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Working in iPhone games, our biz dev people made us integrate with the shadiest of ad publishers. But we required attribution and could track how much the users
by idunno246 6y ago
Working in iPhone games, our biz dev people made us integrate with the shadiest of ad publishers. But we required attribution and could track how much the users spent, so could stop spending on them quickly, which was the normal result. Most of the companies were surprised we wanted attribution and had to build something custom, which to me means at the time nobody else was tracking it so lots of customers must have been getting fleeced. From the tweet, it’s crazy that they were spending 100m without tracking the quality of the users.
Also worked in ad tech. There were some types of customers that cared about performance, but the largest were typically agencies and all they cared about was spending the budget they were given. Everybody knows this is happening, you can differentiate yourself slightly by doing better detecting it. But at the end of the day people really care about customer acquisition cost which includes the fraud, so if you had 0% fraud everyone would just raise their prices or margins
- Kalium 6y ago> Also worked in ad tech. There were some types of customers that cared about performance, but the largest were typically agencies and all they cared about was spending the budget they were given. Large companies call it "brand" spending. Which is to say they're spending to maintain brand awareness. Measuring ROI would call the practice into question.
- jsnell 6y ago> From the tweet, it’s crazy that they were spending 100m without tracking the quality of the users. They were high quality users: Uber didn't pay for installs, but for installs + first ride. What's being alleged is that the ad networks were detecting a user installing the app, and fraudulently creating an ad display event to make it look like the install happened due to the ad.