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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 an

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.
    - mjburgess 4y ago
      No, because a capitalist (in the friedman, etc. sense) distinguishes between free markets and ancap-competition. A free market is a construct of a state with a functioning legal system, requiring as it does, property rights (, limited liability, etc.). Capitalism is not ancap libertarianism. Indeed, it seems quite clear that ancap is an iterative contradiction, as "rule-free competition" cannot produce free markets.
    - lmm 4y ago
      They don't "fear" it any more than you or I "fear" going into work every morning, but competing honestly in the market is how they benefit society, and monopoly rents are the carrot that they're chasing. It's up to us to get our money's worth out of them.
- edwnj 4y ago
  The markets are working. 1. Even with the bots, the price made sense for advertisers for so long because of how cheap ads were. 2. Its starting to not make as much sense and now we are getting these accusations thrown at platforms etc. TLDR: Markets work but just not real time and not very perfectly. The issue with rules (esp excessive rules) is the corruption of the rule maker. To enforce these rules, the rule maker tends to have the ultimate capability for coercion. And If you think "voting" prevents this corruption then you are r*ar*ed. Let alone the corruption of the masses which btw has resulted in the greatest acts of violence in history (USSR, Cambodia, Nazi Germany, 20th century Japan, French Revolution..)
  - hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago
    > and now we are getting these accusations thrown at platforms etc. What?! This problem existed for so many years! And it wasn't some niche knowledge but pretty mainstream already in 2014 (Veritassium video "Facebook Fraud" with 6M views): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag
    - seti0Cha 4y ago
      I think the point is, the problem isn't a problem if it is priced into the product. It's cheap as hell to show ads on a cost per delivery model because the value is low, in part because of bots, in part because people don't click on ads much and in part because it's not clear how useful they are for building brand awareness. If there are more bots than previously suspected, sites will need to charge less to account for that. That's how the market functions, not a sign that it is not functioning.
  - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    Sounds like to you, even the casting couch and sexual favours are an example of working free market. Something along the lines of secretary that provides blowjobs for the CEO ensures they are always at the top of their game?
- ekianjo 4y ago
  There is no market that does not adjust itself with new circumstances. Crypto prices fell and GPUs are now affordable without any government intervention. Amazing isnt it ?
  - markdestouches 4y ago
    No one claims markets don't adjust. The claim is that unregulated markets often don't adjust for the benefit of the society at large. It weren't as amazing when the GPU prices soared due to mining, was it?
  - viraptor 4y ago
    That's not quite right. The affordability increased slightly with the falling prices. But the merge basically opened the floodgates. It was a change in technology rather than a "market change" (as in business incentives balancing over time) that caused it.
  - Bakary 4y ago
    This assumes these things don't operate in an environment affected by multiple nation states and their specific regulations
  - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    > ". Crypto prices fell and GPUs are now affordable without any government intervention" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_failure https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_failure https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullwhip_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullwhip_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demerit_good https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demerit_good https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_asymmetry https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_asymmetry https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Avoid_Parkinson%27s_bicycle-shed_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Avoid_Parkinson%27... And countless others.
bosie 4y ago
> Then there were all the "bonuses" and "incentives" negotiated with big advertisers or publishers. your firm's higher ups received bonsues/incentives from publishers and/or big advertisers directly?
- tpetry 4y ago
  No. When the ad spent increases the sales person, manager etc. get a bonus. And you don‘t do anything to improve quality which would reduce ad spend.
  - axlee 4y ago
    What kind of rational system would ever incentivize spending rather than results (aka sales?). Sounds like the marketing equivalent of being paid by the line of code.
    - csmpltn 4y ago
      > "What kind of rational system would ever incentivize spending rather than results (aka sales?). Sounds like the marketing equivalent of being paid by the line of code." OP works for an advertising company. They get paid by clients to run advertising campaigns. Employees of the advertising company get bonuses for closing high-profile deals with clients. The employees are incentivized to continue bringing in more revenue streams and continue closing more high-profile deals. The deals couldn't have been made in the first place without some form of trust between the parties. As long as the clients are seeing results (aka return-on-investment, ROI), the trust is maintained, and the deals are renewed. Different clients have different budgets, and have different ways of measuring their ROI (sales are one parameter, but there can be more). No one would be buying those advertising services if they wouldn't be seeing ROI. It is generally acknowledged that "advertising works". In reality though, there are lots of factors at play.
    - gergov 4y ago
      Marketing ROI is very tricky to measure. On the other end, you would see that the more you spend the more customers you have. The question is: are those new customers due to your increased spend or not? There's all sorts of attribution magic that goes in the background to trace back adcampaigns to converting users (especially across devices). That's why the article mentions that most of the "big fraud" that was uncovered by simply turning off paid campaigns without conversions dropping. That's a pretty big giveaway that something is amiss. There's an old saying in advertising that we know half of our budget is wasted, we just don't know which half. Ad fraud and bot traffic live in that area, kind of as expected waste. Then there's the other issue - branding campaigns also cost an arm and a leg, and the most you get is vanity metrics like reach and likes and impressions and whatnot, which have dubious correlations with reality but they look nice on dashboards.
mikeodds 4y ago
If those MBAs could read they’d be very upset
- xadhominemx 4y ago
  Yes they would be upset because it wouldn’t work
jefftk 4y ago
> 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 Ad fraud is an adversarial game, and you can't 'solve' it with simple things like this. You'll temporarily cause a lot of pain for the bot operators (yay!) but then they'll adjust and start sending the traffic from botnets (hacked consumer devices). Which is already what they do when trying to defraud advertisers on networks that take fraud seriously (which it sounds like your company didn't). (Disclosure: I used to work on ads at Google)
- tehlike 4y ago
  What he said, same disclaimer
- tjoff 4y ago
  So obviously it is better doing nothing since it benefits us??
  - jefftk 4y ago
    Of course not! The my parent's company is completely in the wrong, and running an online advertising business with a "pretend they're not there" approach to bots is a terrible idea. I'm just saying it's nowhere near as easy as my parent seems to expect.
    - ad_versary 4y ago
      > I'm just saying it's nowhere near as easy as my parent seems to expect. Apple could eliminate most ad fraud that pretends to be its platforms, by generating tokens from its secure enclave for advertisers, and providing a REST API to validate the token is from a live device. And of course, as you are in this industry, you know that Apple devices are the highest quality, valuable, converting clicks in the ecosystem. Then again, PAT would diminish inventory, prices would rise, and people would get better, but nonetheless similar, ROI that they get today. It is intellectually dishonest to make predictions about ROI. Nobody really knows. Bot farms, fraud, those are all red herrings. Most advertising has shitty creatives.
dekken_ 4y ago
Ads are cancer.
IggleSniggle 4y ago
Currently working in ad tech. Your solution wouldn’t work today because so many current and upcoming privacy solutions being rolled out across platforms are run through a VPN or VPN-like service, and many with IP rotation. Many of the bots are using these services so that their IP appears as coming from a legitimate privacy service like Cloudflare. The privacy service providers don’t have good incentives to attempt to identify which users are bots because it would undermine their privacy claims. Tough situation. We do think we have a solution to this but it’s unlikely to last in a privacy arms race. There’s really only one logical place this ends with the ad model surviving, and it’s not pretty.
- armada651 4y ago
  People using a privacy service are also highly likely to be using an ad blocker, I don't think trying to identify which ones are bots is even worthwhile.
  - IggleSniggle 4y ago
    Ads that are pre-rendered by the first-party origin, embedded in the page, cannot be blocked by ad blockers, unless the ad blocker keeps a giant blacklist of rendered advertising content. I don’t know about you but I’ve been starting to see more of this kind of content. Ad blockers are a separate issue from bot traffic. But more importantly, while your assumption is probably true today, it won’t be soon. On-by-default network privacy enhancement is coming, and already here in places. You can easily have these services in place by accident, today, without knowing the first thing about them or why you might want them.
    - dredmorbius 4y ago
      Origin-served ads cannot be blocked by host-based adblockers, but can be blocked by hueristics-based adblockers. I'd implemented a variant of this as banner ads began increasing in prevalence in the late 1990s / early aughts, using CSS to filter out standard banner sizes and path elements. Tools such as uBlock Origin incorporate far more sophisticated variants of this. It's also possible to block (or selectively permit) specific page elements with a CSS editor (e.g., Stylus), with web proxies (including SSL/TLS terminating proxies), or other means. My experience is that if a site tries excessively hard to cram ads down my throat, I'll kill it and look elsewhere. For a long time the argument was that this was a limited technically-sophisticated niche response, and that "the average person" didn't care and wouldn't bother. The increasing prevalence of ad-blocking tools and default incorporation (e.g., in the iOS platform) suggests that the barrier is knowledge and skill rather than of caring, and that people who can block ads in general will. This itself should be a cautionary note to both advertisers and advertising platforms, as the trend will be to drive the audience bar further down sophistication and means capabilties, meaning what ad content is shown aims at less remunerative segments, and tends toward ever-increasingly noxious methods. That story ends poorly, as do most Gresham's Law dynamics. (A similar point is made more pithily here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33067889 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33067889>)
willis936 4y ago
Fleecing the investors, who are fleecing the workers and consumers to entertain their gambling addiction.
tomhallett 4y ago
I made an ad fraud startup which ran into the exact same problem. With video ads, advertisers will pay 10x more to be in a “user initiated” video player (the user clicked or there was a reasonable expectation there’d be a video on that page - YouTube, camera icon on preceding link, etc). But more often then not, those ads are running in an autoplay context (sticky video players in the bottom corner, large players in the footer, etc). I built a mechanism which could tell the difference (viewport, fixed positioning, fingerprint elements on the page, provide a screenshot of the offended page with your ad on it, and various other signals). We ran tests with advertisers, agencies, demand side platforms (dsps), server side platforms (ssps). We’d compare their existing fraud numbers (very low) with our reports (80% fraud). Within each company, we’d have a champion saying “this is going to change everything. Quality supply, better performance metrics, etc etc”. Then we’d get introduced to a team whose compensation was driven by “percentage of spend” - every deal died at this stage. My opinion: if your company is using online advertising tied to conversions (someone buying something, or potentially signing up for something) then you’ll be fine as long as it’s economical. But if your ads are for brand awareness, be extremely careful running on any website which isn’t in the top 10 sites on the internet.
- barbariangrunge 4y ago
  By top 10, do you mean google / Facebook ads? I have some friends whose online store got a lot do traffic from Facebook but I don’t know much personally
- steveBK123 4y ago
  A funny anecdote that's not fraud but puts a bit more ambiguity into the alleged targeted ad eyeballs even from the big players. There's a good amount of "ambient" content on YouTube these days. Some not targeted at adults or even humans. I have been playing YouTube videos on my TV of birds & wildlife, for my house cats to enjoy. There is one guy who makes 8 hour long videos. There is one content creator basically targeting this market of "birds for your cats to watch". I have noticed that the YouTube app on my Samsung TV will play for an unbelievable number of hours without any "are you still watching" prompt. Easily 6 hours!! I've been playing them videos almost daily for weeks and only got this prompt this weekend finally. So some companies probably think they are paying for targeted ads to some category like "people interested in cats / wildlife", YouTube collects a cut and pays the content creator a cut. All this for feline-only eyeballs.
nonasktell 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. Wait, is that not automatic on every single Ad network out there? WTF? How long ago was that?
- doix 4y ago
  I run wireguard on an OVH box that I've had for years as my VPN. I just checked and I still get Google ads. So it's not even automatic on the largest ads network out there. Personally, I'd love it if using a VPN meant that advertisers didn't even try serving ads to me, but unfortunately that's not the case.
  - nonasktell 4y ago
    I mean yeah but Google doesn't count those clicks for ad revenue at all or maybe just on OVH or smaller provider,but AWS ips are definitely flagged for advertising
  - nightpool 4y ago
    What, you just expect Google to show you a giant red box saying "Whoops, we detected that you were trying to do an ad fraud! Better luck next time!". Google will happily show you whatever ads you request, but they won't count them as monetizable impressions and they won't charge advertisers for them. The goal is to make it impossible to tell as a bot operator whether your fraud was successful. So why give bot operators more info about how to evade your detections?
    - reillyse 4y ago
      They should not charge people for them but they definitely do.
manigandham 4y ago
12 year adtech veteran here. Ad fraud is a business problem, not a tech problem. All the major solutions are well known but not implemented because of the massive effect it would have on business for everyone down the chain for advertisers. The entire industry meets every year. They can figure this out and fix most big problems in a few hours, but incentives are not aligned for that to happen.
- api 4y ago
  So basically the industry is incentivized to waste money and hide this from the boss, even within companies that are spending on ads?
  - taftster 4y ago
    You mean, hide this from the stock market.
  - manigandham 4y ago
    Mostly yes, but also common in many other industries (with different kinds of spending).
pmontra 4y ago
> 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 Furthermore they were not spending their own money to buy those ads. Shareholders money is (almost) for free. In my experience companies run by the founders with little or no investors are always more careful about the money they spend.
coldtea 4y ago
Ad businesses are in the business of selling ads. Not of selling less, but good, ads, if they can sell more but bad...
stephen_g 4y ago
I’ve worked for a company that used an Azure hosted internet gateway/firewall that all their sites connected through using an MPLS VPN. So there are definitely some non-not users with traffic coming from there. But yeah, happy enough to not see ads when piping traffic through those ranges!
lovehashbrowns 4y ago
When I worked at a company that got like almost 100% of their revenue from ads, we got a very serious warning from an ad agency to stop serving our ads to bots. They gave us like 7 days to fix our traffic or we'd get removed, effectively killing our company. Scary time to be an engineer that morning! That was like 6-7 years ago, though! It's kinda crazy that things have changed this much.
sharperguy 4y ago
So how about starting by not actually blocking the bots, but publishing two numbers, the original calc including bots, and the adjusted with bots removed. Try to estimate said number for competitors as well. Then after some years try to move to using mainly the second set of numbers.
ravenstine 4y ago
Advertising is corrupt, but much of business (and public perception) is corrupt in a much similar way. What you are seeing is a lack of integrity shared by business leaders who don't ask for rigor when their minions report higher rates of "engagement". There's too much of an incentive for the people in charge to be satisfied with someone telling them that something is "up", and too much incentive for those coming up with the numbers to not perform due diligence. I've seen this multiple times firsthand. Our number of subscribers is through the roof! Mr. Corneroffice will be thrilled! Wait as sec... 90% of them are people we gave away free trials to. Ahh... fuck it. Mr. Corneroffice isn't gonna know or care, and neither will the investors. We're BigCo! Everything we say is considered official by most people anyway. After all, Mr. Corneroffice told us "fail fast, fail early" and "fake it 'til you make it". If he secretly knew I was including the free subscribers, he'd be proud! But he can't know because then I might not get that sweet, sweet bonus. Besides, it's not a lie, right?
- seti0Cha 4y ago
  Mr. Corneroffice has an incentive to catch BS like that, which is that aside from subscriber numbers, he's probably accountable for retention numbers, or even revenue numbers. If he accepts the fake numbers this month, his retention numbers are going to nosedive next month and he's going to look for a neck to choke. If he's content to fake all his numbers, his boss will have a similar counter-incentive, and so on all the way to the top until you reach investors, who are strongly incentivized to detect bullshit, if only to unload the stock onto some other sucker.
codegeek 4y ago
"assume any UA coming from an IP range owned by a cloud provider was a bot and don't show them ads" As someone who is trying to get into google ads for their startup, what's the best way to do this ? Is there a nice Google Ads 101 other than Google's own tutorials ?
winddude 4y ago
We did do that when I worked in adtech. However even 10 years ago there were massive networks of residential proxies.
sethammons 4y ago
that almost sounds whistleblower status. If they are a public company, and they are knowingly using bad data to look more financially successful, there may be something there.
kazinator 4y ago
> and don't show them ads Wee, I'm tunneling by browser session through IP address on a cloud provider so I don't have to see ads! Meanwhile, ads are shown to my cracked residential router which has been enlisted into a botnet.
wnevets 4y ago
> 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 So much about how terrible things are in general can be tied back to this one simple concept.
lofaszvanitt 4y ago
It is wonderful that after cable TV, where a few thousand of individuals' viewing habits determined who watched what, we now have an absolute stellar system where everything can be measured, yet, nobody wants to see the real numbers. :D ...
freediver 4y ago
Great insight, thanks. Are there any 'honest' ad networks with integrity out there in your opionion?
walrus01 4y ago
elliekelly 4y ago
> Advertising has always been corrupt. Bots just corrupt it a little further. I had friends in college who did door to door sales for a major cable company. At the beginning of every week they had to stop by the office to pick up a stack of flyers and at the end of every week they had to mark off the houses they visited on a map. They got paid per flyer distributed and every flyer was distributed directly into the trash can. They got paid, no one got harassed by door to door sales people, and the cable company got their marked off maps. Everyone was happy.

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.
  - mjburgess 4y ago
    No, because a capitalist (in the friedman, etc. sense) distinguishes between free markets and ancap-competition. A free market is a construct of a state with a functioning legal system, requiring as it does, property rights (, limited liability, etc.). Capitalism is not ancap libertarianism. Indeed, it seems quite clear that ancap is an iterative contradiction, as "rule-free competition" cannot produce free markets.
  - lmm 4y ago
    They don't "fear" it any more than you or I "fear" going into work every morning, but competing honestly in the market is how they benefit society, and monopoly rents are the carrot that they're chasing. It's up to us to get our money's worth out of them.
edwnj 4y ago
The markets are working. 1. Even with the bots, the price made sense for advertisers for so long because of how cheap ads were. 2. Its starting to not make as much sense and now we are getting these accusations thrown at platforms etc. TLDR: Markets work but just not real time and not very perfectly. The issue with rules (esp excessive rules) is the corruption of the rule maker. To enforce these rules, the rule maker tends to have the ultimate capability for coercion. And If you think "voting" prevents this corruption then you are r*ar*ed. Let alone the corruption of the masses which btw has resulted in the greatest acts of violence in history (USSR, Cambodia, Nazi Germany, 20th century Japan, French Revolution..)
- hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago
  > and now we are getting these accusations thrown at platforms etc. What?! This problem existed for so many years! And it wasn't some niche knowledge but pretty mainstream already in 2014 (Veritassium video "Facebook Fraud" with 6M views): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag
  - seti0Cha 4y ago
    I think the point is, the problem isn't a problem if it is priced into the product. It's cheap as hell to show ads on a cost per delivery model because the value is low, in part because of bots, in part because people don't click on ads much and in part because it's not clear how useful they are for building brand awareness. If there are more bots than previously suspected, sites will need to charge less to account for that. That's how the market functions, not a sign that it is not functioning.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  Sounds like to you, even the casting couch and sexual favours are an example of working free market. Something along the lines of secretary that provides blowjobs for the CEO ensures they are always at the top of their game?
ekianjo 4y ago
There is no market that does not adjust itself with new circumstances. Crypto prices fell and GPUs are now affordable without any government intervention. Amazing isnt it ?
- markdestouches 4y ago
  No one claims markets don't adjust. The claim is that unregulated markets often don't adjust for the benefit of the society at large. It weren't as amazing when the GPU prices soared due to mining, was it?
- viraptor 4y ago
  That's not quite right. The affordability increased slightly with the falling prices. But the merge basically opened the floodgates. It was a change in technology rather than a "market change" (as in business incentives balancing over time) that caused it.
- Bakary 4y ago
  This assumes these things don't operate in an environment affected by multiple nation states and their specific regulations
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  > ". Crypto prices fell and GPUs are now affordable without any government intervention" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_failure https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_failure https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullwhip_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullwhip_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demerit_good https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demerit_good https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_asymmetry https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_asymmetry https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Avoid_Parkinson%27s_bicycle-shed_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Avoid_Parkinson%27... And countless others.

bosie 4y ago

> Then there were all the "bonuses" and "incentives" negotiated with big advertisers or publishers. your firm's higher ups received bonsues/incentives from publishers and/or big advertisers directly?

tpetry 4y ago
No. When the ad spent increases the sales person, manager etc. get a bonus. And you don‘t do anything to improve quality which would reduce ad spend.
- axlee 4y ago
  What kind of rational system would ever incentivize spending rather than results (aka sales?). Sounds like the marketing equivalent of being paid by the line of code.
  - csmpltn 4y ago
    > "What kind of rational system would ever incentivize spending rather than results (aka sales?). Sounds like the marketing equivalent of being paid by the line of code." OP works for an advertising company. They get paid by clients to run advertising campaigns. Employees of the advertising company get bonuses for closing high-profile deals with clients. The employees are incentivized to continue bringing in more revenue streams and continue closing more high-profile deals. The deals couldn't have been made in the first place without some form of trust between the parties. As long as the clients are seeing results (aka return-on-investment, ROI), the trust is maintained, and the deals are renewed. Different clients have different budgets, and have different ways of measuring their ROI (sales are one parameter, but there can be more). No one would be buying those advertising services if they wouldn't be seeing ROI. It is generally acknowledged that "advertising works". In reality though, there are lots of factors at play.
  - gergov 4y ago
    Marketing ROI is very tricky to measure. On the other end, you would see that the more you spend the more customers you have. The question is: are those new customers due to your increased spend or not? There's all sorts of attribution magic that goes in the background to trace back adcampaigns to converting users (especially across devices). That's why the article mentions that most of the "big fraud" that was uncovered by simply turning off paid campaigns without conversions dropping. That's a pretty big giveaway that something is amiss. There's an old saying in advertising that we know half of our budget is wasted, we just don't know which half. Ad fraud and bot traffic live in that area, kind of as expected waste. Then there's the other issue - branding campaigns also cost an arm and a leg, and the most you get is vanity metrics like reach and likes and impressions and whatnot, which have dubious correlations with reality but they look nice on dashboards.

mikeodds 4y ago

If those MBAs could read they’d be very upset

xadhominemx 4y ago
Yes they would be upset because it wouldn’t work

jefftk 4y ago

> 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 Ad fraud is an adversarial game, and you can't 'solve' it with simple things like this. You'll temporarily cause a lot of pain for the bot operators (yay!) but then they'll adjust and start sending the traffic from botnets (hacked consumer devices). Which is already what they do when trying to defraud advertisers on networks that take fraud seriously (which it sounds like your company didn't). (Disclosure: I used to work on ads at Google)

tehlike 4y ago
What he said, same disclaimer
tjoff 4y ago
So obviously it is better doing nothing since it benefits us??
- jefftk 4y ago
  Of course not! The my parent's company is completely in the wrong, and running an online advertising business with a "pretend they're not there" approach to bots is a terrible idea. I'm just saying it's nowhere near as easy as my parent seems to expect.
  - ad_versary 4y ago
    > I'm just saying it's nowhere near as easy as my parent seems to expect. Apple could eliminate most ad fraud that pretends to be its platforms, by generating tokens from its secure enclave for advertisers, and providing a REST API to validate the token is from a live device. And of course, as you are in this industry, you know that Apple devices are the highest quality, valuable, converting clicks in the ecosystem. Then again, PAT would diminish inventory, prices would rise, and people would get better, but nonetheless similar, ROI that they get today. It is intellectually dishonest to make predictions about ROI. Nobody really knows. Bot farms, fraud, those are all red herrings. Most advertising has shitty creatives.

dekken_ 4y ago

Ads are cancer.

IggleSniggle 4y ago

Currently working in ad tech. Your solution wouldn’t work today because so many current and upcoming privacy solutions being rolled out across platforms are run through a VPN or VPN-like service, and many with IP rotation. Many of the bots are using these services so that their IP appears as coming from a legitimate privacy service like Cloudflare. The privacy service providers don’t have good incentives to attempt to identify which users are bots because it would undermine their privacy claims. Tough situation. We do think we have a solution to this but it’s unlikely to last in a privacy arms race. There’s really only one logical place this ends with the ad model surviving, and it’s not pretty.

armada651 4y ago
People using a privacy service are also highly likely to be using an ad blocker, I don't think trying to identify which ones are bots is even worthwhile.
- IggleSniggle 4y ago
  Ads that are pre-rendered by the first-party origin, embedded in the page, cannot be blocked by ad blockers, unless the ad blocker keeps a giant blacklist of rendered advertising content. I don’t know about you but I’ve been starting to see more of this kind of content. Ad blockers are a separate issue from bot traffic. But more importantly, while your assumption is probably true today, it won’t be soon. On-by-default network privacy enhancement is coming, and already here in places. You can easily have these services in place by accident, today, without knowing the first thing about them or why you might want them.
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    Origin-served ads cannot be blocked by host-based adblockers, but can be blocked by hueristics-based adblockers. I'd implemented a variant of this as banner ads began increasing in prevalence in the late 1990s / early aughts, using CSS to filter out standard banner sizes and path elements. Tools such as uBlock Origin incorporate far more sophisticated variants of this. It's also possible to block (or selectively permit) specific page elements with a CSS editor (e.g., Stylus), with web proxies (including SSL/TLS terminating proxies), or other means. My experience is that if a site tries excessively hard to cram ads down my throat, I'll kill it and look elsewhere. For a long time the argument was that this was a limited technically-sophisticated niche response, and that "the average person" didn't care and wouldn't bother. The increasing prevalence of ad-blocking tools and default incorporation (e.g., in the iOS platform) suggests that the barrier is knowledge and skill rather than of caring, and that people who can block ads in general will. This itself should be a cautionary note to both advertisers and advertising platforms, as the trend will be to drive the audience bar further down sophistication and means capabilties, meaning what ad content is shown aims at less remunerative segments, and tends toward ever-increasingly noxious methods. That story ends poorly, as do most Gresham's Law dynamics. (A similar point is made more pithily here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33067889 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33067889>)

willis936 4y ago

Fleecing the investors, who are fleecing the workers and consumers to entertain their gambling addiction.

tomhallett 4y ago

I made an ad fraud startup which ran into the exact same problem. With video ads, advertisers will pay 10x more to be in a “user initiated” video player (the user clicked or there was a reasonable expectation there’d be a video on that page - YouTube, camera icon on preceding link, etc). But more often then not, those ads are running in an autoplay context (sticky video players in the bottom corner, large players in the footer, etc). I built a mechanism which could tell the difference (viewport, fixed positioning, fingerprint elements on the page, provide a screenshot of the offended page with your ad on it, and various other signals). We ran tests with advertisers, agencies, demand side platforms (dsps), server side platforms (ssps). We’d compare their existing fraud numbers (very low) with our reports (80% fraud). Within each company, we’d have a champion saying “this is going to change everything. Quality supply, better performance metrics, etc etc”. Then we’d get introduced to a team whose compensation was driven by “percentage of spend” - every deal died at this stage. My opinion: if your company is using online advertising tied to conversions (someone buying something, or potentially signing up for something) then you’ll be fine as long as it’s economical. But if your ads are for brand awareness, be extremely careful running on any website which isn’t in the top 10 sites on the internet.

barbariangrunge 4y ago
By top 10, do you mean google / Facebook ads? I have some friends whose online store got a lot do traffic from Facebook but I don’t know much personally
steveBK123 4y ago
A funny anecdote that's not fraud but puts a bit more ambiguity into the alleged targeted ad eyeballs even from the big players. There's a good amount of "ambient" content on YouTube these days. Some not targeted at adults or even humans. I have been playing YouTube videos on my TV of birds & wildlife, for my house cats to enjoy. There is one guy who makes 8 hour long videos. There is one content creator basically targeting this market of "birds for your cats to watch". I have noticed that the YouTube app on my Samsung TV will play for an unbelievable number of hours without any "are you still watching" prompt. Easily 6 hours!! I've been playing them videos almost daily for weeks and only got this prompt this weekend finally. So some companies probably think they are paying for targeted ads to some category like "people interested in cats / wildlife", YouTube collects a cut and pays the content creator a cut. All this for feline-only eyeballs.

nonasktell 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. Wait, is that not automatic on every single Ad network out there? WTF? How long ago was that?

doix 4y ago
I run wireguard on an OVH box that I've had for years as my VPN. I just checked and I still get Google ads. So it's not even automatic on the largest ads network out there. Personally, I'd love it if using a VPN meant that advertisers didn't even try serving ads to me, but unfortunately that's not the case.
- nonasktell 4y ago
  I mean yeah but Google doesn't count those clicks for ad revenue at all or maybe just on OVH or smaller provider,but AWS ips are definitely flagged for advertising
- nightpool 4y ago
  What, you just expect Google to show you a giant red box saying "Whoops, we detected that you were trying to do an ad fraud! Better luck next time!". Google will happily show you whatever ads you request, but they won't count them as monetizable impressions and they won't charge advertisers for them. The goal is to make it impossible to tell as a bot operator whether your fraud was successful. So why give bot operators more info about how to evade your detections?
  - reillyse 4y ago
    They should not charge people for them but they definitely do.

manigandham 4y ago

12 year adtech veteran here. Ad fraud is a business problem, not a tech problem. All the major solutions are well known but not implemented because of the massive effect it would have on business for everyone down the chain for advertisers. The entire industry meets every year. They can figure this out and fix most big problems in a few hours, but incentives are not aligned for that to happen.

api 4y ago
So basically the industry is incentivized to waste money and hide this from the boss, even within companies that are spending on ads?
- taftster 4y ago
  You mean, hide this from the stock market.
- manigandham 4y ago
  Mostly yes, but also common in many other industries (with different kinds of spending).

pmontra 4y ago

> 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 Furthermore they were not spending their own money to buy those ads. Shareholders money is (almost) for free. In my experience companies run by the founders with little or no investors are always more careful about the money they spend.

coldtea 4y ago

Ad businesses are in the business of selling ads. Not of selling less, but good, ads, if they can sell more but bad...

stephen_g 4y ago

I’ve worked for a company that used an Azure hosted internet gateway/firewall that all their sites connected through using an MPLS VPN. So there are definitely some non-not users with traffic coming from there. But yeah, happy enough to not see ads when piping traffic through those ranges!

lovehashbrowns 4y ago

When I worked at a company that got like almost 100% of their revenue from ads, we got a very serious warning from an ad agency to stop serving our ads to bots. They gave us like 7 days to fix our traffic or we'd get removed, effectively killing our company. Scary time to be an engineer that morning! That was like 6-7 years ago, though! It's kinda crazy that things have changed this much.

sharperguy 4y ago

So how about starting by not actually blocking the bots, but publishing two numbers, the original calc including bots, and the adjusted with bots removed. Try to estimate said number for competitors as well. Then after some years try to move to using mainly the second set of numbers.

ravenstine 4y ago

Advertising is corrupt, but much of business (and public perception) is corrupt in a much similar way. What you are seeing is a lack of integrity shared by business leaders who don't ask for rigor when their minions report higher rates of "engagement". There's too much of an incentive for the people in charge to be satisfied with someone telling them that something is "up", and too much incentive for those coming up with the numbers to not perform due diligence. I've seen this multiple times firsthand. Our number of subscribers is through the roof! Mr. Corneroffice will be thrilled! Wait as sec... 90% of them are people we gave away free trials to. Ahh... fuck it. Mr. Corneroffice isn't gonna know or care, and neither will the investors. We're BigCo! Everything we say is considered official by most people anyway. After all, Mr. Corneroffice told us "fail fast, fail early" and "fake it 'til you make it". If he secretly knew I was including the free subscribers, he'd be proud! But he can't know because then I might not get that sweet, sweet bonus. Besides, it's not a lie, right?

seti0Cha 4y ago
Mr. Corneroffice has an incentive to catch BS like that, which is that aside from subscriber numbers, he's probably accountable for retention numbers, or even revenue numbers. If he accepts the fake numbers this month, his retention numbers are going to nosedive next month and he's going to look for a neck to choke. If he's content to fake all his numbers, his boss will have a similar counter-incentive, and so on all the way to the top until you reach investors, who are strongly incentivized to detect bullshit, if only to unload the stock onto some other sucker.

codegeek 4y ago

"assume any UA coming from an IP range owned by a cloud provider was a bot and don't show them ads" As someone who is trying to get into google ads for their startup, what's the best way to do this ? Is there a nice Google Ads 101 other than Google's own tutorials ?

winddude 4y ago

We did do that when I worked in adtech. However even 10 years ago there were massive networks of residential proxies.

sethammons 4y ago

that almost sounds whistleblower status. If they are a public company, and they are knowingly using bad data to look more financially successful, there may be something there.

kazinator 4y ago

> and don't show them ads Wee, I'm tunneling by browser session through IP address on a cloud provider so I don't have to see ads! Meanwhile, ads are shown to my cracked residential router which has been enlisted into a botnet.

wnevets 4y ago

> 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 So much about how terrible things are in general can be tied back to this one simple concept.

lofaszvanitt 4y ago

It is wonderful that after cable TV, where a few thousand of individuals' viewing habits determined who watched what, we now have an absolute stellar system where everything can be measured, yet, nobody wants to see the real numbers. :D ...

freediver 4y ago

Great insight, thanks. Are there any 'honest' ad networks with integrity out there in your opionion?

walrus01 4y ago

elliekelly 4y ago

> Advertising has always been corrupt. Bots just corrupt it a little further. I had friends in college who did door to door sales for a major cable company. At the beginning of every week they had to stop by the office to pick up a stack of flyers and at the end of every week they had to mark off the houses they visited on a map. They got paid per flyer distributed and every flyer was distributed directly into the trash can. They got paid, no one got harassed by door to door sales people, and the cable company got their marked off maps. Everyone was happy.