't say that out loud. I love the fact that I get internet content for nothing as it's paid for by big advertisers who are to stupid to realise that I never purchase anything that they advertise.
- village-idiot 8y agoThankfully nobody important cares about my opinion.
- tartoran 8y agoI think the same and stay quiet about it
- Deimorz 8y agoThis was a good article from a while back that shows how every dollar spent on online advertising seems to only result in about 3 cents worth of actual ad views: https://adcontrarian.blogspot.com/2017/01/display-ads-my-3-worth.html https://adcontrarian.blogspot.com/2017/01/display-ads-my-3-w...
- munchbunny 8y agoYes and no. Conventional wisdom inside ad tech is that fraud rates are about 30% on average. Typically lower for video. So there's real value in there (in terms of ROI for the advertiser) but there's effectively an entire margin of fraud where advertisers are bearing much of that cost.
- thrower123 8y agoVideo ads are intolerable. Whenever they exist, they spawn an arms war of dark patterns to get and stop them from auto-playing, without warning, at maximum volume. The Facebook Android app is gawdawful for this; I just discovered that you can put it into some sort of a data-saving mode, which seems to stop auto-play for the moment... but time will tell. And though we're supposed to be bagging on Facebook here, YouTube is really bad with some of their in-the-middle of content ad spots that I've been noticing lately. I'll be watching a peaceful little Timeline documentary, and right in the middle of an interview the TV starts blaring pop music for something I am never going to buy. Especially galling when it's something produced for cable TV, so it has commercial breaks built into it naturally, where the ads could be inserted unobtrusively.
- village-idiot 8y agoI think what’s shocking is how awful a lot of the targeting is. Even before I started getting super aggressive about blocking all trackers, I regularly got fed ads for products and services I didn’t need, and in languages I couldn’t understand. The most confusing is that I keep getting ads from the same company I bought my wedding ring at. Like, I’m not divorced, and I don’t need a second. Why would they re-target me?
- lmm 8y agoWeddings are a high-margin business, they can afford to spend a lot on advertising and not be too careful about their targeting. The advertising service is happy to take their money. It's not that we can't do better, it's that there isn't enough incentive to do better at any level.
- 8y ago
- code4tee 8y agoMy previous company stopped advertising on Twitter for precisely this reason. Our own analytics showed that the majority of the clicks we were getting and being charged for were obviously either bits or other spam accounts. It was actually crazy what we were being charged for.
- wild_preference 8y agoWatching Twitter attempt to deal with the cryptocurrency spammers that chain on to every half-popular tweet leads me to believe that it really is just incompetence (+ being a hard problem in general). For example, their latest solution is to prevent you from having the exact same name as a famous person. Notice all the bots now have the name "Elon" or "Elon Mu5k" when responding to Elon Musk.
- liveoneggs 8y agogoogle can't even get analytics to agree with their advertising platforms
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- codedokode 8y agoBots exist, but is it Google's fault? Fake views are often bought by site owners wanting to get more profit.
- kawsper 8y agoClicks should at least show up on the server the ad is linking to, bot or not.
- cortesoft 8y agoRight, but they seem to be really good at not paying site owners who do that...
- scythe 8y agoYou hear about it when someone gets caught. You don't hear about it when they don't. Who would ever say, publicly, "Look! I've been faking out AdSense for years and getting away with it!"?
- dirkgently 8y agoAnd another discussion where Facebook does something wrong and HN immediately starts talking about Google.
- lovich 8y agoThey are the top two players in the digital ad space, which this article is about. Talking about how others in the industry also follow this practice seems like a pertinent topic of discussion in light of the article
- andun 8y agoPersonally I don't care much about FB because I don't use it. Google, on the other hand...
- draw_down 8y agoGive me a break. It’s a discussion about advertising and Google is the ad company.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- cedivad 8y agoI once had google adwords flooding my website with some ridiculous number like 1000 clicks in 5 minutes, zeroing my daily budget in just a few seconds. The clicks had nothing to do with my campaign keywords, which was set to gradually distribuite the adverts during the day instead of rushing to the budget limit. Conversion was terrible, as in no one subscribed to the newsletter (the website usually had a very high newsletter conversion rate (20-30%? I forgot), but of those 1000, not even one person decided to subscribe. The ad spend for the day (I remember now) was even higher than the daily limit. I spent two weeks talking to the useless billing support that would admit no fault before giving up and paying for a "bug" in their system.
- hammock 8y agoFacebook could still be doing it... There is no third party auditor of their ad analytics. And you can't create one either, because you can't scrape a walled garden like Facebook the way you can scrape the internet. The only thing that's true is the data you are measuring yourself, which would be web traffic, conversions etc. Although it's not inconceivable that a fraudulent actor would send bit traffic with (e.g. Facebook) referrer tags to your site to make you think you were getting greater reach with your ads than you were.
- andreygrehov 8y agoI wonder if you can reproduce the inflation by ultra-targeting a number of hand picked users.
- hammock 8y agoYou can create "custom audiences" by uploading a list of email addresses, it has to be a minimum size group of 100 I believe. However it's unlikely that you'd see too much as I have to imagine most of the inflation is happening in the broader targeting efforts. "males 18-31 with these interests" etc.
- givinguflac 8y agoGotta hand it to Facebook, at least they’re consistent with one thing: being deceptive.
- adamnemecek 8y agoIs this company legit imploding?
- keyle 8y agoAt this point they might be "too big to fail".
- dlock 8y agodont think facebook is that kind of company yet .... other businesses which are core to our day to day are not built on fb's operations i would think (such as banks manufacturing companies etc). and if this happened could you imagine the influx of engineers available
- arthurofbabylon 8y agoFacebook is very replaceable, from a technical standpoint. (From a social/demographic outlook, its replacement is inevitable.)
- mrweasel 8y agoI think there's a risk that Facebook won't be replaced, because may early adopters won't sign up for any new social network. Both Facebook and Google have severely hurt the trust of many, to the point where they will be reluctant to sign up for any new alternatives in the fear that they will eventually be equally "evil".
- ionised 8y agoThere is absolutely nothing about Facebook that is essential or irreplaceable.
- kjprince 8y agoThey have just a bit of traction...that's pretty hard to replace
- 8y ago
- keyle 8y agoOn a side note, if you use instagram, I'm not sure if you've noticed, but literally every 3-4 pictures is an ad now. It's so annoying, they're completely ruining the experience and it affects my retention rate and my will to come back.
- imagetic 8y agoThey're just reinforcing the demise of the platform. Over 80% of the last followers I picked up were bots. At least I'm assuming anyone who followers 4800 people can't be human.
- r3bl 8y agoYou can follow 100k people, it won't matter. You'll still see updates from about 20-30 people or so.
- ObsoleteNerd 8y agoI've been a major Insta user since the beginning, with a few different accounts (I do photography on a few different topics, so I keep them separate to appeal to each niche). I would be on for a few hours a day, every day, chatting to people, sharing photos, etc. I recently deleted all my accounts completely, because it just became so horrible to use. Timeline all over the place, overwhelming number of ads, impossible to use search anymore, Explore that just ignores what you like and shows you stuff they want you to see, etc etc.
- nayuki 8y agoSimilar behavior on Snapchat. After viewing all the photos/videos from 1 to 3 friends, I see an ad, followed by more friend content, an ad, repeat.
- ProfessorLayton 8y agoJust as a point of reference, as a very infrequent Instagram user (Maybe once a week, often much less) I have yet to see a single ad. So it seems like they scale the amount of ads they show depending on how heavily you use the service.
- gk1 8y agoPretty sure Twitter has an ad metrics problem too. As I wrote last year: > When I ran a Twitter Ads campaign for one of my clients, within two days I noticed that Google Analytics was reporting nearly 100% fewer visitors from the campaign than Twitter was reporting clicks. That is, if Twitter counted (and charged for) 100 clicks, Google Analytics showed fewer than 5 visitors from the campaign. > The support team at Twitter Ads told me they are legitimate clicks, but people are probably clicking the image in the tweet to expand the tweet or image, not expecting it to take them to a different site. As soon as they realize they’ve just clicked an outgoing link, they go back or close the tab before our site and Google Analytics script even has time to load. https://www.gkogan.co/blog/how-ad-campaigns-fail/ https://www.gkogan.co/blog/how-ad-campaigns-fail/
- ndespres 8y agoI do exactly that behavior all the time. It's difficult to tell whether an image will expand when I click it on Twitter app for iPhone. When it opens a browser window that I wasn't expecting, I close immediately.
- alsetmusic 8y ago> It's difficult to tell whether an image will expand when I click it on Twitter app for iPhone. Tap and hold on a link. A sheet will pop up asking how to treat the link. The link address will be listed at the top.
- mbel 8y agoWhich takes approximately the same amount of time as clicking, going to browser and returning back to the tweet.
- pavanlimo 8y agoCan't disagree with Twitter's reasoning there, anecdotally I myself have done that many times.
- 8y ago
- imagetic 8y agoI've been doing a large amount of video production that is published to Facebook for the last few years. Mostly live, some post / uploaded work. But the live productions stats the morning after an event are extremely suspect. It seems like the numbers astronomically inflated.
- IAmGraydon 8y agoSo who do you suspect is the bad actor and what is their motivation?
- darpa_escapee 8y agoFacebook. More money.
- IAmGraydon 8y agoI don’t follow. How would FB profit from showing you an inflated number of plays? Are you paying them for plays?
- acct1771 8y agoInflated efficacy of Facebook as a platform.
- imagetic 8y agoMany of the numbers I've seen are more in line with impressions. The app loading and being somewhere in a timeline dramatically inflates their numbers. In reality, I know a lot of people who see little to no gain from Facebook as a platform at this point. Especially for small business.
- imagetic 8y agoWhen you sit in meetings and hear the social media and sales people spit their numbers, and it defies all forms reality... Well, they look good to the company and the bosses eat up the voodoo science they are preaching. I've yet to ever see true ROI or accurate numbers of any kind coming out of Facebook or Instagram for content or marketing campaigns. Instagram is mostly a bot problem. Facebook has loose impression and view numbers. YouTube hasn't ever been a red flag in my experience, but I've never been involved with any ad work there, just content.
- cm2012 8y agoThis is why, if you advertise, measure results on purchases or leads generated and nothing else. Every ad platform's engagement measures are useless to you unless you have a lot of experience and context for what they mean.
- nostromo 8y agoThat's incredibly difficult for large brands to do. If Target's sales are up this holiday, was it the TV ads, the print ads, or the online ads? Or maybe it wasn't any of them and the economy is just up.
- cm2012 8y agoTarget has teams with context and experience in how to properly use, measure and attribute those numbers. 99% of start-ups, even very well funded ones, don't.
- lawnchair_larry 8y agoWhat do youbmean by that? When I buy something at Target stores, they have absolutely no way to attribute whether I saw something on TV, a billboard, the aisle, their junk mail in my mailbox, or online.
- cm2012 8y agoThey do multivariate tests using geography, among other things.
- mattlondon 8y agoI believe that Google can link in-store purchases to online ad exposure for most credit card users in the US. They've done this by doing a deal with MasterCard to integrate sales data cookie data. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-30/google-and-mastercard-cut-a-secret-ad-deal-to-track-retail-sales https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-30/google-an...
- meritt 8y agoIn 2008 I worked for an ad network and we dealt with a massive amount of fraudulent traffic. We did our best to shield our advertisers from the obviously bogus traffic, as it absolutely killed traffic quality and inflated CPAs. However some advertisers, notably one large video game/entertainment website, wanted to purchase as much traffic as possible, and they were overjoyed to get the bot traffic (which went for a CPC of about $0.001). They were buying $10-20k per day from us of fraudulent traffic. Turns out they were relying on the audience engagement platforms (alexa, hitwise, quantcast, comscore, etc) to track their audience size and those platforms incorrectly counted our bot traffic as legitimate. As the majority of their advertisers were brand marketing (e.g. Nintendo paying for a full-site background spread for the latest Zelda) and there was no direct way to measure success, advertisers would be swayed by the third-party audience profiles and agree it was good idea to spend massive amounts of money on ad campaigns there.
- IAmGraydon 8y agoHow and why was bot traffic priced at $0.001 CPC? No ad network would price legitimate traffic that low, which means you must have known it was illegitimate. So that means you were complicit in committing fraud against the downstream advertisers, correct?
- meritt 8y ago> How and why was bot traffic priced at $0.001 CPC? Our ad server code only supported 3 decimal places. It wasn't until later that we figured out the how/why behind their desire for what we outright informed them was most likely bot traffic. And yeah, I didn't stay much longer at that company. The entire industry is incredibly sketchy and that apparently hasn't changed much.
- re1man 8y agoHaha
- throwaway_trust 8y agoI work in ad-tech and let me tell you all these wall gardens are so arrogant that they create their own metrics for measurement and bully industry (especially marketers to follow them). I strongly believe only way to bring these mega companies to senses and rein in on their arrogance by trust busting and creating level playing field for competition. We need DOJ and anti-trust into big 3 oligopoly (GOOG, FB, AMZN) to crack down on them. They are too big for small players to compete.
- adtac 8y agoI'm just wondering, at how many companies does a oligopoly become a healthy, competitive environment?
- TeMPOraL 8y agoIt's context-dependent. Sometimes 10, sometimes 50. But definitely not 3.
- lmm 8y agoI once saw an economics paper that used a simple model and showed that when the top 4 companies in a given industry controlled more than 60% of the market they would naturally behave like a cartel even if they weren't coordinating. So that's probably the tipping point.
- maxwell 8y agoInteresting, I'd love to see the source if you can find it.
- monochromatic 8y ago>I work in ad-tech You just lost literally all of the default credibility that arbitrary humans get.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- lerie82 8y agoReally? that's why people wanted to advertise on FB? Not because it's the most used website in the world huh? All numbers from advertising are wrong.
- Bombthecat 8y agoNot only Video ads. I'm pretty sure all other ads too. Something is really off with the numbers on Facebook (in my opinion on Google too, but there I'm not so sure)
- keiferski 8y agoI genuinely don't understand why anyone, anywhere, would trust Facebook with anything. They've been nothing but unethical and misleading from the start. I'm not saying this to be hyperbolic - it simply seems like a poor business decision to get involved with them.
- gammateam 8y agoall adtech companies do this by the way.
- ionised 8y agoThat's not a good excuse.
- gammateam 8y agoIt wasn't an excuse, it was a public service announcement. Hauling Facebook's CEO into legislative inquiries worldwide totally misses the Mark. Masquerading Facebook as the Face of this reality is totally disingenuous and more of a reflection of discomfort and fatigue people already had with that service than a genuine expression against the data brokers.
- zwhatever 8y agoZuckerberg stealing something isn't news, it's his only business model.
- iamleppert 8y agoSeems to be a pretty big nail in the coffin for them and this is just the tip of the iceberg. lol. A class action of one of their core revenue streams is going to be very expensive. I think we should just make Facebook a public utility, and do them like the utility companies were done; congress can easily decide to transfer control of the company and all of its assets in a single resolution. Then, drastically reduce headcount by getting rid of all the business teams, sales, marketing and keeping only essential technical and administrative staff. Sell off the other unrelated business units (Oculus etc). Allow the company to operate and make a minuscule profit margin while allowing the local governments decision making ability regarding the content and policing of the networks under their geography.
- swift532 8y agoI'd like this more than the status quo, but this still leaves the door open for governments to read private messages and leverage social platforms for manipulation. In my mind, and I admit I am not certain this is possible - the only right way for a social network to function is for it to be decentralized and user data controlled by individual users - with optins for any "sharing".
- tomjen3 8y agoOther than that you hopefully can't do that without having to pay a massive amount of money under imminent domain laws, it now means everybody has to pay for Facebook, and that it will improve (if at all) at the level of congress.
- locklock 8y agois there any chance facebook will improve in the future, in any way? both the increasingly terrible user experience and the company's shady practices seem like features rather than bugs at this point and to fix either would require a fundamental shift that i can't imagine happening.
- stevehawk 8y agoDidn't this come about because Facebook autoplays videos and any video played more than 3 seconds counts as a viewing?