5 ms·

That is a very accurate description of the 'ad tech' business we got to interact with at Blekko. Greed caught many of the folks, they would be making $2K - $4K

That is a very accurate description of the 'ad tech' business we got to interact with at Blekko. Greed caught many of the folks, they would be making $2K - $4K a week and suddenly jump to $15-$20K ? And all the anti-fraud algorithms would light up. I don't doubt for a moment that the small numbers were also fraud but until they crossed the threshold they got away with it. The CFO and I were convinced that everyone would switch to "CPA" or per-action models (you only pay on the ad if the click resulted in a sale/conversion etc) that seemed like a much harder thing to defraud. But for brand impressions? That isn't something you can do easily. Our crawler uncovered a registrar that had sold thousands of domains on one of the odd top levels to a scammer who had populated them with duplicate data driven "forum", "blog" and "review" sites. At the time the crawler would flag sites with identical copy and this person had been fairly clever in that they clearly had a crawler of their own and they crawled through forums and just duplicated all of the messages and then populated their "fake" forum with them (as an example). If you looked at one "page" it kind of made sense (it clearly was written by a human) but different responses were talking about randomly different things (likes one post on cats and then a post on rebuilding an engine). We speculated it had started as a black hat SEO operation and then expanded into an ad fraud farm. But still it was amazing to see what was perhaps hundreds of thousands of "web pages" that existed simply to exploit a way to extract money out the web ecosystem.

BiteCode_dev 5y ago
The opposite is true: ad companies will often not count all the legit impressions, until you start putting monitoring and call them out. Ads are just a dirty business at this point.
- Beltiras 5y ago
  Has it ever not been?
  - BiteCode_dev 5y ago
    If you read the excellent Bernays' propaganda (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_(book)), you can have dive into how advertising was perceived in 1920. While I don't buy that this is the only view at the time, and that there was no dirt to find, I believe that there was a time were ads were imagined as a way to inform the consumers, or at least convey some kind of information to them. Unfortunately, the market doesn't optimize for what's right, only for what's profitable. The too may or may not aligned at first, but give it enough time, and it will deviate.
    - mistrial9 5y ago
      obligatory ref to "Century of the Self" four-part documentary
  - codyb 5y ago
    Just personally, I’m not super opposed to ads sold on television networks that come over my antenna that basically just market to specific demographics. Billboards a bit problematic if they distract drivers but otherwise don’t bother me much either.
winternett 5y ago
It's only when you look into the Black Hat world that you realize how deceptive the Ad world is... Major Record labels botting their music videos to make them look extremely popular, social media profiles with millions of followers for sale providing instant impressions of fake fame, and the majority of ad-based revenue being eaten up by scammers. Even Google analytics are so convoluted now that they really make a simple process of tracking real engagement into a maddeningly confusing bowl of spaghetti. The people that seek to overcomplicate the web also create wild pyramid schemes for profit that really corrupt purpose and utility of the Internet. It won't be long before we begin to see completely fabricated statistics everywhere, and it will feed into misled investors and more deception. I'm glad we still have the ability to create our own web sites and resources, many companies have been lobbying to take that ability away from us, to drive costs of doing so up wildly, and to cripple our ability to have an even playing field. I don't run ads on my personal web sites though, it's better I don't contribute further to the problem. My friends and family don't realize why I'm such a pessimist when I speak about the Internet and Social Media now, I worry about them being scammed and influenced by the fake aspects of certain business and celebrity online. If there's one thing that the Pandemic has shown, it's who had money and who was faking. There were many people using black hat techniques to fake popularity, success, and fame and that began to dry up quick every time Google pushed an algorithm update. The sad reality is that normal creators, and business owners that don't participate in the ad/manipulation madness can't ever make it to a point where they'll be visible, and the Internet can't ever return to the point where equal opportunity existed because of all of the now embedded ad-based revenue culture that we all let take hold of it. The only way to thrive moving forward will be to create small (focused) communities that avoid the current pitfalls of ad based communities, and to be able to sell valuable and highly useful products and services within them that fund reasonable expansion and operation of those communities.
- fedreserved 5y ago
  Future4200.com is a perfect example of the small community you discussed. It's a marijuana/hemp forum that is one of the biggest resources in the space.

BiteCode_dev 5y ago

The opposite is true: ad companies will often not count all the legit impressions, until you start putting monitoring and call them out. Ads are just a dirty business at this point.

Beltiras 5y ago
Has it ever not been?
- BiteCode_dev 5y ago
  If you read the excellent Bernays' propaganda (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_(book)), you can have dive into how advertising was perceived in 1920. While I don't buy that this is the only view at the time, and that there was no dirt to find, I believe that there was a time were ads were imagined as a way to inform the consumers, or at least convey some kind of information to them. Unfortunately, the market doesn't optimize for what's right, only for what's profitable. The too may or may not aligned at first, but give it enough time, and it will deviate.
  - mistrial9 5y ago
    obligatory ref to "Century of the Self" four-part documentary
- codyb 5y ago
  Just personally, I’m not super opposed to ads sold on television networks that come over my antenna that basically just market to specific demographics. Billboards a bit problematic if they distract drivers but otherwise don’t bother me much either.

winternett 5y ago

It's only when you look into the Black Hat world that you realize how deceptive the Ad world is... Major Record labels botting their music videos to make them look extremely popular, social media profiles with millions of followers for sale providing instant impressions of fake fame, and the majority of ad-based revenue being eaten up by scammers. Even Google analytics are so convoluted now that they really make a simple process of tracking real engagement into a maddeningly confusing bowl of spaghetti. The people that seek to overcomplicate the web also create wild pyramid schemes for profit that really corrupt purpose and utility of the Internet. It won't be long before we begin to see completely fabricated statistics everywhere, and it will feed into misled investors and more deception. I'm glad we still have the ability to create our own web sites and resources, many companies have been lobbying to take that ability away from us, to drive costs of doing so up wildly, and to cripple our ability to have an even playing field. I don't run ads on my personal web sites though, it's better I don't contribute further to the problem. My friends and family don't realize why I'm such a pessimist when I speak about the Internet and Social Media now, I worry about them being scammed and influenced by the fake aspects of certain business and celebrity online. If there's one thing that the Pandemic has shown, it's who had money and who was faking. There were many people using black hat techniques to fake popularity, success, and fame and that began to dry up quick every time Google pushed an algorithm update. The sad reality is that normal creators, and business owners that don't participate in the ad/manipulation madness can't ever make it to a point where they'll be visible, and the Internet can't ever return to the point where equal opportunity existed because of all of the now embedded ad-based revenue culture that we all let take hold of it. The only way to thrive moving forward will be to create small (focused) communities that avoid the current pitfalls of ad based communities, and to be able to sell valuable and highly useful products and services within them that fund reasonable expansion and operation of those communities.

fedreserved 5y ago
Future4200.com is a perfect example of the small community you discussed. It's a marijuana/hemp forum that is one of the biggest resources in the space.