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The issue though is the complete lack of transparency with the major online ad networks. We're relying on the fox to guard the hen house. They get paid whether

The issue though is the complete lack of transparency with the major online ad networks. We're relying on the fox to guard the hen house. They get paid whether the click is valid or not. I don't think we should reasonably expect the Google's and Facebook's of the ad world to spend money preventing fraud when that generates less profit overall. Until we start regulating the industry, no ad company is going to spend money to lose money, especially when there's no real repercussions to begin with.

x0x0 6y ago
> Until we start regulating the industry, no ad company is going to spend money to lose money Google made 113 BILLION dollars from advertising last year. The majority of companies spending that are sophisticated enough to tell if they're getting value from their 0.1 trillion dollars. Ditto even reddit advertisers -- attribution to reddit is table stakes for buying ads. The buyers are getting value or they quit spending on reddit. edit: In fact, if you understand ads, fraud on reddit is a problem for reddit because it causes advertisers to transfer ad spend off of reddit.
jamiequint 6y ago
Almost all bidding on FB is oCPM and Google is tCPM, which means that clicks don't really matter at all in terms of Google/FB's ability to monetize. Transparency shouldn't matter for people bidding for conversions. The only transparency you need is to know where the visitors are coming from. If anything fraud (really misclicks for FB and Google search since there is no fraud incentive) is also bad for them as well as it provides false signal of intent to their algorithms.
- weare138 6y ago
  >which means that clicks don't really matter at all in terms of Google/FB's ability to monetize What? They get paid for the clicks, not the impressions. Serving ad impressions costs money, the clicks make money. I don't quite follow your line of reasoning here. >Transparency shouldn't matter for people bidding for conversions Why wouldn't it? How do we know the bidding process is fair and the clicks we're paying for are valid? We don't and that's the problem. We wouldn't tolerate this type of behavior from companies in other industries. We need to quit giving tech companies a free pass and start holding them accountable. >If anything fraud (really misclicks for FB and Google search since there is no fraud incentive) is also bad for them as well as it provides false signal of intent to their algorithms. It only has to be good enough to convince people to keep using it. There's no financial incentive to eliminate fraud completely, or even try, without regulation.
  - benlivengood 6y ago
    Disclosure: I used to work on the pipelines counting this stuff at Google. > What? They get paid for the clicks, not the impressions. Serving ad impressions costs money, the clicks make money. I don't quite follow your line of reasoning here. Google has display ads (nee double-click) and search ads (adwords). Display ads can be pay per click or pay per impression (https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/2454058?hl=en https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/2454058?hl=en). Search ads are pay per click. > Why wouldn't it? How do we know the bidding process is fair and the clicks we're paying for are valid? We don't and that's the problem. We wouldn't tolerate this type of behavior from companies in other industries. We need to quit giving tech companies a free pass and start holding them accountable. For cost per click there's an economic argument that the auction is fair. Google has limited ad slots and leaves money on the table if it serves low bid or low quality ads instead of higher-bid or higher-quality ads, and if Google pretended low-quality ads were high quality the advertiser would see it as an insanely high cost per conversion. Click validity is also easy to measure; count how many clicks you're charged for and compare that with how many referrals with gclid from google.com show up in your logs (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/35813737/matching-google-adwords-referrer-url https://stackoverflow.com/questions/35813737/matching-google...). Impression ads are trickier which is why there are fancy cross-device conversion/attribution metrics to correlate purchases with impressions, but ultimately that is the problem with pay-per-impression in general. > It only has to be good enough to convince people to keep using it. There's no financial incentive to eliminate fraud completely, or even try, without regulation. Here I mostly agree; I was pretty disappointed to find out Google was serving those stupid "Download Now"-button ads on various software distribution sites. I think that particular insanity has been fixed now, but "not against the rules" was the answer for most of the time I was there. Trust is also a financial incentive and is the primary incentive to prevent outright fraud. Ad-blockers or moving to another ad network are the proper responses to indicate lowered trust.
  - jamiequint 6y ago
    Google gets paid for clicks but most (or at least many) people bid on conversions, for those people it doesn't matter if google delivers 100 clicks at $2 per click, or 4 clicks at $50 per click as long as they get the same number of conversions, so to this extent the CPC doesn't matter. Similarly, I could care less if 50% of the clicks are fraudulent. As a buyer what I'm judging at the end of the day is if I got the value I wanted for the price I paid. Clicks don't map to value very well, conversion actions do. Plus, it's not like if there was no click fraud that the auction becomes magically transparent, it's still as opaque as it was before, so really this is the only rational way to purchase ads (off of some basis other than "did the # of clicks meet my expectations?")

x0x0 6y ago

> Until we start regulating the industry, no ad company is going to spend money to lose money Google made 113 BILLION dollars from advertising last year. The majority of companies spending that are sophisticated enough to tell if they're getting value from their 0.1 trillion dollars. Ditto even reddit advertisers -- attribution to reddit is table stakes for buying ads. The buyers are getting value or they quit spending on reddit. edit: In fact, if you understand ads, fraud on reddit is a problem for reddit because it causes advertisers to transfer ad spend off of reddit.

jamiequint 6y ago

Almost all bidding on FB is oCPM and Google is tCPM, which means that clicks don't really matter at all in terms of Google/FB's ability to monetize. Transparency shouldn't matter for people bidding for conversions. The only transparency you need is to know where the visitors are coming from. If anything fraud (really misclicks for FB and Google search since there is no fraud incentive) is also bad for them as well as it provides false signal of intent to their algorithms.

weare138 6y ago
>which means that clicks don't really matter at all in terms of Google/FB's ability to monetize What? They get paid for the clicks, not the impressions. Serving ad impressions costs money, the clicks make money. I don't quite follow your line of reasoning here. >Transparency shouldn't matter for people bidding for conversions Why wouldn't it? How do we know the bidding process is fair and the clicks we're paying for are valid? We don't and that's the problem. We wouldn't tolerate this type of behavior from companies in other industries. We need to quit giving tech companies a free pass and start holding them accountable. >If anything fraud (really misclicks for FB and Google search since there is no fraud incentive) is also bad for them as well as it provides false signal of intent to their algorithms. It only has to be good enough to convince people to keep using it. There's no financial incentive to eliminate fraud completely, or even try, without regulation.
- benlivengood 6y ago
  Disclosure: I used to work on the pipelines counting this stuff at Google. > What? They get paid for the clicks, not the impressions. Serving ad impressions costs money, the clicks make money. I don't quite follow your line of reasoning here. Google has display ads (nee double-click) and search ads (adwords). Display ads can be pay per click or pay per impression (https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/2454058?hl=en https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/2454058?hl=en). Search ads are pay per click. > Why wouldn't it? How do we know the bidding process is fair and the clicks we're paying for are valid? We don't and that's the problem. We wouldn't tolerate this type of behavior from companies in other industries. We need to quit giving tech companies a free pass and start holding them accountable. For cost per click there's an economic argument that the auction is fair. Google has limited ad slots and leaves money on the table if it serves low bid or low quality ads instead of higher-bid or higher-quality ads, and if Google pretended low-quality ads were high quality the advertiser would see it as an insanely high cost per conversion. Click validity is also easy to measure; count how many clicks you're charged for and compare that with how many referrals with gclid from google.com show up in your logs (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/35813737/matching-google-adwords-referrer-url https://stackoverflow.com/questions/35813737/matching-google...). Impression ads are trickier which is why there are fancy cross-device conversion/attribution metrics to correlate purchases with impressions, but ultimately that is the problem with pay-per-impression in general. > It only has to be good enough to convince people to keep using it. There's no financial incentive to eliminate fraud completely, or even try, without regulation. Here I mostly agree; I was pretty disappointed to find out Google was serving those stupid "Download Now"-button ads on various software distribution sites. I think that particular insanity has been fixed now, but "not against the rules" was the answer for most of the time I was there. Trust is also a financial incentive and is the primary incentive to prevent outright fraud. Ad-blockers or moving to another ad network are the proper responses to indicate lowered trust.
- jamiequint 6y ago
  Google gets paid for clicks but most (or at least many) people bid on conversions, for those people it doesn't matter if google delivers 100 clicks at $2 per click, or 4 clicks at $50 per click as long as they get the same number of conversions, so to this extent the CPC doesn't matter. Similarly, I could care less if 50% of the clicks are fraudulent. As a buyer what I'm judging at the end of the day is if I got the value I wanted for the price I paid. Clicks don't map to value very well, conversion actions do. Plus, it's not like if there was no click fraud that the auction becomes magically transparent, it's still as opaque as it was before, so really this is the only rational way to purchase ads (off of some basis other than "did the # of clicks meet my expectations?")