24 ms·

Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots

619 points by thm 4y ago

russiasux 4y ago
I been saying it, ain't I been aging it?
throw827474737 4y ago
Almost all advertising like grabbing attention without prior consent is already inherently corrupted, bots are just late fallout.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
anonyme-honteux 4y ago
"How xxx Corrupted Advertising" is a really strange titlre. It seems to assume that Advertising being corrupted is a new thing? And that the Elon guy is somehow a genius for noticing a part of the problem? The whole history of advertising seems to indicate that in fact Advertising was designed to make us buy things we don't need, not designed to talk to the better angels of our nature. Edward Bernays, aka Freud nephew, was a pioneer in Public Relations (called Propaganda at the time, they were not afraid of the word) and one of his greatest success was to convince women to start smoking en masse. He did that by branding cigarettes as feminist "Torches of Freedom" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays If that's not corrupt, I don't know what is. I mean the whole industry would look really really different if they had to give up misoginy. Think "Cheat On Your Girlfriend, Not On Your Workout” (Reebook) and 42.000 other examples
- ahartmetz 4y ago
  Strange choice to stress misogyny. Women see attractive models in advertising, they think "unachievable beauty ideals, I feel pressured". I see the same, I think "it exploited my biology to grab my attention, damn it worked again". Is it misogyny or is it mis-everyone, let's make money?
  - stormdennis 4y ago
    I'm pretty certain that the advertising of women's things using beautiful, scantily dressed, women must work, it's being going on for long enough.
  - DoctorOW 4y ago
    Obviously, the primary effects are those that impact women, but things can annoy you and still be misogyny.
  - anonyme-honteux 4y ago
    > Women see attractive models in advertising, they think "unachievable beauty ideals, I feel pressured". And they are right. > I see the same, I think "it exploited my biology to grab my attention, damn it worked again". And you are right. > Is it let's make money? Yes > Is it misogyny or is it mis-everyone? It is misoginy, and misoginy is always is mis-everyone - but a tiny elite who benefits from it. Advertisers for example. TODO: Add "why-not-both?" meme here.
  - tialaramex 4y ago
    > Is it misogyny or is it mis-everyone The word you might want here is misanthropy "a dislike of humankind".
    - anonyme-honteux 4y ago
      That's a useless word though. It's like "all lives matter". Nobody but psychopaths disagree so why do people bring it up? What's the point? Mostly to defend the status quo where some lives matter less than others.
      - a1369209993 4y ago
        > It's like "all lives matter". Nobody but psychopaths disagree so why do people bring it up? I only have anecdata to go on, but in literally every case I've seen, the reason has been "because of (and in response to) someone else implying otherwise".
- secondcoming 4y ago
  Advertising to designed to make you choose a particular company over another when you go to buy that thing you don't need.
- otabdeveloper4 4y ago
  Ad tech is applied sociology. What you're talking about is a different advertising industry, one that deals with human psychology. Ad fraud is essentially incorrect/fraudulent sampling that leads to biased results. (Usually with a hidden motive.) Which is why in traditional advertising sampling and data collection is done by government-mandated entities. Digital advertising has been "disrupted" by entities like Google and Facebook, but eventually we'll get there too.
devonallie 4y ago
Huge companies that exploit their workers are themselves being exploited. Sounds like maybe there is a god.
- amelius 4y ago
  So in the end we're all being exploited by advertising?
- from 4y ago
  Ad fraud overwhelmingly victimizes companies that pay for ads many of whom are small businesses whereas the big companies like Google benefit because it means more volume.
EdwardDiego 4y ago
When I worked in adtech, I proposed a simple solution to ad fraud on our platform - assume any UA coming from an IP range owned by a cloud provider was a bot and don't show them ads, don't count their impressions. Worst case, people using a VPN hosted on EC2 might not see an ad, but I was certain they'd cope. Best case, higher quality traffic increases yields. The business team vetoed that, it would adversely impact their numbers in the current quarter, and well, a significant proportion of their total comp was bonuses tied to those numbers. Also, the shareholders seemed to be of the mindset that has infected cryptocurrency speculators where no matter what, the spice must flow, wait, I mean, the number go up. Then there were all the "bonuses" and "incentives" negotiated with big advertisers or publishers. We just referred to them as kickbacks, because they totally are, but labeling something in code as kickbackPercentage was verboten. Just in case. Advertising has always been corrupt. Bots just corrupt it a little further.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  > Then there were all the "bonuses" and "incentives" negotiated with big advertisers or publishers. We just referred to them as kickbacks But every time I propose that market without rules at all leads to corriluption and inefficiency, people get up in arms
  - mjburgess 4y ago
    Markets are, in a sense, defined by rules. Perhaps the argument goes better if you say competition without rules leads to mafia, ie., people stop competing and form gangs -- since this is more efficient for them. These gangs then monopolise trade, and use violence to stop people competing with them. If they disagree, you can always point to the state itself as an example. But likewise, without a winning mafia to set the rules, others arise quickly. No group wants to compete, the want to have already won.
    - bostik 4y ago
      > No group wants to compete, they want to have already won. Or to put it another way: a capitalist fears nothing more than a truly well-functioning market.
aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
Advertising is corrupt by nature.
dkobia 4y ago
“Victimless crime” - I think not. Most affected are small businesses and startups with precious marketing dollars that can no longer afford to run an App Install campaign that reaches real users instead of bots. The big dogs can brute force their way through this. I’d venture to say that Ad fraud is a moat in itself.
londons_explore 4y ago
If you are paying any bill for ads, make sure you only pay for conversions. Ie. unless the customer actually buys your product, then don't pay anything. Eg. instead of paying $0.002 per view of your ad, or $0.10 per click of your ad, pay $6 per person who clicks your ad and then buys your product. That way, ad fraud doesn't affect you. Plenty of ad providers allow such an option. Internally, they convert your payments per conversion into payments per click and then payments per impression, but importantly this shifts the incentive to get rid of bots to them, not you - you no longer care. The provider also has an incentive to send you customers who will actually buy your product, and to send the bots and web scrapers to their other clients.
- amelius 4y ago
  Question: how do they know if you're playing fairly and tell them of the conversion? Also, do they get the customer's personal data that is involved in the purchase?
  - abofh 4y ago
    Usually there's a magic pixel that you embed on the checkout success page or a callback you invoke. I suppose people could cheat, but if your ad never converts, the network has no incentive to run it.
    - Nextgrid 4y ago
      This has major privacy and GDPR implications though.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - robertlagrant 4y ago
        Such as?
      - bigbillheck 4y ago
anm89 4y ago
And how much of tech valuations are based off of the bs revenues this genetates? Id venture a lot since a lot of tech valuations are levered up based on other tech valuations in a daisy chain
- demarq 4y ago
  This. I believe this is what really has google and meta in a panic. Network effects for these companies have been built upon funding from advertisers. They have failed to build consumer business models (B2C) on top of these networks. There are clocks ticking as advertisers seek direct routes to customers. People just like free stuff at the end of the day, and if you are zuck or Sundar this is absolutely terrifying. You have to either give something to advertisers or convince people to pay for “free stuff”. In all honesty, the one bet google had right was gaming, consumers aren’t shy about opening their wallets. People may debate paying a couple of dollars for twitter blue, or sharing a Netflix password BUT will happily fork over 100s of dollars for games. Google however expected overnight success and now they going to try squeeze ads and all their freemeum toys for all the juice they can get. Same goes for meta, which at one point was poised to be the king of online gaming.
- ryan93 4y ago
  I think a insane fraction of google revenue comes from lawyers, insurance and car sales. But maybe you are talking about smaller companies that buy ads being overvalued.
punnerud 4y ago
When using Facebook ads I am fine with that. First I argent for likes, after getting a lot of likes on the ad (from bots?) I switch to targeting the right demographic
iamacyborg 4y ago
If anyone wants additional insights, I spoke with an ad fraud researcher on this topic during the pandemic. He had a lot of interesting things to say. https://www.mql.fm/002-60-million-60-billion-ad-fraud-question-augustine-fou https://www.mql.fm/002-60-million-60-billion-ad-fraud-questi...
- lifeisstillgood 4y ago
  Just listened to this - it was great. Augustine Fou was a fantastic interviewee and it made so much about the ad fraud market clear. I have bookmarked it by submitting the link on HN - well worth a listen to folks.
  - iamacyborg 4y ago
    Thanks! Always happy to hear some of the stuff I do is well received!
    - lifeisstillgood 4y ago
      No worries - if you have a moment please post about the hideen side of making the podcast (equipment, finding / persuading guests, fitting it in the day etc) Always interested in the real how to
      - iamacyborg 4y ago
        I’ve written a few bits about that here https://www.jacquescorbytuech.com/writing/starting-a-podcast/ https://www.jacquescorbytuech.com/writing/starting-a-podcast...
Oarch 4y ago
The digital economy would doubtless take a hard hit if we knew the true scale of synthetic engagement out there. It's just easier not to look too hard. Reminds me of a joke: "Doctor, my brother has lost his mind. He think he's a chicken." "Have you tried telling him he's not a chicken?" "No. You see, the thing is, we really need the eggs..."
- c7b 4y ago
  > No. You see, the thing is, we really need the eggs. Isn't that the opposite of the problem here? If the bots actually generated sales, the adbuyers would likely be quite happy. This seems more like the Emperor's New Clothes, if you're looking for a metaphor.
  - wccrawford 4y ago
    I read that as his brother doesn't actually lay eggs, they're just hoping against hope for it. Same as the ads and the bots.
    - grandpoobah 4y ago
      "We could really use the eggs" might have been a better way of phrasing it then.
    - c7b 4y ago
      ok, yeah, reading it that way it is a quite an appropriate metaphor
- InCityDreams 4y ago
  Must be a European joke. In the States I'm guessing it costs more to see a doctor than just go buy eggs. And, yes, i know my euro-taxes essentialy pay for my doc, but a week in hospital that cost me €13.50, I'll live with. As well as a year's worth of post-care and meds....€0.00. Eggs are getting a bit pricey now, though.
- mountainb 4y ago
  No one really wanted to do much digging when the market was good, but now that the market is bad, expect a lot of digging and a lot of suing.
c7b 4y ago
> Yet the digital advertising industry has grown so accustomed to working with inflated numbers that few are willing to unmask the fake clicks That is a funny reason for why this phenomenon might have grown so big in the first place. The people in the ad-buying company who are in the best position to 'smell' when the numbers are off are also the ones most likely to individually benefit from inflated numbers (KPIs, number go up,...). A principal-agent problem at its finest, that unfortunately might drag some white-collar workers into being at least morally complicit in cyber crime.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  From my definition of white collar (office worker sitting on chair in front of computer all day), and blue collar (factory/shop/traveling/working with hands not computer), I would have thought white collar workers were the ones most likely capable of committing cyber crimes.
  - c7b 4y ago
    Two points - I think it's worth pointing out anyway, because in my experience white-collar workers - especially outside of areas like finance, where they do get a lot of compliance training - often seem to be of the impression that their work is far removed from what could eventually be considered crime - Hands-on workers can absolutely be part of cyber crime schemes. Money mules, various packing, collection and delivery activities, intimidation,... can be important parts of the cyber crime 'supply chain'
- civilized 4y ago
  Reminds me of Graeber's bullshit jobs theory. We have people generating fake clicks so that the ad departments at big companies can feel important.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    On top of that, IIRC he mentions advertising among the "zero-sum" variety of bullshit job. Not all of it, but a great deal is "we're spending more because [other big brand] started spending more, just to keep from losing market share".
stephc_int13 4y ago
This is a classic problem when relying on proxy metrics instead of real-world impact. Proxy metrics are convenient, they are also easy to game. With enough time, any system involving humans will be corrupted. But in the grand scheme of things, I don't care about adtech being demonetized in the long run.
emaro 4y ago
If you ask me, we should simply delete the entire advertisement sector—influencers included—and start from scratch. The amount of wasted resources (i.e. attention, money, electricity, bandwidth, time, smart people) is just insane! The benefits I see are mostly lot's of jobs and means for the biggest businesses to sell more stuff. That can hardly be worth it. I know I'm dreaming and it will never happen, but still... let me dream.
- fdewrewrewf 4y ago
  The internet and all related technology is largely funded by advertising. It would indeed be very fun to watch that all disappear.
  - emaro 4y ago
    Ads, military and porn, the three pillars of the internet!
  - themoonisachees 4y ago
    Major websites are ad-funded, the internet isn't. Networking technology, IPV4/6, http, ssl and most website frameworks aren't funded by advertising ( and even if they are eg react, they won't disappear.) Let FAANGs fail. Let them try to disguise ads into content, fail and go off the deep end. What is there to lose, really? Search? Someone will take their place. Instant gratification online ordering (not funded by ads but fuck it) orchestrating modern slavery? We'l be fine. Facebook products? Might be a bit of a panic as chat for 50% of the world population goes down, but we'll manage. RCS is good now, matrix is right there, we'll manage. TikTok? We'l be fine. Pretty much any thing funded by advertising is not vital to society (otherwise they could make you pay for it) and like half of it is parasitic.
    - kritiko 4y ago
      Photo & video hosting for all of your major life events that delivers the content to all of your friends and family?
LatteLazy 4y ago
Companies should be doing testing to check the efficiency of their ad spending. If they're happy with the Spend/Sales ratio then it is irrelevant whether they pay $x for 1000 impressions->10 real views->1 sale or $x for 10 impressions->10 real views->1 sale. If they are not doing their homework, that is on them. And frankly, 90%+ of advertising is a blight on the environment whether it's online or broadcast or physical so who cares.
seydor 4y ago
That's not my problem. Advertisers are part of the problem, they take in huge sums of money and feed the Google+fb monopoly, without ever knowing how their money is wasted, they "trust" them. There is nothing more opaque than google, the company that controls both the supply and demand of search ads. If you willingly participate in that market,i m sorry, not sorry
- iKevinShah 4y ago
  I am not an advertiser or anything, but businesses dont "trust" them. The moment businesses see an alternate option with more transparency and somewhat similar results - They will jump ship. Although we are way far from anything like that coming up (on that scale)
  - seydor 4y ago
    There were a bunch of ad marketplaces that were pretty transparent - (buysellads.com? not sure, and many others) because they were pretty basic, you were buying ads directly on websites. Google is not transparent on the publisher or the advertiser side. Advertisers "bid" on "keywords" with the amount that google suggests (pulled out of their ass? who knows). On the publisher side, if you add "auto ads" on any website, a bunch of ads appear all over the place, most of the time breaking your page layout. You are given an RPM for your ads that , as far as i know, could also be pulled out of their ass. They control the inflow and the outflow, and adjust according to their cashflow needs. Advertisers like them because they provide a lot of bloated dashboards with fancy graphs as proof of their work.
    - ehnto 4y ago
      I did always find auto-pricing for ads weird. Why would I trust the one entity that stands to gain from an increase to set my bid? The fact that it's impossible to verify the veracity of the system makes that a no-go for me, but clearly not for everyone.
- manigandham 4y ago
  Its not trust so much as monopoly access to the digital ad market. Google has so much prime inventory (search results + youtube) that it's impossible to avoid it if you want any kind of scale for your campaigns.
nottorp 4y ago
> The case started when Uber pulled all online advertising and discovered barely any drop in app installs or sales. Uber is a bad example I think. Not only they've been in the news so many times advertising is probably irellevant, there is an actual "natural" ceiling for demand for Uber in an area. They may have to compete with ads in places where they have competition, but not overall. > The technology to detect and block bots already exists Yeah, right. When I close the site because i can't be arsed to look for palm trees in 120x80 photos, I'm a bot.
- omgomgomgomg 4y ago
  I do think they are a good example, however , maybe they ran those less quantifyable brand name campaigns. There are many reports out there confirming the same. Dont give the ad networks a carte blanche sometimes they themselves are hijacked by bad operators. It seems there is very little done a mitigation or prevention of bad traffic and a lot of sending beginner sales persons to the front lines. I mean, they do provide some estimates for conversion rates, but never will they put that on paper. Where are their numbers for traffic cost even coming from if they do not know? When they say lets run a test campaign for 1 or 2 k before I commit to 5 times that, I ask them what have my comoetitors done, do you have feedback?( I do, am on friendly terms with competitors) they always say they have no insight(is that so?). All I know that some of them create either zero or so much fake traffic that I have to justify the 400 percent page views month to month to some payment partners.
robertlagrant 4y ago
If they're getting decent ROI on their ad spend, what does it matter? TV ads were normally shown to empty rooms while their occupants went to make themselves a drink. Still worth buying.
- shalmanese 4y ago
  It mainly has an effect on content creators who rely on ads for revenue. They're the only ones providing real conversions but they're forced to share their revenue with bots emulating fake conversions and so their total slice of the pie goes down.
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    Conversions should be tracked differently to (and weighted higher than) impressions, though?
- manigandham 4y ago
  Because the bad actors are bad and extracting illicit gains from the industry. Removing the fraud will lower ad costs, cost of goods and as a result the cost of products for consumers.
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    I now realise I should've read the article, instead of clicking back as soon as it auto-played a video. I didn't realise it was deliberate, and fraud.
- from 4y ago
  Because diverting money from actual productive businesses that employ lots of people into the pockets of people who are going to spend the money on Lamborghinis is net bad for society? Why care about insurance fraud if insurance is still profitable? Someone is paying for fraud and it’s basically the rest of society in the form of higher costs.
JCM9 4y ago
Years ago our company was running an ad campaign on social media. Curious on the results I spent time looking into a randomly selected pool of the “users” that had been clicking on our ads. It quickly became clear that at least half (if not a lot more) of the clicks were from what appeared to be fake users or bots. We shut the whole ad spend there off immediately.
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  I sometimes when an advertisement annoys me, I punish it clicking on it, clicking around on the website, maybe adding items to the cart or going through half of the click funnel, and then I close the tab and never come back. It's great.
  - omgomgomgomg 4y ago
    You could automate this with a script running at certain intervals. Some will throw you a captcha sometimes, but not all and not always early enough. I did not abuse this, I have observed this when developing a scraper. Test headless before deploying was my most valuable take away.
3pt14159 4y ago
What blows my mind is how bots even care about this stuff. Back in 2009 I started my first tech startup with a friend. We crawled the net and stored the locations of and contents of online ads. Aside from the mistake that this actually costs a lot of money and we were too young to effectively raise money, we also made another mistake: Ads were about to get very dynamic. Not just ads rotating on a site, but search retargetting and hypertargetting were about to take off. So I did what any reasonable founder would do after learning that the business just wouldn't work. I turned down a just offered $200k (huge at that time) and closed up the business. Years later I'm learning that bots are still interested, and I suppose there is some signal here, but its minuscule compared to what was available back then. Plus, there are fewer and fewer out-of-app websites people spend there time on these days. I dunno. I'm happy that startup never went anywhere. It would have sucked to be swept into the ad tech industry over the past decade.
fortyseven 4y ago
To be fair, the bots were mostly impressed.
vinay_ys 4y ago
With private access tokens demo'ed at WWDC2022 [1] as a better replacement for captchas, this problem can be reduced to a great extent. As this becomes an IETF [2] standard that Google and Microsoft and many others will also implement, this will no-doubt be used to solve bots-in-ads problem. 1. https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2022/10077/ https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2022/10077/ 2. https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-private-access-tokens-01.html https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-private-access-tokens-...
- leothecool 4y ago
  Botnets create traffic from trusted devices. Would the icloud token provider un-trust compromised devices? Sounds like a nightmare.
PaulHoule 4y ago
I think fraud is ubiquitous in advertising and often the publishers are to blame. Frequently on mobile devices the ads cover the content and you wind up clicking on the ad when you are trying to hide it. Also I think it is not so accidental that mobile web sites have so many layout shifts because each layout shift is a chance you click on the wrong link and ka-ching!
- baloki 4y ago
  Layout shifts on ad sites are more usually related to the fact that ads come in various sizes and to make sure one is always displayed (and the company makes a tenth of a hundredth of a local denomination of currency) so you can’t prefix the ad space to take out of the page. Then UX and your ad team will duke it out for if it should be a fixed size or should the company make more money and the user always loses :(
  - PaulHoule 4y ago
    I dunno. Half of the problem is knowing where people will click, the other half is knowing when. People into Black Hat SEO circa 2008 would often practice "blending" where the point was fitting the Google text ads into places on your site where people would be likely to mistake them for content. This is related tactically to a certain kind of landing page which seems to make no sense, but some users will get confused and click on a random link which goes "ka-ching". In that kind of site all the links are paid links, on the real web it is not too different, it is maybe 10 or 20 paid links per real link. Fitts' law is on their side. I guess the only reason they don't put mini-banners between the navigation links (as Fitts would have you do) on the bottom of the page is that goes too far and gets you kicked out of the ad network. I have noticed the layout shifts that happen on certain sites when I am just about to touch a link on my tablet and thought... "I wonder if you can predict some clicks based on the accelerometer trace" but then, nah, they'd have to ask permission to use the accelerometer wouldn't they?
jrm4 4y ago
"How bots corrupted advertising" Ah, yes, "advertising," that fine institution representing the best the world has to offer in purity and honesty...
barbariangrunge 4y ago
I’m going to ask the dumb question: if you had a newsletter or some online store that you wanted to promote, and you had at least some budget for ads, what actually works in terms of ads? All anyone talks about is how ads never work, but I know a couple of people who, for example, thrive on Facebook ads. Are they outliers then?
- Disruptive_Dave 4y ago
  Broadly - conversions that you can validate. It's kind of that simple. Depends on the channel, as well. For LI and FB/IG, have tight targeting, tighter tracking, and really really good creative. As long as I'm making more than I spend, there's something there. Every now and then we turn off our ads for a month or so and analyze traffic and sales to make sure those ads aren't capturing leads that would've come in organically. Advertising is work - you have to constantly investigate and experiment and optimize and refresh. Then do it all over again when that particular well runs dry.
- jacooper 4y ago
  I have a similar question. I am running a FOSS community in my local language. And we have a contest where we pay the best 5 articles in our forums every month. We would like to market our contest but how can one market their website without supporting bigtech?(keep in mind, not in English) Twitter is our biggest platform and the one we are going to try first, but that's big tech and not privacy friendly anyway?
micromacrofoot 4y ago
Add it to the huge sums that companies pay for misclicks. Traditional banner ads are a total scam. Outside of advertising, how many business expenses regularly have single-digit effectiveness rates?
djfjdjduct 4y ago
there's two ad clients: small business who want cheap ads to sell, and large incumbent who want expensive ads as a barrier for new competitors. the players (dsp, ssp, etc) all want expensive ads, more profit. the second group will gladly pay the inflated cost because that's what they want anyway. and they have weight to force even google to submit to known bogus accreditation that let all bots through. the first group have to pay because they have no leverage and can't force Google to have a valid accreditation. ads sales pay huge 20-30pct commission because everyone knows some of that goes back to the large client buyer. sucks to be a small business.
hnburnsy 4y ago
To me it feels like companies have these ad budgets, and just feel the need to spend, spend, spend without measuring any sort of ROI. Example, almost every GM commercial these days are for EV cars\truck that you cannot even buy, some you cannot even put down a deposit or the "pre-order" is meaningless (like refundable $100 for the Lyriq, but no specs, colors or pricing has event been announced). It is like GM needs to spend its marketing budget no matter what.
- from 4y ago
  I think for bigger brands like Coca-Cola it becomes harder to measure. Because it’s not like you see an ad for Coke Zero on Facebook and order it right away, whereas you might if there was a new company with a cool new product. That’s why they run “awareness ads” to make sure they stay in people’s heads but I don’t think anyone knows exactly how effective those are.
- lofaszvanitt 4y ago
  They have specific goals to spend x amount on y product every month. SO that is not a mystery. Also, there are video game sales of 10s of millions where only 10% ever finish the game. Yet the next version has the same mechanics and sales are higher and still 10% finish the game. Interesting...
- darkcha0s 4y ago
  I run a startup that heavily relies on ads, and I can tell you for sure that we spend and measure ROI in detail. We have metrics that tell us exactly how much we need to spend to convert a user into paying user, so that we can budget ourselves accordingly; I think most low/mid tier companies do this. Of course, when you look at real giants, its a different story as the ROI is harder to measure.
leros 4y ago
Companies are measuring the results of their advertising pretty closely. I would (possibly incorrectly) assume they're still hitting their metrics despite serving their ads to lots of bots.
NoGravitas 4y ago
Honestly, I'd much rather they show their ads to bots than to humans. Hopefully, the day will come when every human is using a competent adblocker, but the ad industries numbers don't go down thanks to the bots, and people can get paid for content that everyone enjoys for free.
- from 4y ago
  But there’s no free lunch. If businesses realize there is a 0% ROI to ad spend due to all the traffic being bots, they will stop buying ads. At which point sites will just migrate to a subscription model.
  - netr0ute 4y ago
    That's the endgame! Then websites will have to compete for your dollars, and the cream will rise to the top.
  - Viliam1234 4y ago
    If businesses actually had the ability to correctly calculate ROI to ad spend, we wouldn't be talking about ad fraud.
  - hedora 4y ago
    Wouldn't the incompetent businesses keep buying ads, helping them eliminate themselves from the market?
  - otabdeveloper4 4y ago
    No. Ads will be inserted server-side. Like in the old days of print magazines and TV.
    - from 4y ago
      It's possible to block TV ads: https://next.taiv.tv https://next.taiv.tv. Taiv is a startup for bars and restaurants that uses a model which basically detects when there are sudden color shifts and lets them insert their own ads or get paid to insert someone else's ads. Although I don't know how you'd block print ads unless you had some kind of AR headset that blacked them out.
caseysoftware 4y ago
It's amazing how much compute time - both hardware and humans - is dedicated to figuring out how to show which ads to people.. and it turns out that many of the "views" aren't even people.
- propogandist 4y ago
  there is no incentive to figure out the solution to this problem. The largest players in this space (Google, Facebook) require advertisers to spend money to make money. If the big players were to solve the ad fraud problem, beyond a superficial level, it would hurt their bottom line —- which hurts stock price, which is tied to compensation for their employees. Ad fraud is usually a niche conversation that doesn’t get much traction (esp as most publications are reliant on ads), but the twitter / musk lawsuit is helping more people pay attention.
toss1 4y ago
>>In June, the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), a US industry group, published a blog post that estimated that ad fraud is costing US advertisers $120 billion each year. Hours after it was published, those statements were removed. John Wolfe, the ANA’s director of communications, tells WIRED that the figures were removed because they were out of date, but declines to provide any new figures. Right, because the up-to-date fraud numbers are higher. >>But the industry is letting ad dollars flow into the pockets of cybercriminals, he adds, who can then use it to fund other illicit activities. It’s a major problem, he argues. “One that no one talks about, no one writes about, everyone thinks it’s someone else’s problem.” Exactly, everyone is incentivized to accept the inflated numbers, and disincentivized to look at reality, so the result is unsurprising. >>Fou believes the industry was corrupted around a decade ago, when a series of opaque middlemen entered the scene. “Prior to that, advertisers would buy ads from publishers like The New York Times,” It's said in software that 'Everything can be solved by another layer of indirection'. Everything evidently includes inserting a fraud layer. Solution? De-scaling and going back to advertising directly with specific platforms instead of ad "networks". What about paying for conversion instead of clicks? That concept seems to have completely disappeared. Anyone inside know why or what could be done to get back to that? As a small biz owner developing physical products, I'd be interested in advertising, but I sure don't want to blow $$thousands out the door in hours for a mere illusion...
m1117 4y ago
I wish they only showed ads to bots. I find myself vigorously clicking "skip ad" on youtube. Is that "ad rage"?
cloudking 4y ago
I've seen some paid solutions for this like https://www.clickcease.com/ https://www.clickcease.com/ Does anyone know of any free open-source solutions?
myth2018 4y ago
> “After all, who cares if big brands waste their money showing ads to bots?” I'm not so sure this affects only big brands. I've experienced that in march 2020. I ran ads in a very popular platform and was fairly happy about the results -- modest, but steady. When the pandemics hit, my target-market shifted their focus away from my sort of product, and such shift happened almost overnight. Since I used to get a reasonable amount of real visitors, I thought "well, I believe the clicks on my ads will decrease sharply now". Guess what? I kept getting the same amount of clicks on average, and my budget of course kept burning at the same rate. The only difference was that the "visits" started to last only a few seconds, the pages were not scrolled anymore, and the "visitors" never sent an inquiry.
- seti0Cha 4y ago
  Your bounce rate went up. That's still consistent with your target audience losing interest. It may be that they care enough to click on your ad but don't engage with your content. It could also be that the ratio of bots increased at the same rate as customer interest wained, or it could be the ads were never effective. It kind of doesn't matter. As an ad buyer, the only thing you to need worry about is whether the value of the traffic coming from the ads is worth your money. Uninterested humans and bots are of equally little value.
  - myth2018 4y ago
    They cared enough to keep searching for my keywords, to click on my ads, but then they realized they were not interested and bounced? Also, like I said, the traffic the ads generated was good (it generated prospects fitting the profile I was targeting, and I was happy with the numbers), so yes, the ads were effective.
    - seti0Cha 4y ago
      My point is, either the traffic got worse or your ad is no longer effective and a higher bounce rate can indicate either. Bots don't shoulder aside regular users, so regardless of whether there are more bots, there are less users. Otherwise you'd have seen traffic increasing but not conversion. If traffic is flat and interaction is down, you've lost interested users and you need to look at your creative, or your targeting, or possibly consider whether any design or content changes on your landing page could be responsible. It could also be that you are getting outbid and your placement is now not catching the best customers. The fact that what worked before doesn't work now is totally normal. Customer tastes change, competitor behavior changes, the traffic supplier is changing. Ad buying is a constant battle.
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kkkrist 4y ago
I worked for a print ad business many years ago. They were basically running the same business model with the paper. Ads were placed in glossy and cheap/free pos magazines (cheap traffic) that mostly landed in the trash after collecting dust on the shelf. The bots consisted of distributors claiming high quality distribution while throwing the paper right into the trash. Everyone knew and hardly anyone cared because incentives were mostly aligned (mostly big brands). I was hired to help with the transition to digital. Guess how that worked out. Next I tried running my own online marketing business. I thought not deceiving customers and actually providing real value was something clients would pay for. Some did, but competing with all the fraud became to tiresome eventually. Not going to work in this industry every again unless there are alternatives (includes scrubbing toilets)
strangattractor 4y ago
People that buy ads for companies want to keep their jobs too. And like most jobs the more money the company gives you responsibility for spending the more they pay you. Don't see why they care how many bots see their ads.
amai 4y ago
That is known since the 1990s. And yet, nothing changes.
deleted 4y ago
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paulpauper 4y ago
This is sorta a self-correcting problem because bot traffic is imputed into the price/bids for ads. Bot traffic lowers ROI, hence lower bid. If ads converted really well and were 100% human traffic, they would be much more expensive on a CPC or CPM basis than they already are (even though they are plenty expensive still). Evidently in spite of bots, companies still derive enough value to keep spending tons of money on ads and pay really high CPM and CPC rates.
classichasclass 4y ago
Even the smol internet is not immune. At Floodgap, I estimate about 2/3rds of the Gopher traffic is automated, based on the nature, spacing and progression of IPs through the site. Some of it comes from HTTP->gopher proxies that allow web bots to index through them (can't imagine how much money that can cost), but much of it seems to be connected to no known proxy.
ok123456 4y ago
A few years ago, I tried to help out a locally owned gym do an experiment with Google Ad-Words. The place small storefront in a run-down strip mall straight out of the 1960s, but it had very good equipment for people that were in the know and it was 24 hours. The owner was a nice guy but he relied entirely on word-of-mouth and his technical skills extended to making expletive laced, 128-point-font signs reminding people to put equipment away in Word. I got the sense the business was not going well after a protracted battle with a former business partner, where the business partner just wanted to liquidate the assets and call it a day. He managed to buy the business partner out and continued to operate the place---sans a few treadmills. I decided to try and help him out by volunteering my time and some money to see if a small, targeted ad buy from Google could help him out. It sure beat finding another place like this. The dashboard made it look very targeted geographically. But, when I investigated where they were all coming from it was 95% international and from affiliates listings from very low quality sites with no information on them. A month and $300 later, I discontinued this experiment because the traffic was entirely bot driven. From that experience, I've come to the conclusion that online Ad Tech is 99% a scam.
- ezoe 4y ago
  Online ad has negative effect. I never trust products or services that are showed up in online ads.
  - ok123456 4y ago
    Everyone who thinks this way already blocks all ads. In this case, it was the slightly less worse case where the ad was meant to be informative instead of manufacture consumption. If you were looking for a gym that met this criteria in this locality, finding information about this particular gym would have been limited to people willing to go through several pages of search results, or looking through specialized indexes, or just happen to be walking past the storefront on the way to the bar or gun shop next door. This was the exact use case that online advertisers invent to justify that they're not all bad, and they failed to come through.
remram 4y ago
There are probably more problems about advertisement effectiveness than bots cheating the system. This article from The Correspondent was on the frontpage a few years back and I think about it a lot: https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble-is-here-its-called-online-advertising/13228924500-22d5fd24 https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble-is-h... HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21465873 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21465873
excalibur 4y ago
If a company counts as a person for purposes of filing lawsuits, why doesn't another company count for purposes of viewing web pages? Why do they have to be human? That's racist.
convexfunction 4y ago
I worked for a while on an online ad measurement product, specifically on identifying and helping our clients avoid "invalid traffic", which is almost but not exactly a synonym for "bots". Reading this article, you'd come away with the impression that companies doing this work don't even exist? (Besides the venerable Dr Fou, who excels at getting his name in print whenever this subject comes up.) I can't vouch that all the third party ad measurement vendors do a good job -- in fact I know from experience that some of our competitors did not -- but it was weird to not see any acknowledgement that there's a whole competitive field of the adtech industry with lots of talent behind it working specifically on this problem and which any serious advertiser, publisher, or exchange in the open web ad ecosystem is already a client of. (The "walled gardens" like Google/FB/etc also work with these measurement vendors, though the measurement itself is neutered to the point of uselessness, basically just passing their definitely totally trustworthy numbers through to another dashboard. Now that's a topic I'd like to see a journalist dive into!)
csa 4y ago
Does anyone know which companies media methane was partnering with? The following article explains the mechanics: https://www.anura.io/blog/king-of-ad-fraud-sentenced https://www.anura.io/blog/king-of-ad-fraud-sentenced But who were these partners who were paying media methane for (fraudulent) clicks?
deleted 4y ago
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AtNightWeCode 4y ago
Not surprised. I worked with companies that paid affiliates for purchases done by load testing in test envs. Budgets is not always a good thing.
hedora 4y ago
Hey, what if we added an x-i-am-an-ad-bot header to HTTP? I'd happily set it if it meant lower ad revenue, and that way, the actual click fraud bots wouldn't be committing fraud.
russellbeattie 4y ago
This has been obvious since the 2017 report by Homeland Security about the Russian disinformation campaign:[1] > Bots are computer algorithms designed to execute specific online tasks autonomously and repetitively. They simulate the behavior of human beings in social networks, interacting with other users and sharing information and messages. Millions of bots spread information on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. According to a 2017 estimate, there were 23 million bots on Twitter (around 8.5% of all Twitter accounts), 140 million bots on Facebook (up to 5.5% of all Facebook accounts) and approximately 27 million bots on Instagram (8.2% of all Instagram accounts). These three platforms alone contained 190 million bots—more than half the number of people who live in the entire United States. I've been wondering (and posting on HN about it) this exact topic for years. All those bots are pretending to be online users and all of them doing everything possible to circumvent detection, including consuming ads. I would bet that most big advertisers have contractual rebates and reimbursements covering the fake ads - there's no way they'd stand for this sort of graft filling Google and Facebooks bank accounts while they paid millions for ads to fake users. It's the smaller advertisers that get really shafted. Some small franchise or website buying a few thousand ads only to get little in the way of return on their investment. They have no way to detect the false impressions and rely on the various ad networks to detect bots, of which they have zero incentive to do. I'm amazed it's taken this long for any news to come out about this, and even more amazed Congress and law enforcement haven't been involved yet. Again, look at the numbers above - this is a huge number of fake users and that only covers the disinformation efforts. Imagine the various networks out there that are focused purely on generating ad revenue and nothing else. 1. https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/ia/ia_combatting-targeted-disinformation-campaigns.pdf https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/ia/ia_c...
singularity2001 4y ago
Are the bots impressed though?

619 points by thm 4y ago

I been saying it, ain't I been aging it?

Almost all advertising like grabbing attention without prior consent is already inherently corrupted, bots are just late fallout.

deleted 4y ago

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anonyme-honteux 4y ago

"How xxx Corrupted Advertising" is a really strange titlre. It seems to assume that Advertising being corrupted is a new thing? And that the Elon guy is somehow a genius for noticing a part of the problem? The whole history of advertising seems to indicate that in fact Advertising was designed to make us buy things we don't need, not designed to talk to the better angels of our nature. Edward Bernays, aka Freud nephew, was a pioneer in Public Relations (called Propaganda at the time, they were not afraid of the word) and one of his greatest success was to convince women to start smoking en masse. He did that by branding cigarettes as feminist "Torches of Freedom" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays If that's not corrupt, I don't know what is. I mean the whole industry would look really really different if they had to give up misoginy. Think "Cheat On Your Girlfriend, Not On Your Workout” (Reebook) and 42.000 other examples

ahartmetz 4y ago
Strange choice to stress misogyny. Women see attractive models in advertising, they think "unachievable beauty ideals, I feel pressured". I see the same, I think "it exploited my biology to grab my attention, damn it worked again". Is it misogyny or is it mis-everyone, let's make money?
- stormdennis 4y ago
  I'm pretty certain that the advertising of women's things using beautiful, scantily dressed, women must work, it's being going on for long enough.
- DoctorOW 4y ago
  Obviously, the primary effects are those that impact women, but things can annoy you and still be misogyny.
- anonyme-honteux 4y ago
  > Women see attractive models in advertising, they think "unachievable beauty ideals, I feel pressured". And they are right. > I see the same, I think "it exploited my biology to grab my attention, damn it worked again". And you are right. > Is it let's make money? Yes > Is it misogyny or is it mis-everyone? It is misoginy, and misoginy is always is mis-everyone - but a tiny elite who benefits from it. Advertisers for example. TODO: Add "why-not-both?" meme here.
- tialaramex 4y ago
  > Is it misogyny or is it mis-everyone The word you might want here is misanthropy "a dislike of humankind".
  - anonyme-honteux 4y ago
    That's a useless word though. It's like "all lives matter". Nobody but psychopaths disagree so why do people bring it up? What's the point? Mostly to defend the status quo where some lives matter less than others.
    - a1369209993 4y ago
      > It's like "all lives matter". Nobody but psychopaths disagree so why do people bring it up? I only have anecdata to go on, but in literally every case I've seen, the reason has been "because of (and in response to) someone else implying otherwise".
secondcoming 4y ago
Advertising to designed to make you choose a particular company over another when you go to buy that thing you don't need.
otabdeveloper4 4y ago
Ad tech is applied sociology. What you're talking about is a different advertising industry, one that deals with human psychology. Ad fraud is essentially incorrect/fraudulent sampling that leads to biased results. (Usually with a hidden motive.) Which is why in traditional advertising sampling and data collection is done by government-mandated entities. Digital advertising has been "disrupted" by entities like Google and Facebook, but eventually we'll get there too.

devonallie 4y ago

Huge companies that exploit their workers are themselves being exploited. Sounds like maybe there is a god.

amelius 4y ago
So in the end we're all being exploited by advertising?
from 4y ago
Ad fraud overwhelmingly victimizes companies that pay for ads many of whom are small businesses whereas the big companies like Google benefit because it means more volume.

EdwardDiego 4y ago

When I worked in adtech, I proposed a simple solution to ad fraud on our platform - assume any UA coming from an IP range owned by a cloud provider was a bot and don't show them ads, don't count their impressions. Worst case, people using a VPN hosted on EC2 might not see an ad, but I was certain they'd cope. Best case, higher quality traffic increases yields. The business team vetoed that, it would adversely impact their numbers in the current quarter, and well, a significant proportion of their total comp was bonuses tied to those numbers. Also, the shareholders seemed to be of the mindset that has infected cryptocurrency speculators where no matter what, the spice must flow, wait, I mean, the number go up. Then there were all the "bonuses" and "incentives" negotiated with big advertisers or publishers. We just referred to them as kickbacks, because they totally are, but labeling something in code as kickbackPercentage was verboten. Just in case. Advertising has always been corrupt. Bots just corrupt it a little further.

ClumsyPilot 4y ago
> Then there were all the "bonuses" and "incentives" negotiated with big advertisers or publishers. We just referred to them as kickbacks But every time I propose that market without rules at all leads to corriluption and inefficiency, people get up in arms
- mjburgess 4y ago
  Markets are, in a sense, defined by rules. Perhaps the argument goes better if you say competition without rules leads to mafia, ie., people stop competing and form gangs -- since this is more efficient for them. These gangs then monopolise trade, and use violence to stop people competing with them. If they disagree, you can always point to the state itself as an example. But likewise, without a winning mafia to set the rules, others arise quickly. No group wants to compete, the want to have already won.
  - bostik 4y ago
    > No group wants to compete, they want to have already won. Or to put it another way: a capitalist fears nothing more than a truly well-functioning market.

aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago

Advertising is corrupt by nature.

dkobia 4y ago

“Victimless crime” - I think not. Most affected are small businesses and startups with precious marketing dollars that can no longer afford to run an App Install campaign that reaches real users instead of bots. The big dogs can brute force their way through this. I’d venture to say that Ad fraud is a moat in itself.

londons_explore 4y ago

If you are paying any bill for ads, make sure you only pay for conversions. Ie. unless the customer actually buys your product, then don't pay anything. Eg. instead of paying $0.002 per view of your ad, or $0.10 per click of your ad, pay $6 per person who clicks your ad and then buys your product. That way, ad fraud doesn't affect you. Plenty of ad providers allow such an option. Internally, they convert your payments per conversion into payments per click and then payments per impression, but importantly this shifts the incentive to get rid of bots to them, not you - you no longer care. The provider also has an incentive to send you customers who will actually buy your product, and to send the bots and web scrapers to their other clients.

amelius 4y ago
Question: how do they know if you're playing fairly and tell them of the conversion? Also, do they get the customer's personal data that is involved in the purchase?
- abofh 4y ago
  Usually there's a magic pixel that you embed on the checkout success page or a callback you invoke. I suppose people could cheat, but if your ad never converts, the network has no incentive to run it.
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    This has major privacy and GDPR implications though.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - robertlagrant 4y ago
      Such as?
    - bigbillheck 4y ago

anm89 4y ago

And how much of tech valuations are based off of the bs revenues this genetates? Id venture a lot since a lot of tech valuations are levered up based on other tech valuations in a daisy chain

demarq 4y ago
This. I believe this is what really has google and meta in a panic. Network effects for these companies have been built upon funding from advertisers. They have failed to build consumer business models (B2C) on top of these networks. There are clocks ticking as advertisers seek direct routes to customers. People just like free stuff at the end of the day, and if you are zuck or Sundar this is absolutely terrifying. You have to either give something to advertisers or convince people to pay for “free stuff”. In all honesty, the one bet google had right was gaming, consumers aren’t shy about opening their wallets. People may debate paying a couple of dollars for twitter blue, or sharing a Netflix password BUT will happily fork over 100s of dollars for games. Google however expected overnight success and now they going to try squeeze ads and all their freemeum toys for all the juice they can get. Same goes for meta, which at one point was poised to be the king of online gaming.
ryan93 4y ago
I think a insane fraction of google revenue comes from lawyers, insurance and car sales. But maybe you are talking about smaller companies that buy ads being overvalued.

punnerud 4y ago

When using Facebook ads I am fine with that. First I argent for likes, after getting a lot of likes on the ad (from bots?) I switch to targeting the right demographic

iamacyborg 4y ago

If anyone wants additional insights, I spoke with an ad fraud researcher on this topic during the pandemic. He had a lot of interesting things to say. https://www.mql.fm/002-60-million-60-billion-ad-fraud-question-augustine-fou https://www.mql.fm/002-60-million-60-billion-ad-fraud-questi...

lifeisstillgood 4y ago
Just listened to this - it was great. Augustine Fou was a fantastic interviewee and it made so much about the ad fraud market clear. I have bookmarked it by submitting the link on HN - well worth a listen to folks.
- iamacyborg 4y ago
  Thanks! Always happy to hear some of the stuff I do is well received!
  - lifeisstillgood 4y ago
    No worries - if you have a moment please post about the hideen side of making the podcast (equipment, finding / persuading guests, fitting it in the day etc) Always interested in the real how to
    - iamacyborg 4y ago
      I’ve written a few bits about that here https://www.jacquescorbytuech.com/writing/starting-a-podcast/ https://www.jacquescorbytuech.com/writing/starting-a-podcast...

Oarch 4y ago

The digital economy would doubtless take a hard hit if we knew the true scale of synthetic engagement out there. It's just easier not to look too hard. Reminds me of a joke: "Doctor, my brother has lost his mind. He think he's a chicken." "Have you tried telling him he's not a chicken?" "No. You see, the thing is, we really need the eggs..."

c7b 4y ago
> No. You see, the thing is, we really need the eggs. Isn't that the opposite of the problem here? If the bots actually generated sales, the adbuyers would likely be quite happy. This seems more like the Emperor's New Clothes, if you're looking for a metaphor.
- wccrawford 4y ago
  I read that as his brother doesn't actually lay eggs, they're just hoping against hope for it. Same as the ads and the bots.
  - grandpoobah 4y ago
    "We could really use the eggs" might have been a better way of phrasing it then.
  - c7b 4y ago
    ok, yeah, reading it that way it is a quite an appropriate metaphor
InCityDreams 4y ago
Must be a European joke. In the States I'm guessing it costs more to see a doctor than just go buy eggs. And, yes, i know my euro-taxes essentialy pay for my doc, but a week in hospital that cost me €13.50, I'll live with. As well as a year's worth of post-care and meds....€0.00. Eggs are getting a bit pricey now, though.
mountainb 4y ago
No one really wanted to do much digging when the market was good, but now that the market is bad, expect a lot of digging and a lot of suing.

c7b 4y ago

> Yet the digital advertising industry has grown so accustomed to working with inflated numbers that few are willing to unmask the fake clicks That is a funny reason for why this phenomenon might have grown so big in the first place. The people in the ad-buying company who are in the best position to 'smell' when the numbers are off are also the ones most likely to individually benefit from inflated numbers (KPIs, number go up,...). A principal-agent problem at its finest, that unfortunately might drag some white-collar workers into being at least morally complicit in cyber crime.

lotsofpulp 4y ago
From my definition of white collar (office worker sitting on chair in front of computer all day), and blue collar (factory/shop/traveling/working with hands not computer), I would have thought white collar workers were the ones most likely capable of committing cyber crimes.
- c7b 4y ago
  Two points - I think it's worth pointing out anyway, because in my experience white-collar workers - especially outside of areas like finance, where they do get a lot of compliance training - often seem to be of the impression that their work is far removed from what could eventually be considered crime - Hands-on workers can absolutely be part of cyber crime schemes. Money mules, various packing, collection and delivery activities, intimidation,... can be important parts of the cyber crime 'supply chain'
civilized 4y ago
Reminds me of Graeber's bullshit jobs theory. We have people generating fake clicks so that the ad departments at big companies can feel important.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  On top of that, IIRC he mentions advertising among the "zero-sum" variety of bullshit job. Not all of it, but a great deal is "we're spending more because [other big brand] started spending more, just to keep from losing market share".

stephc_int13 4y ago

This is a classic problem when relying on proxy metrics instead of real-world impact. Proxy metrics are convenient, they are also easy to game. With enough time, any system involving humans will be corrupted. But in the grand scheme of things, I don't care about adtech being demonetized in the long run.

emaro 4y ago

If you ask me, we should simply delete the entire advertisement sector—influencers included—and start from scratch. The amount of wasted resources (i.e. attention, money, electricity, bandwidth, time, smart people) is just insane! The benefits I see are mostly lot's of jobs and means for the biggest businesses to sell more stuff. That can hardly be worth it. I know I'm dreaming and it will never happen, but still... let me dream.

fdewrewrewf 4y ago
The internet and all related technology is largely funded by advertising. It would indeed be very fun to watch that all disappear.
- emaro 4y ago
  Ads, military and porn, the three pillars of the internet!
- themoonisachees 4y ago
  Major websites are ad-funded, the internet isn't. Networking technology, IPV4/6, http, ssl and most website frameworks aren't funded by advertising ( and even if they are eg react, they won't disappear.) Let FAANGs fail. Let them try to disguise ads into content, fail and go off the deep end. What is there to lose, really? Search? Someone will take their place. Instant gratification online ordering (not funded by ads but fuck it) orchestrating modern slavery? We'l be fine. Facebook products? Might be a bit of a panic as chat for 50% of the world population goes down, but we'll manage. RCS is good now, matrix is right there, we'll manage. TikTok? We'l be fine. Pretty much any thing funded by advertising is not vital to society (otherwise they could make you pay for it) and like half of it is parasitic.
  - kritiko 4y ago
    Photo & video hosting for all of your major life events that delivers the content to all of your friends and family?

LatteLazy 4y ago

Companies should be doing testing to check the efficiency of their ad spending. If they're happy with the Spend/Sales ratio then it is irrelevant whether they pay $x for 1000 impressions->10 real views->1 sale or $x for 10 impressions->10 real views->1 sale. If they are not doing their homework, that is on them. And frankly, 90%+ of advertising is a blight on the environment whether it's online or broadcast or physical so who cares.

seydor 4y ago

That's not my problem. Advertisers are part of the problem, they take in huge sums of money and feed the Google+fb monopoly, without ever knowing how their money is wasted, they "trust" them. There is nothing more opaque than google, the company that controls both the supply and demand of search ads. If you willingly participate in that market,i m sorry, not sorry

iKevinShah 4y ago
I am not an advertiser or anything, but businesses dont "trust" them. The moment businesses see an alternate option with more transparency and somewhat similar results - They will jump ship. Although we are way far from anything like that coming up (on that scale)
- seydor 4y ago
  There were a bunch of ad marketplaces that were pretty transparent - (buysellads.com? not sure, and many others) because they were pretty basic, you were buying ads directly on websites. Google is not transparent on the publisher or the advertiser side. Advertisers "bid" on "keywords" with the amount that google suggests (pulled out of their ass? who knows). On the publisher side, if you add "auto ads" on any website, a bunch of ads appear all over the place, most of the time breaking your page layout. You are given an RPM for your ads that , as far as i know, could also be pulled out of their ass. They control the inflow and the outflow, and adjust according to their cashflow needs. Advertisers like them because they provide a lot of bloated dashboards with fancy graphs as proof of their work.
  - ehnto 4y ago
    I did always find auto-pricing for ads weird. Why would I trust the one entity that stands to gain from an increase to set my bid? The fact that it's impossible to verify the veracity of the system makes that a no-go for me, but clearly not for everyone.
manigandham 4y ago
Its not trust so much as monopoly access to the digital ad market. Google has so much prime inventory (search results + youtube) that it's impossible to avoid it if you want any kind of scale for your campaigns.

nottorp 4y ago

> The case started when Uber pulled all online advertising and discovered barely any drop in app installs or sales. Uber is a bad example I think. Not only they've been in the news so many times advertising is probably irellevant, there is an actual "natural" ceiling for demand for Uber in an area. They may have to compete with ads in places where they have competition, but not overall. > The technology to detect and block bots already exists Yeah, right. When I close the site because i can't be arsed to look for palm trees in 120x80 photos, I'm a bot.

omgomgomgomg 4y ago
I do think they are a good example, however , maybe they ran those less quantifyable brand name campaigns. There are many reports out there confirming the same. Dont give the ad networks a carte blanche sometimes they themselves are hijacked by bad operators. It seems there is very little done a mitigation or prevention of bad traffic and a lot of sending beginner sales persons to the front lines. I mean, they do provide some estimates for conversion rates, but never will they put that on paper. Where are their numbers for traffic cost even coming from if they do not know? When they say lets run a test campaign for 1 or 2 k before I commit to 5 times that, I ask them what have my comoetitors done, do you have feedback?( I do, am on friendly terms with competitors) they always say they have no insight(is that so?). All I know that some of them create either zero or so much fake traffic that I have to justify the 400 percent page views month to month to some payment partners.

robertlagrant 4y ago

If they're getting decent ROI on their ad spend, what does it matter? TV ads were normally shown to empty rooms while their occupants went to make themselves a drink. Still worth buying.

shalmanese 4y ago
It mainly has an effect on content creators who rely on ads for revenue. They're the only ones providing real conversions but they're forced to share their revenue with bots emulating fake conversions and so their total slice of the pie goes down.
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  Conversions should be tracked differently to (and weighted higher than) impressions, though?
manigandham 4y ago
Because the bad actors are bad and extracting illicit gains from the industry. Removing the fraud will lower ad costs, cost of goods and as a result the cost of products for consumers.
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  I now realise I should've read the article, instead of clicking back as soon as it auto-played a video. I didn't realise it was deliberate, and fraud.
from 4y ago
Because diverting money from actual productive businesses that employ lots of people into the pockets of people who are going to spend the money on Lamborghinis is net bad for society? Why care about insurance fraud if insurance is still profitable? Someone is paying for fraud and it’s basically the rest of society in the form of higher costs.

JCM9 4y ago

Years ago our company was running an ad campaign on social media. Curious on the results I spent time looking into a randomly selected pool of the “users” that had been clicking on our ads. It quickly became clear that at least half (if not a lot more) of the clicks were from what appeared to be fake users or bots. We shut the whole ad spend there off immediately.

marginalia_nu 4y ago
I sometimes when an advertisement annoys me, I punish it clicking on it, clicking around on the website, maybe adding items to the cart or going through half of the click funnel, and then I close the tab and never come back. It's great.
- omgomgomgomg 4y ago
  You could automate this with a script running at certain intervals. Some will throw you a captcha sometimes, but not all and not always early enough. I did not abuse this, I have observed this when developing a scraper. Test headless before deploying was my most valuable take away.

3pt14159 4y ago

What blows my mind is how bots even care about this stuff. Back in 2009 I started my first tech startup with a friend. We crawled the net and stored the locations of and contents of online ads. Aside from the mistake that this actually costs a lot of money and we were too young to effectively raise money, we also made another mistake: Ads were about to get very dynamic. Not just ads rotating on a site, but search retargetting and hypertargetting were about to take off. So I did what any reasonable founder would do after learning that the business just wouldn't work. I turned down a just offered $200k (huge at that time) and closed up the business. Years later I'm learning that bots are still interested, and I suppose there is some signal here, but its minuscule compared to what was available back then. Plus, there are fewer and fewer out-of-app websites people spend there time on these days. I dunno. I'm happy that startup never went anywhere. It would have sucked to be swept into the ad tech industry over the past decade.

fortyseven 4y ago

To be fair, the bots were mostly impressed.

vinay_ys 4y ago

With private access tokens demo'ed at WWDC2022 [1] as a better replacement for captchas, this problem can be reduced to a great extent. As this becomes an IETF [2] standard that Google and Microsoft and many others will also implement, this will no-doubt be used to solve bots-in-ads problem. 1. https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2022/10077/ https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2022/10077/ 2. https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-private-access-tokens-01.html https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-private-access-tokens-...

leothecool 4y ago
Botnets create traffic from trusted devices. Would the icloud token provider un-trust compromised devices? Sounds like a nightmare.

PaulHoule 4y ago

I think fraud is ubiquitous in advertising and often the publishers are to blame. Frequently on mobile devices the ads cover the content and you wind up clicking on the ad when you are trying to hide it. Also I think it is not so accidental that mobile web sites have so many layout shifts because each layout shift is a chance you click on the wrong link and ka-ching!

baloki 4y ago
Layout shifts on ad sites are more usually related to the fact that ads come in various sizes and to make sure one is always displayed (and the company makes a tenth of a hundredth of a local denomination of currency) so you can’t prefix the ad space to take out of the page. Then UX and your ad team will duke it out for if it should be a fixed size or should the company make more money and the user always loses :(
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  I dunno. Half of the problem is knowing where people will click, the other half is knowing when. People into Black Hat SEO circa 2008 would often practice "blending" where the point was fitting the Google text ads into places on your site where people would be likely to mistake them for content. This is related tactically to a certain kind of landing page which seems to make no sense, but some users will get confused and click on a random link which goes "ka-ching". In that kind of site all the links are paid links, on the real web it is not too different, it is maybe 10 or 20 paid links per real link. Fitts' law is on their side. I guess the only reason they don't put mini-banners between the navigation links (as Fitts would have you do) on the bottom of the page is that goes too far and gets you kicked out of the ad network. I have noticed the layout shifts that happen on certain sites when I am just about to touch a link on my tablet and thought... "I wonder if you can predict some clicks based on the accelerometer trace" but then, nah, they'd have to ask permission to use the accelerometer wouldn't they?

jrm4 4y ago

"How bots corrupted advertising" Ah, yes, "advertising," that fine institution representing the best the world has to offer in purity and honesty...

barbariangrunge 4y ago

I’m going to ask the dumb question: if you had a newsletter or some online store that you wanted to promote, and you had at least some budget for ads, what actually works in terms of ads? All anyone talks about is how ads never work, but I know a couple of people who, for example, thrive on Facebook ads. Are they outliers then?

Disruptive_Dave 4y ago
Broadly - conversions that you can validate. It's kind of that simple. Depends on the channel, as well. For LI and FB/IG, have tight targeting, tighter tracking, and really really good creative. As long as I'm making more than I spend, there's something there. Every now and then we turn off our ads for a month or so and analyze traffic and sales to make sure those ads aren't capturing leads that would've come in organically. Advertising is work - you have to constantly investigate and experiment and optimize and refresh. Then do it all over again when that particular well runs dry.
jacooper 4y ago
I have a similar question. I am running a FOSS community in my local language. And we have a contest where we pay the best 5 articles in our forums every month. We would like to market our contest but how can one market their website without supporting bigtech?(keep in mind, not in English) Twitter is our biggest platform and the one we are going to try first, but that's big tech and not privacy friendly anyway?

micromacrofoot 4y ago

Add it to the huge sums that companies pay for misclicks. Traditional banner ads are a total scam. Outside of advertising, how many business expenses regularly have single-digit effectiveness rates?

djfjdjduct 4y ago

there's two ad clients: small business who want cheap ads to sell, and large incumbent who want expensive ads as a barrier for new competitors. the players (dsp, ssp, etc) all want expensive ads, more profit. the second group will gladly pay the inflated cost because that's what they want anyway. and they have weight to force even google to submit to known bogus accreditation that let all bots through. the first group have to pay because they have no leverage and can't force Google to have a valid accreditation. ads sales pay huge 20-30pct commission because everyone knows some of that goes back to the large client buyer. sucks to be a small business.

hnburnsy 4y ago

To me it feels like companies have these ad budgets, and just feel the need to spend, spend, spend without measuring any sort of ROI. Example, almost every GM commercial these days are for EV cars\truck that you cannot even buy, some you cannot even put down a deposit or the "pre-order" is meaningless (like refundable $100 for the Lyriq, but no specs, colors or pricing has event been announced). It is like GM needs to spend its marketing budget no matter what.

from 4y ago
I think for bigger brands like Coca-Cola it becomes harder to measure. Because it’s not like you see an ad for Coke Zero on Facebook and order it right away, whereas you might if there was a new company with a cool new product. That’s why they run “awareness ads” to make sure they stay in people’s heads but I don’t think anyone knows exactly how effective those are.
lofaszvanitt 4y ago
They have specific goals to spend x amount on y product every month. SO that is not a mystery. Also, there are video game sales of 10s of millions where only 10% ever finish the game. Yet the next version has the same mechanics and sales are higher and still 10% finish the game. Interesting...
darkcha0s 4y ago
I run a startup that heavily relies on ads, and I can tell you for sure that we spend and measure ROI in detail. We have metrics that tell us exactly how much we need to spend to convert a user into paying user, so that we can budget ourselves accordingly; I think most low/mid tier companies do this. Of course, when you look at real giants, its a different story as the ROI is harder to measure.

leros 4y ago

Companies are measuring the results of their advertising pretty closely. I would (possibly incorrectly) assume they're still hitting their metrics despite serving their ads to lots of bots.

NoGravitas 4y ago

Honestly, I'd much rather they show their ads to bots than to humans. Hopefully, the day will come when every human is using a competent adblocker, but the ad industries numbers don't go down thanks to the bots, and people can get paid for content that everyone enjoys for free.

from 4y ago
But there’s no free lunch. If businesses realize there is a 0% ROI to ad spend due to all the traffic being bots, they will stop buying ads. At which point sites will just migrate to a subscription model.
- netr0ute 4y ago
  That's the endgame! Then websites will have to compete for your dollars, and the cream will rise to the top.
- Viliam1234 4y ago
  If businesses actually had the ability to correctly calculate ROI to ad spend, we wouldn't be talking about ad fraud.
- hedora 4y ago
  Wouldn't the incompetent businesses keep buying ads, helping them eliminate themselves from the market?
- otabdeveloper4 4y ago
  No. Ads will be inserted server-side. Like in the old days of print magazines and TV.
  - from 4y ago
    It's possible to block TV ads: https://next.taiv.tv https://next.taiv.tv. Taiv is a startup for bars and restaurants that uses a model which basically detects when there are sudden color shifts and lets them insert their own ads or get paid to insert someone else's ads. Although I don't know how you'd block print ads unless you had some kind of AR headset that blacked them out.

caseysoftware 4y ago

It's amazing how much compute time - both hardware and humans - is dedicated to figuring out how to show which ads to people.. and it turns out that many of the "views" aren't even people.

propogandist 4y ago
there is no incentive to figure out the solution to this problem. The largest players in this space (Google, Facebook) require advertisers to spend money to make money. If the big players were to solve the ad fraud problem, beyond a superficial level, it would hurt their bottom line —- which hurts stock price, which is tied to compensation for their employees. Ad fraud is usually a niche conversation that doesn’t get much traction (esp as most publications are reliant on ads), but the twitter / musk lawsuit is helping more people pay attention.

toss1 4y ago

>>In June, the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), a US industry group, published a blog post that estimated that ad fraud is costing US advertisers $120 billion each year. Hours after it was published, those statements were removed. John Wolfe, the ANA’s director of communications, tells WIRED that the figures were removed because they were out of date, but declines to provide any new figures. Right, because the up-to-date fraud numbers are higher. >>But the industry is letting ad dollars flow into the pockets of cybercriminals, he adds, who can then use it to fund other illicit activities. It’s a major problem, he argues. “One that no one talks about, no one writes about, everyone thinks it’s someone else’s problem.” Exactly, everyone is incentivized to accept the inflated numbers, and disincentivized to look at reality, so the result is unsurprising. >>Fou believes the industry was corrupted around a decade ago, when a series of opaque middlemen entered the scene. “Prior to that, advertisers would buy ads from publishers like The New York Times,” It's said in software that 'Everything can be solved by another layer of indirection'. Everything evidently includes inserting a fraud layer. Solution? De-scaling and going back to advertising directly with specific platforms instead of ad "networks". What about paying for conversion instead of clicks? That concept seems to have completely disappeared. Anyone inside know why or what could be done to get back to that? As a small biz owner developing physical products, I'd be interested in advertising, but I sure don't want to blow $$thousands out the door in hours for a mere illusion...

m1117 4y ago

I wish they only showed ads to bots. I find myself vigorously clicking "skip ad" on youtube. Is that "ad rage"?

cloudking 4y ago

I've seen some paid solutions for this like https://www.clickcease.com/ https://www.clickcease.com/ Does anyone know of any free open-source solutions?

myth2018 4y ago

> “After all, who cares if big brands waste their money showing ads to bots?” I'm not so sure this affects only big brands. I've experienced that in march 2020. I ran ads in a very popular platform and was fairly happy about the results -- modest, but steady. When the pandemics hit, my target-market shifted their focus away from my sort of product, and such shift happened almost overnight. Since I used to get a reasonable amount of real visitors, I thought "well, I believe the clicks on my ads will decrease sharply now". Guess what? I kept getting the same amount of clicks on average, and my budget of course kept burning at the same rate. The only difference was that the "visits" started to last only a few seconds, the pages were not scrolled anymore, and the "visitors" never sent an inquiry.

seti0Cha 4y ago
Your bounce rate went up. That's still consistent with your target audience losing interest. It may be that they care enough to click on your ad but don't engage with your content. It could also be that the ratio of bots increased at the same rate as customer interest wained, or it could be the ads were never effective. It kind of doesn't matter. As an ad buyer, the only thing you to need worry about is whether the value of the traffic coming from the ads is worth your money. Uninterested humans and bots are of equally little value.
- myth2018 4y ago
  They cared enough to keep searching for my keywords, to click on my ads, but then they realized they were not interested and bounced? Also, like I said, the traffic the ads generated was good (it generated prospects fitting the profile I was targeting, and I was happy with the numbers), so yes, the ads were effective.
  - seti0Cha 4y ago
    My point is, either the traffic got worse or your ad is no longer effective and a higher bounce rate can indicate either. Bots don't shoulder aside regular users, so regardless of whether there are more bots, there are less users. Otherwise you'd have seen traffic increasing but not conversion. If traffic is flat and interaction is down, you've lost interested users and you need to look at your creative, or your targeting, or possibly consider whether any design or content changes on your landing page could be responsible. It could also be that you are getting outbid and your placement is now not catching the best customers. The fact that what worked before doesn't work now is totally normal. Customer tastes change, competitor behavior changes, the traffic supplier is changing. Ad buying is a constant battle.

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kkkrist 4y ago

I worked for a print ad business many years ago. They were basically running the same business model with the paper. Ads were placed in glossy and cheap/free pos magazines (cheap traffic) that mostly landed in the trash after collecting dust on the shelf. The bots consisted of distributors claiming high quality distribution while throwing the paper right into the trash. Everyone knew and hardly anyone cared because incentives were mostly aligned (mostly big brands). I was hired to help with the transition to digital. Guess how that worked out. Next I tried running my own online marketing business. I thought not deceiving customers and actually providing real value was something clients would pay for. Some did, but competing with all the fraud became to tiresome eventually. Not going to work in this industry every again unless there are alternatives (includes scrubbing toilets)

strangattractor 4y ago

People that buy ads for companies want to keep their jobs too. And like most jobs the more money the company gives you responsibility for spending the more they pay you. Don't see why they care how many bots see their ads.

amai 4y ago

That is known since the 1990s. And yet, nothing changes.

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paulpauper 4y ago

This is sorta a self-correcting problem because bot traffic is imputed into the price/bids for ads. Bot traffic lowers ROI, hence lower bid. If ads converted really well and were 100% human traffic, they would be much more expensive on a CPC or CPM basis than they already are (even though they are plenty expensive still). Evidently in spite of bots, companies still derive enough value to keep spending tons of money on ads and pay really high CPM and CPC rates.

classichasclass 4y ago

Even the smol internet is not immune. At Floodgap, I estimate about 2/3rds of the Gopher traffic is automated, based on the nature, spacing and progression of IPs through the site. Some of it comes from HTTP->gopher proxies that allow web bots to index through them (can't imagine how much money that can cost), but much of it seems to be connected to no known proxy.

ok123456 4y ago

A few years ago, I tried to help out a locally owned gym do an experiment with Google Ad-Words. The place small storefront in a run-down strip mall straight out of the 1960s, but it had very good equipment for people that were in the know and it was 24 hours. The owner was a nice guy but he relied entirely on word-of-mouth and his technical skills extended to making expletive laced, 128-point-font signs reminding people to put equipment away in Word. I got the sense the business was not going well after a protracted battle with a former business partner, where the business partner just wanted to liquidate the assets and call it a day. He managed to buy the business partner out and continued to operate the place---sans a few treadmills. I decided to try and help him out by volunteering my time and some money to see if a small, targeted ad buy from Google could help him out. It sure beat finding another place like this. The dashboard made it look very targeted geographically. But, when I investigated where they were all coming from it was 95% international and from affiliates listings from very low quality sites with no information on them. A month and $300 later, I discontinued this experiment because the traffic was entirely bot driven. From that experience, I've come to the conclusion that online Ad Tech is 99% a scam.

ezoe 4y ago
Online ad has negative effect. I never trust products or services that are showed up in online ads.
- ok123456 4y ago
  Everyone who thinks this way already blocks all ads. In this case, it was the slightly less worse case where the ad was meant to be informative instead of manufacture consumption. If you were looking for a gym that met this criteria in this locality, finding information about this particular gym would have been limited to people willing to go through several pages of search results, or looking through specialized indexes, or just happen to be walking past the storefront on the way to the bar or gun shop next door. This was the exact use case that online advertisers invent to justify that they're not all bad, and they failed to come through.

remram 4y ago

There are probably more problems about advertisement effectiveness than bots cheating the system. This article from The Correspondent was on the frontpage a few years back and I think about it a lot: https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble-is-here-its-called-online-advertising/13228924500-22d5fd24 https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble-is-h... HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21465873 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21465873

excalibur 4y ago

If a company counts as a person for purposes of filing lawsuits, why doesn't another company count for purposes of viewing web pages? Why do they have to be human? That's racist.

convexfunction 4y ago

I worked for a while on an online ad measurement product, specifically on identifying and helping our clients avoid "invalid traffic", which is almost but not exactly a synonym for "bots". Reading this article, you'd come away with the impression that companies doing this work don't even exist? (Besides the venerable Dr Fou, who excels at getting his name in print whenever this subject comes up.) I can't vouch that all the third party ad measurement vendors do a good job -- in fact I know from experience that some of our competitors did not -- but it was weird to not see any acknowledgement that there's a whole competitive field of the adtech industry with lots of talent behind it working specifically on this problem and which any serious advertiser, publisher, or exchange in the open web ad ecosystem is already a client of. (The "walled gardens" like Google/FB/etc also work with these measurement vendors, though the measurement itself is neutered to the point of uselessness, basically just passing their definitely totally trustworthy numbers through to another dashboard. Now that's a topic I'd like to see a journalist dive into!)

csa 4y ago

Does anyone know which companies media methane was partnering with? The following article explains the mechanics: https://www.anura.io/blog/king-of-ad-fraud-sentenced https://www.anura.io/blog/king-of-ad-fraud-sentenced But who were these partners who were paying media methane for (fraudulent) clicks?

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AtNightWeCode 4y ago

Not surprised. I worked with companies that paid affiliates for purchases done by load testing in test envs. Budgets is not always a good thing.

hedora 4y ago

Hey, what if we added an x-i-am-an-ad-bot header to HTTP? I'd happily set it if it meant lower ad revenue, and that way, the actual click fraud bots wouldn't be committing fraud.

russellbeattie 4y ago

This has been obvious since the 2017 report by Homeland Security about the Russian disinformation campaign:[1] > Bots are computer algorithms designed to execute specific online tasks autonomously and repetitively. They simulate the behavior of human beings in social networks, interacting with other users and sharing information and messages. Millions of bots spread information on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. According to a 2017 estimate, there were 23 million bots on Twitter (around 8.5% of all Twitter accounts), 140 million bots on Facebook (up to 5.5% of all Facebook accounts) and approximately 27 million bots on Instagram (8.2% of all Instagram accounts). These three platforms alone contained 190 million bots—more than half the number of people who live in the entire United States. I've been wondering (and posting on HN about it) this exact topic for years. All those bots are pretending to be online users and all of them doing everything possible to circumvent detection, including consuming ads. I would bet that most big advertisers have contractual rebates and reimbursements covering the fake ads - there's no way they'd stand for this sort of graft filling Google and Facebooks bank accounts while they paid millions for ads to fake users. It's the smaller advertisers that get really shafted. Some small franchise or website buying a few thousand ads only to get little in the way of return on their investment. They have no way to detect the false impressions and rely on the various ad networks to detect bots, of which they have zero incentive to do. I'm amazed it's taken this long for any news to come out about this, and even more amazed Congress and law enforcement haven't been involved yet. Again, look at the numbers above - this is a huge number of fake users and that only covers the disinformation efforts. Imagine the various networks out there that are focused purely on generating ad revenue and nothing else. 1. https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/ia/ia_combatting-targeted-disinformation-campaigns.pdf https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/ia/ia_c...

singularity2001 4y ago

Are the bots impressed though?