3 ms·

this is a huge market correction just waiting to happen. I'm glad, it should take these annoying banner ads out once and for all.

logicallee 11y ago
If you see banner ads (without clicking) you have the same experience as everyone else who actually sees them. Maybe the reason you notice them and they bother you, is because the amount of your attention that that experience has to take up has to be so great that your peers' attention is worth the payment even when that attention is divided by 10 (if we assume 90% click fraud.) In other words, given no other change except eliminating payments to non-person audience members, you might find the Internet is suddenly filled with advertisement that violently takes only 1/10th as much of your attention as currently, since the money is being spent on you and your peers only; and not on you, your peers, and then botnets and other dilution. Put yet another way: the leakier the transaction between you (real user) and advertiser, the worse the experience you have so as to make up for it. Let's put some numbers on it! Let's say everyone is happy to buy a banana online and the profit is 20 cents. Then if click fraud is 0% and the cost of an ad is 1 cent, a 7% click-through is fine: it costs 14 cents to get a customer, leaving 6 cents profit. Any more than 7% click-through is pure profit. But raise the click fraud to 90% and suddenly 7% won't do it: the real ad cost is now 10 cents, and instead of 7% click through you now need 70% clickthrough. So the ad will be much, much louder.
- fineman 11y ago
  > So the ad will be much, much louder. And you figure that'll make the ad-haters click it more? Also, that 10cent ad is much more ripe for the picking than the 1cent one. All of a sudden you're attracting click-fraud attention from far more sophisticated attackers. And driving more "normal people" to ask a techie to hide these annoying dancing bananas (and all others ads at the same time.) I don't really think you've thought this through to the endgame.
  - logicallee 11y ago
    I don't know. Consider television advertisements. A 90% fraud rate (false, fraudulent, invented impressions) versus a 0% fraud rate baked into impression numbers reported to advertisers surely would affect how much sales movement they have to show, doesn't it? I mean sure, as the other comment pointed out cpc prices must in some sense rationally reflect the fraud amount. But nobody is perfect, no market is perfectly rational and efficient, and at the end of the day the quality of advertisement that next to no real person sees must be different from one where every impression paid for gets seen by a real person... (including you and me.) It would be a strange world otherwise.
- geon 11y ago
  You are assuming the advertiser is not measuring the perfomance in any way. More likely, the ongoing fraud is driving the prices down. Once the fraud stops, cpc would go up.

logicallee 11y ago

If you see banner ads (without clicking) you have the same experience as everyone else who actually sees them. Maybe the reason you notice them and they bother you, is because the amount of your attention that that experience has to take up has to be so great that your peers' attention is worth the payment even when that attention is divided by 10 (if we assume 90% click fraud.) In other words, given no other change except eliminating payments to non-person audience members, you might find the Internet is suddenly filled with advertisement that violently takes only 1/10th as much of your attention as currently, since the money is being spent on you and your peers only; and not on you, your peers, and then botnets and other dilution. Put yet another way: the leakier the transaction between you (real user) and advertiser, the worse the experience you have so as to make up for it. Let's put some numbers on it! Let's say everyone is happy to buy a banana online and the profit is 20 cents. Then if click fraud is 0% and the cost of an ad is 1 cent, a 7% click-through is fine: it costs 14 cents to get a customer, leaving 6 cents profit. Any more than 7% click-through is pure profit. But raise the click fraud to 90% and suddenly 7% won't do it: the real ad cost is now 10 cents, and instead of 7% click through you now need 70% clickthrough. So the ad will be much, much louder.

fineman 11y ago
> So the ad will be much, much louder. And you figure that'll make the ad-haters click it more? Also, that 10cent ad is much more ripe for the picking than the 1cent one. All of a sudden you're attracting click-fraud attention from far more sophisticated attackers. And driving more "normal people" to ask a techie to hide these annoying dancing bananas (and all others ads at the same time.) I don't really think you've thought this through to the endgame.
- logicallee 11y ago
  I don't know. Consider television advertisements. A 90% fraud rate (false, fraudulent, invented impressions) versus a 0% fraud rate baked into impression numbers reported to advertisers surely would affect how much sales movement they have to show, doesn't it? I mean sure, as the other comment pointed out cpc prices must in some sense rationally reflect the fraud amount. But nobody is perfect, no market is perfectly rational and efficient, and at the end of the day the quality of advertisement that next to no real person sees must be different from one where every impression paid for gets seen by a real person... (including you and me.) It would be a strange world otherwise.
geon 11y ago
You are assuming the advertiser is not measuring the perfomance in any way. More likely, the ongoing fraud is driving the prices down. Once the fraud stops, cpc would go up.