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Are you serious? It takes a minute to disassemble literally any APK with AdMob SDK and abuse their ID's. These values are not secrets. If a billion dollar compa

by veeti 6y ago

Are you serious? It takes a minute to disassemble literally any APK with AdMob SDK and abuse their ID's. These values are not secrets. If a billion dollar company like Google can't detect simple fraudulent activity like this, how are their ads supposed to be worth a single dollar?

mschuster91 6y ago
> how are their ads supposed to be worth a single dollar? Hard truth: a lot of internet ads is fraud. With paper, radio and TV, any ad buyer can cheaply verify that their ad spending ends up where it should by buying a paper at a random train station or listening to the airwaves. On the Internet, it's worse than the Wild West, with fraud and deception on every part of the chain.
- DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
  Which is ironic because in the 1990s web-advertising was sold to marketeers' as the best form of advertising because every view is logged and tracked: unlike a magazine ad you can know exactly how many people saw it and interacted with it (...right before middle-school kids realized they could make free money by clicking ads they put up on their geocities webpages) When Facebook launched their ad platform people were saying there would be even less fraud than open web advertising because FB (at the time...) was doing a good job of keeping bots out of Facebook - but I understand right now that Facebook advertising is the worst form of advertising you can spend money on... * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25623858 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25623858 * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26193544 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26193544
  - mschuster91 5y ago
    For Facebook ads, I have an interesting story... way back years when some neo-Nazis chartered a ship (the "C Star", for those who want to look it up), cruised in the Mediterranean and ended up in distress, I set up a couple ads for troll posts of mine and targeted them to followers of the German alt-right party... and lo and behold, the people flocked in with angry replies. Best 50$ I ever spent on entertainment, and it was highly effective.
- sellyme 5y ago
  > With paper, radio and TV, any ad buyer can cheaply verify that their ad spending ends up where it should by buying a paper at a random train station or listening to the airwaves. Good luck verifying that the FM radio station you bought as spots on really averages 150,000 concurrent listeners. Sure, you know your ad was there, but that doesn't help you.
  - mschuster91 5y ago
    At least for TV and radio stations there are a lot of market research companies determining listener counts, and it's (relatively) easy to do a verification study yourself if you don't trust the numbers the station reports. Grab a phone book or buy an address list and contact people, that's it. On the internet, it's next to impossible to do any sort of verification yourself.

by veeti 6y ago

mschuster91 6y ago

> how are their ads supposed to be worth a single dollar? Hard truth: a lot of internet ads is fraud. With paper, radio and TV, any ad buyer can cheaply verify that their ad spending ends up where it should by buying a paper at a random train station or listening to the airwaves. On the Internet, it's worse than the Wild West, with fraud and deception on every part of the chain.

DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
Which is ironic because in the 1990s web-advertising was sold to marketeers' as the best form of advertising because every view is logged and tracked: unlike a magazine ad you can know exactly how many people saw it and interacted with it (...right before middle-school kids realized they could make free money by clicking ads they put up on their geocities webpages) When Facebook launched their ad platform people were saying there would be even less fraud than open web advertising because FB (at the time...) was doing a good job of keeping bots out of Facebook - but I understand right now that Facebook advertising is the worst form of advertising you can spend money on... * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25623858 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25623858 * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26193544 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26193544
- mschuster91 5y ago
  For Facebook ads, I have an interesting story... way back years when some neo-Nazis chartered a ship (the "C Star", for those who want to look it up), cruised in the Mediterranean and ended up in distress, I set up a couple ads for troll posts of mine and targeted them to followers of the German alt-right party... and lo and behold, the people flocked in with angry replies. Best 50$ I ever spent on entertainment, and it was highly effective.
sellyme 5y ago
> With paper, radio and TV, any ad buyer can cheaply verify that their ad spending ends up where it should by buying a paper at a random train station or listening to the airwaves. Good luck verifying that the FM radio station you bought as spots on really averages 150,000 concurrent listeners. Sure, you know your ad was there, but that doesn't help you.
- mschuster91 5y ago
  At least for TV and radio stations there are a lot of market research companies determining listener counts, and it's (relatively) easy to do a verification study yourself if you don't trust the numbers the station reports. Grab a phone book or buy an address list and contact people, that's it. On the internet, it's next to impossible to do any sort of verification yourself.