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Please explain to me why a bot would click on ads? (if anyone knows) Is it crawlers crawling Facebook? Are they alleging that facebook is doing it to boost re

by nirvana 14y ago

Please explain to me why a bot would click on ads? (if anyone knows) Is it crawlers crawling Facebook? Are they alleging that facebook is doing it to boost revenues? Their hypothesis seems secure, given that you can't really use the facebook site at all without javascript enabled. More alarming is Facebook holding their name for ransom for the sum of $24,000 a year!

jiggy2011 14y ago
Possibly other advertisers trying to push competitors away from facebook so BigDickPillz Inc can have it all to themselves?
- pathdependent 14y ago
  Yes. This used to happen a lot on ad networks, although I personally don't know how pervasive it is now. The game is as jiggy said. Force competing ad buyers to pay for what appears to be non-productive traffic by forcing ad clicks. Since the real views are dominated by false views, the conversion rate on whatever is being sold appears to be horrible. The competitor goes elsewhere, and the scammer maintains access to artificially cheap ad inventory, since there are fewer bidders.
  - dclowd9901 14y ago
    How does Google prevent this? Is it simply inherently not-problematic, due to their spread of advertising?
    - veyron 14y ago
      Overall it's hard to say whether google wins or loses overall by this. In absence of a real competitor in the search ad space, people generally will swallow google's fee hikes ...
    - pathdependent 14y ago
      It's a cat and mouse game. Google gets good at it; scammers get more sophisticated; google catches up again; ad infinitum. Also, in addition to the scam mentioned above -- in Google's case, targeting AdWords -- they have to deal with scammers hitting their own AdSense properties. It's a well known problem. Considering AdWords is Google's primary source of revenue, they work hard at it. For a tiny bit more directly from Google, see: http://support.google.com/adwords/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=6114 http://support.google.com/adwords/bin/answer.py?hl=en&an...
- freshhawk 14y ago
  As pathdependant said, this is a very common shady tactic in the ad business. You drive up your competitors costs with bots in order to drive them away from your keywords or make them think their conversions on those keywords are awful and then abandon them. By far the most likely explanation in my opinion. Even if it's not the correct one, some of the traffic is almost certainly these kinds of bots.
TomGullen 14y ago
The biggest conspiracy theory would say that a bot clicking ads would help earn FB money. I don't really suspect this to be true, Facebook CTR are incredibly low so if they are faking it they are doing it badly. I suspect the most likely reason is some sort of spam scraper thing that visits every url or something. I would have assumed Facebook would be well protected against this sort of thing in regards to charging advertisers.
- vaksel 14y ago
  Facebook does analytics...they aren't some tiny startup...surely they track the quality of their traffic...so they know that 70-80% of their ad traffic comes from bots. So Facebook is knowingly profiting from this, and they have the resources to fix this...but they don't since this is making so much money for them.
- phenom 14y ago
  FB does not need do that shady stuff. Here some facts. [1] Bot registration on FB is really easy. If you try register 100 fake users in direct way you need to deal with javascript and web forms with strange ids, cookies and so on in your script. But if you enter fb.com without enabled javascript, they ask you change browser or use mobile version, which is not require* js at all. [2] You can register number of accounts from one ip without CAPTCHA [3] Only one "difficulty" is to find batch of emails, it is not that big issue since we have services like mailinator.com. So 15 -25 loc script on python do all your job. It is not required use any tools like selenium or special skills , only basic understanding how http get/post works. Why fb doing all this super easy bot registration stuff? I think we all know why. Edit: spelling. Sorry non native English speaker here
  - woodchuck64 14y ago
    You seem knowledgeable. What is the main purpose of bots on facebook? The article implies they could be used by facebook or competitors to burn up ad revenue, but this approach would just kill the golden pay-per-click goose.
    - 14y ago
vegashacker 14y ago
The OP says that they are not accusing FB of using bots to drive up revenue.
- huggyface 14y ago
  They refused to overtly accuse them, but the subtext seem to argue exactly that.
  - pandog 14y ago
    Which is really taking things too far - if Facebook wanted to generate some revenue with bots then it wouldn't be very difficult for them to write ones that supported JavaScript.
    - adharmad 14y ago
      That is true, but Facebook's reputation would suffer seriously if they were ever caught. What they (Facebook) are doing now seems to be some version of DADT (Don't Ask, Don't Tell).
  - Cushman 14y ago
    I don't think so, there's lots of reasons that would be a stupid idea for Facebook. But there's clearly something shady going on, and Facebook is being dicks to them in other ways, so they're out. That's the subtext.
    - huggyface 14y ago
      They end the bot section with "But let's move on, because who the bots belong to isn't provable." after saying that they weren't accusing Facebook of running the bots. The subtext is screaming out. Does me pointing out the barely shrouded subtext mean that I believe what they are saying? Of course not. It's just as likely, it seems, that their test is simply flawed (as others said, let's see the technical honey trap), that it's some other technical fault, etc. I highly doubt, just on intuition, that Facebook is running such broken bots: Come on, they'd do a better job than make something so easily detected.
rkaplan 14y ago
Bots might be operated by competitors to increase the cost of advertising for Limited Pressing. This is the most likely scenario, in my opinion. However, though rather unlikely, the bots could be affiliated with Facebook itself, as all of those extra clicks translate into lots of extra Facebook revenue. That doesn't seem like a very sustainable strategy though. Does anyone know what kind (if any) of anti-bot measures Facebook already has in place for paid advertising?
dchuk 14y ago
could be ad spy tools...they crawl around clicking ads and following them to the landing pages and then follow the landing pages to the offer being promoted. Allows affiliates and other advertisers to reverse engineer the competition

by nirvana 14y ago

jiggy2011 14y ago

Possibly other advertisers trying to push competitors away from facebook so BigDickPillz Inc can have it all to themselves?

pathdependent 14y ago
Yes. This used to happen a lot on ad networks, although I personally don't know how pervasive it is now. The game is as jiggy said. Force competing ad buyers to pay for what appears to be non-productive traffic by forcing ad clicks. Since the real views are dominated by false views, the conversion rate on whatever is being sold appears to be horrible. The competitor goes elsewhere, and the scammer maintains access to artificially cheap ad inventory, since there are fewer bidders.
- dclowd9901 14y ago
  How does Google prevent this? Is it simply inherently not-problematic, due to their spread of advertising?
  - veyron 14y ago
    Overall it's hard to say whether google wins or loses overall by this. In absence of a real competitor in the search ad space, people generally will swallow google's fee hikes ...
  - pathdependent 14y ago
    It's a cat and mouse game. Google gets good at it; scammers get more sophisticated; google catches up again; ad infinitum. Also, in addition to the scam mentioned above -- in Google's case, targeting AdWords -- they have to deal with scammers hitting their own AdSense properties. It's a well known problem. Considering AdWords is Google's primary source of revenue, they work hard at it. For a tiny bit more directly from Google, see: http://support.google.com/adwords/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=6114 http://support.google.com/adwords/bin/answer.py?hl=en&an...
freshhawk 14y ago
As pathdependant said, this is a very common shady tactic in the ad business. You drive up your competitors costs with bots in order to drive them away from your keywords or make them think their conversions on those keywords are awful and then abandon them. By far the most likely explanation in my opinion. Even if it's not the correct one, some of the traffic is almost certainly these kinds of bots.

TomGullen 14y ago

The biggest conspiracy theory would say that a bot clicking ads would help earn FB money. I don't really suspect this to be true, Facebook CTR are incredibly low so if they are faking it they are doing it badly. I suspect the most likely reason is some sort of spam scraper thing that visits every url or something. I would have assumed Facebook would be well protected against this sort of thing in regards to charging advertisers.

vaksel 14y ago
Facebook does analytics...they aren't some tiny startup...surely they track the quality of their traffic...so they know that 70-80% of their ad traffic comes from bots. So Facebook is knowingly profiting from this, and they have the resources to fix this...but they don't since this is making so much money for them.
phenom 14y ago
FB does not need do that shady stuff. Here some facts. [1] Bot registration on FB is really easy. If you try register 100 fake users in direct way you need to deal with javascript and web forms with strange ids, cookies and so on in your script. But if you enter fb.com without enabled javascript, they ask you change browser or use mobile version, which is not require* js at all. [2] You can register number of accounts from one ip without CAPTCHA [3] Only one "difficulty" is to find batch of emails, it is not that big issue since we have services like mailinator.com. So 15 -25 loc script on python do all your job. It is not required use any tools like selenium or special skills , only basic understanding how http get/post works. Why fb doing all this super easy bot registration stuff? I think we all know why. Edit: spelling. Sorry non native English speaker here
- woodchuck64 14y ago
  You seem knowledgeable. What is the main purpose of bots on facebook? The article implies they could be used by facebook or competitors to burn up ad revenue, but this approach would just kill the golden pay-per-click goose.
  - 14y ago

vegashacker 14y ago

The OP says that they are not accusing FB of using bots to drive up revenue.

huggyface 14y ago
They refused to overtly accuse them, but the subtext seem to argue exactly that.
- pandog 14y ago
  Which is really taking things too far - if Facebook wanted to generate some revenue with bots then it wouldn't be very difficult for them to write ones that supported JavaScript.
  - adharmad 14y ago
    That is true, but Facebook's reputation would suffer seriously if they were ever caught. What they (Facebook) are doing now seems to be some version of DADT (Don't Ask, Don't Tell).
- Cushman 14y ago
  I don't think so, there's lots of reasons that would be a stupid idea for Facebook. But there's clearly something shady going on, and Facebook is being dicks to them in other ways, so they're out. That's the subtext.
  - huggyface 14y ago
    They end the bot section with "But let's move on, because who the bots belong to isn't provable." after saying that they weren't accusing Facebook of running the bots. The subtext is screaming out. Does me pointing out the barely shrouded subtext mean that I believe what they are saying? Of course not. It's just as likely, it seems, that their test is simply flawed (as others said, let's see the technical honey trap), that it's some other technical fault, etc. I highly doubt, just on intuition, that Facebook is running such broken bots: Come on, they'd do a better job than make something so easily detected.

rkaplan 14y ago

Bots might be operated by competitors to increase the cost of advertising for Limited Pressing. This is the most likely scenario, in my opinion. However, though rather unlikely, the bots could be affiliated with Facebook itself, as all of those extra clicks translate into lots of extra Facebook revenue. That doesn't seem like a very sustainable strategy though. Does anyone know what kind (if any) of anti-bot measures Facebook already has in place for paid advertising?

dchuk 14y ago

could be ad spy tools...they crawl around clicking ads and following them to the landing pages and then follow the landing pages to the offer being promoted. Allows affiliates and other advertisers to reverse engineer the competition