Pardon my rudimentary understanding here, but I sort of assumed in such a wide scale auction, pricing would reflect acceptance of a certain level of fraud, and that the price would balance out at a point where these fake clicks were part of the equation.
Up to a point. After some threshold of noise the system becomes unstable. Similarly, after some threshold of fraud the advertisers lose faith and leave. I.e. mostly shit is not a place you want to be at.
This is basically true, but it's not a perfectly efficient market and it doesn't react immediately. But basically yea, every network has ad fraud and you just build that into your max CPC because at the end of the day everything runs on a CPA/cost-per-conversion basis.
>pricing would reflect acceptance of a certain level of fraud, and that the price would balance out at a point where these fake clicks were part of the equation.
A few honest questions for anyone who's an ad buyer for mixed media: I've wondered how advertisers look at broadcast advertising compared to digital. For one there's no direct correlation (as in a click) with broadcast television. There's also no direct accounting of who actually saw it, just a best guess based on Neilson numbers. It seems to me that DVR's are akin to ad blockers as well. Why is digital so conversation obsessed (clicks/purchases) and not focused as much on the branding values (CPM)? Is broadcast advertising so much cheaper than digital that it makes sense to just blanket ads and hope for the best?
The way people handle it is to triangulate on the value based on a couple different sources. For example, you may test your TV ad in a handful of markets first and see if you experience lift in those areas. In addition, you may offer a unique coupon/promo code in that ad and measure uptake. Then you survey customers and ask them how they heard about you.
So maybe in your test regions you saw 2% promo uptake, 3% lift, and 5% survey responses saying they saw the ad. You'll pick an estimate somewhere from 2-5% depending on how conservative or aggressive you want to be. That's how you approach it at a small to medium sized company that actually cares about how their marketing budget is spent.
I've also seen an ad agency attempt to measure incremental website traffic gain in the test regions during the time slots the ad aired. If your traffic is large enough to have a clean baseline or the ad response is massive this is probably okay, but I'm skeptical of this methodology.
If you're a bigger company, there are also ways to get better viewthru conversion metrics. Shazam offers something to this effect, where they allow you to Shazam a commercial. Shazam can then tell you of people who viewed the commercial who went on to convert. Nielsen may sell this too.
With TV if you can't get the numbers to work on a pure customer acquisition basis, you'll measure brand recognition and recall in your test regions. If your ad makes an impact there you can then justify spending some of your brand budget in addition to the marketing budget to justify the overall expense.
In the US you can buy national ad spots on major channels pretty cheaply (couple hundred $ per spot) if you buy "remnant" inventory. Basically that means that the network hasn't sold all of their "run my ad in the 9:22am commercial break" spots and so you can try to by a spot in the "morning" day part and it might run in the 9:22am commercial spot...or it might not. But they will tell you if/when the ad ran at some point so you can go back and check your stats.
Attribution is kind of a bitch, but the methodology above tends to work very well given the right traffic size/mix.
I work at a major advertiser who's media budgets measure in the billion dollar zone.
> I've wondered how advertisers look at broadcast advertising compared to digital.
At our levels of spend, we build econometric models to understand media spend effectiveness and spend a fair bit on tracking and vetting the methodologies of trackers.
> For one there's no direct correlation (as in a click) with broadcast television.
Correct. Frankly, we're interested in valid human viewable reach, not clicks. Not even Impressions though most our buys are CPM today and we want to buy viewable CPMs. We use in fraud detection providers and generally don't pay for Impressions detected as fraud.
> Is broadcast advertising so much cheaper than digital that it makes sense to just blanket ads and hope for the best?
In many cases yes... In some cases no - especially when there are demographics who simply don't watch much TV which is increasingly a reality. At our scale, digital - even the biggies struggle to give us reach affordably.
Fellow senior buy side guy. Used to work at a top search agency and am now client side.
This is the correct answer. At that scale focus groups, surveys, econometric modeling, etc. are what determine success. The harder part is for mid size advertisers who don't have the budget to move the needle to make those things viable, but still need to be branding heavy.
Beyond that, digital is way more trackable and often more efficient as a result, even on the branding side.
My understanding is that even broadcast television advertising can be pretty well targeted based on the show's demographic profile, the viewership of the station/channel, known DVR usage trends, and the viewer's location. Surveys on brand awareness and recall can be delivered locally to confirm the ad was seen. The larger the company (large scale means more likely to do broadcast TV advertising), the more they can control other advertising channels in order to test whether the advertising is showing lift locally. There is a whole industry and 50+ years of experience using these things to gauge advertising effectiveness, so the limitations and usefulness is pretty well understood.
Then the internet comes along and digital advertising is promoted as being better at all types of advertising (which of course its not). And its new (new is risky/scary) and no one knows if exposure to digital advertising has the same "brand awareness" lift as non-digital, or how to quantify that. The results have been mixed. P&G recently announced they would dramatically scale back social advertising because they determined it wasn't effective.
So its on digital to prove its value, and the argument becomes "direct correlation/clicks" is proof, which is fine. Some people accept that and some don't. In 50 years, the limitations and usefulness of digital will be pretty well understood, but in the meantime, advertisers need more than "its new" to trust it.
I've worked with buy side teams and a lot of it is ignorance. I think you'd be horrored with some of the slots that your company gets purchased (and that process, in Australia anyway.) Things like having 1/3 of your 5 figure weekly budget spent on one advert.
The first is searching under the streetlight: both attributable digital ads and non-attributable ads are put into a media plan with (mostly fanciful) estimates and projections as to returns and value before the project starts. Then the campaigns are run, and the attributable ads are scored according to actual results, while everything else is either carried forward on the assumptions the estimates are true, assigned an arbitrary fraction of all sales/traffic, or run through some GIGO model. A lot of personal prejudice and tribal knowledge is applied here.
The other, smarter instinct is that while traditional/non-digital advertising can't be finely attributed it can be monitored and audited, and this is vastly more important. Mistakes and underperformance are bounded--fraud is not. A billboard in an inappropriate place with shitty creative at least exists and has some non-zero value not that far from the best possible billboard; but fraudulent Internet advertising can just dump all your money down a hole, never be seen by a relevant human, and do nothing but give you false metrics.
DVRs aren't that much of a threat -- most of what a TV ad says is that "my brand exists, I can afford TV ads, and your social circle has seen my ads" and that works at 10x speed anyway. Hypertargeting makes Internet ads worthless for that sort of positioning.
(I buy internet display only right now but I used to work in a mixed team)
Why is digital so conversation obsessed (clicks/purchases) and not focused as much on the branding values (CPM)?
I'm not in the profession, but my theory is that what can be measured, will be measured. However, and someone please correct me if I'm wrong, that doesn't mean that any digital strategy is more effective than any print/broadcast strategy from 40 years ago.
Keep in mind these are the people pushing for autoplay video.
In related news, certain subreddits have been promoting the use of https://adnauseam.io/, a fork of uBlock origin that automatically clicks all the ads encountered. The same redditors also encourage searching for high-CPC terms (e.g. insurance or rare medical conditions) to maximize the impact.
It's hard to understand the level of _schadenfreude_ that warrants use of AdNauseam. Ads can be hated. That's all right. But, why would anyone be so hell bent on depleting advertisers budget. What if the advertiser is not a rich company but a small business. How acceptable it's to destroy the potential value of her budget?
Of course, Google might already be detecting it, but the intent of AdNeuseam seems nothing but despicable.
This isn't shadenfreude; it's a type of direct action against advertising and indirectly the type of hyper-capitalism that allowed advertising to become malignant.
When profit is the only metric that counts, the only way to send a message is to disrupt the flow of revenue.
> seems nothing but despicable
I'd suggest viewing it from the other side, but I suspect Upton Sinclair's caution may apply: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
You overestimate the amount of impact adnauseam makes. Users that click on many ads on one page within a short time window, but never convert? Obviously fraud that's being filtered, the user will be blacklisted on both the supply and the demand side, and you very quickly make no impact at all, and will most certainly not disrupt the flow of revenue for anybody involved here. That's not some outlandish futuristic technology, that's standard practice for any half-decent player in online advertising.
I never discussed the level of impact for this type of direct action.
edit: Also, if the impact is negligible, I assume you're fine with more people installing adnauseam.
> Obviously fraud
Good luck making that decision. Are you willing to defraud the people hosting your ads with an overly-sensitive detector? Unlike the user that installs adnauseam that doesn't have any contractual relationship with the advertiser or ad-hosting website, the advertiser would be committing fraud if their false positive is too high.
I think those descriptions are a little too subtle and too nuanced. Broader generalizations that make more sweeping claims would work better to make the point.
Absolutely. Broad, biased statements are indisputably the best way to gain deep insight into an issue. Details and worries about correctness often muddy the waters.
> Ads can be hated. That's all right. But, why would anyone be so hell bent on depleting advertisers budget.
Why not? Many of us are so hell bent on not wanting to see ads that we actually run adblockers. Then ad companies want to dmca or prosecute adblockers and advertisers call us thieves for using one (however, none of them would reimburse the ram, electricity, internet bandwidth, and time wasted with all that unsolicited spam). I don't care if they go bankrupt.
> What if the advertiser is not a rich company but a small business. How acceptable it's to destroy the potential value of her budget?
When they pay for clicks, they're gambling. No sympathy. It might be a good idea to cap that gambling budget and consider less risky ways to reach people if the yield isn't high enough.
Several reasons why adnetworks is hated to the point where people want to take action:
Adnetworks don't take responsibility for what they publish. Malware, scams, illegal ads (such as targeting children), and resource depleting software are all ire-causing problems where it's the victim that have to shoulder it.
Then we have the ethical question about tracking and creating registers over people who search for medical conditions. To target the sick and vulnerable is very ire-inducing. Doctor-patient confidentiality exist for good reasons and many ad networks have no problems in ignoring that.
If adnetworks played by the common rules (ie laws) that we all have to abide to, then I would generally agree that citizen action like this is bad. But thats not the current situation, so its either activism like this or put our hope that global treaties is going to be signed that limit what companies can do and what legal responsibility they have.
However, it doesn't seem that hard for me to understand. If you see advertising as a social ill, that seeks to manipulate people into making purchases that they neither need nor will make their lives better. If that's what you believe it doesn't seem inconsistent to want to do everything you can to make advertising nonviable.
> the intent of AdNeuseam seems nothing but despicable.
To some, the intent to operate a business, particularly one that depends on advertising, is despicable. They consider the act of making money (i.e. revenues > costs) to be evil exploitation of workers, and the act of getting people to buy something they can survive without (i.e. advertising influences whether and how much consumers buy) to be evil consumerist waste, part of a culture of buying shit you don't need, which they see as a cancer on human civilization.
Running a DoS attack against advertising has a decently advantageous risk:effectiveness ratio as a technique to fight capitalism, if that's your intention, and for some people it is.
I think there are two major point why people hate ads: no privacy and a potential source of malware and what not.
Yesterday I was looking for a nice Android game and stumbled upon Mekorama. Not only is it a great game but the developer is asking very politely for some money without the use of ads. In the reviews you can see this is an absolute bonus. And because of this the game doesn't need ads for exposure. See, I just promoted the game on HN.
> It's hard to understand the level of _schadenfreude_ that warrants use of AdNauseam.
Have you seen modern ads? They're a direct security threat, a threat against privacy and, many would argue, a considerable social ill. AdNauseam represents one of the few available means of direct action against the ad industry. Personally, I think it's a great idea.
In fact, I would argue that until the ad networks take responsibility over the security implications of their actions, using AdNauseam is the ethical thing to do.
If enough users adopt this, the effect will be advertisers flee whatever websites those users frequent.
The end result being those websites (due to declines in revenue) cut their staffs, reducing the quantity and quality of their content. And then AdNauseum users complain on certain subreddits about the declining quality of the target sites.
AdNauseum seems to be a case of "you destroy what you love."
> How exactly do truely free to use websites run if not with advertisements?
They don't. And I consider this a feature, not a bug. The www existed just fine before advertisers came onto the scene, and it can function even better when they leave.
I think SE would indeed be a loss, but I do strongly believe that the loss would be well worth it to push out internet advertising. Additionally, I don't believe that SE's only viable financial model is advertisement.
Badly exposed, maybe, but surely not ridiculous. We are so used to wasting hours alone in front of a screen while being bombarded by advertising that we are totally forgetting what it looks like to get out and speak with other people.
Word of mouth, baby. When a product is good it makes a good subject for conversation with friends and relatives, and they surely don't cover my mouth with duct tape as a form of ad-blocking.
Off topic, but are you still interested in those ActiveX h264 dvrs? I've got sdks for a few variants of a chip family commonly used in them and am working on reverse engineering their binary kernel modules, and was hoping to start gathering helpers.
Hi, thanks. I have only one of the old 4 inputs models left, but should get one of the new AHD ones and be able to do some tests in a while.
I'm not expert in reverse engineering but if I can help I'll be glad to.
I'm almost new here, if there is a way to send PMs to other people I didn't find it.
Also, I'm still recovering from hurricane Harvey, so I may not be online as much as usual, but you can memoserv me and I'll get it once I'm back online.
None that I know of, but you can find me on freenode in gentoo channels, other places, and #exploiteers. Gathering hardware data would be a good place to start.
I can't think of any quality product that relies solely on advertisement, and I can't think of any product that has become better once advertisements became a part of its funding.
The type of business Doubleclick engages in is neither efficient nor effective on most web users but it causes a pervasive wide scale annoyance to all who enounter Doublclick's tentacles. One could argue that Doubleclick (now Google) must retain a certain level of schadenfreude to pollute the web with their garbage for so long knowing that, in the main, they are only creating a nuisance for web users, not generating revenue for their customers. If a salesman has to knock on thousands of doors to find only a single buyer, there is always the chance communities close their gates to keep the salesman out. Clearly, most people living in the community are not interested in what he is selling.
Is it reasonable to annoy thousands of people to find one person who will buy? Who knows? But certainly, one can expect that there will be thousands of annoyed people.
Another way to look at this, especially after Google acquired Doubleclick, is that it could be the customers purchasing ads who are being deceived. It is hard to imagine that web users are deceiving Doubleclick and Google by clicking on ads and not purchasing products. Doubleclick knows most users do not click and do not purchase products/services in response to these ads. But those purchasing ads may not know this. The information asymmetry is in Google's favor.
These "adnauseum" users appear to be acting out of frustration in response to the promulgation of advertising that Google knows most users are not interested in. They are not achieving any financial gain, and certainly not by deceiving others.
It is easier to imagine a situation where those parties buying ads are being deceived by Doubleclick to believe that certain web advertising is more efficient, effective and reliable than it truly is. Hence the refunds.
Users are entitled to click on whatever they so choose. If they become frustrated and start clicking on everything, it is hard to argue this is "fraudulent" or deceptive. They are expressing themselves honestly: they are frustrated. The possibility that users can click on anything and everything in a page presented to them has always been there; buyers of web advertising should be aware of this when engaging a web ad sales company. Leading them to believe otherwise might be deceptive or even "fraudulent".
Free market cannot work without propagation of information. Curious what kind of mechanism you envision to solve that problem: public service anouncements in place of ads ?
If it really did that. In practice, it doesn't. Not for me anyway. It's like firing an assault rifle at the sky and hoping there's someone to catch the bullet, where ever it might land. It's just spam about products I'm never going to buy and don't need to know about.
By all means, give me all the ads when I'm actually looking for a product to buy. The sad thing is that when I do that, all the ads tend to be irrelevant. Even on sites like amazon, which should know what I'm looking for. They have these sponsored product placements that are supposed to be relevant to my search. In practice, they hardly ever are. And if they're somewhat relevant, they're still not relevant enough for me to consider purchase.
Online ads do an incredibly bad job of providing useful knowledge about the mere existence of a product.
In practice, I always need to turn to reviews, forums, word-of-mouth, etc. etc. etc., and finding useful information in the infinite sea of ad-spam is quite frustrating.
I see that you have a very practical and scalable solution out there.
We will gush about a movie/product/service launch on television and call it news. One might even consider incentivising people to write positive reviews, we will just not call them ads. Why havent we seen any of these yet ? I have my review-blocker, post-blocker, word-of-mouth blocker startups still in waiting.
There are farms of blogs with junk content and reviews that exist purely for ad revenue and referral marketing. Online communities have sockpuppets doing the same shit. Respected news papers have "submarine" PR pieces promoting one product or another. The fake positive reviews you mention already exist - both on blogs and sites like Amazon, App Store etc.
In this vast sea of noise, it is very hard to find good information. These massive industries keep churning out ads in a million different forms & keep blurring the lines between ad/content with a motive to sell and trustworthy content from a real person without ulterior motives.
Its a constant never-ending war on trustworthy content and erodes the webs utility as a whole. In the past 10 years the web has become more and more of an artificially curated garden to sell you shit and keep you clicking.. and despite many protests about ads, they remain invasive and pervasive.
They ignore all these concerns and keep ramping it up. So I don't think twice about using AdNaseaum.
I agree with everything you said, but carpet-bombing the crap out of all ads does not seem to be an improvement. Ads satisfy a real need, stamp it out artificially and it will come up with some other name, some other form.
This
war against *
is too hackneyed an approach, admittedly, very popular in the US. It has not done much good anywhere.
Well using ad nauseaum is not carpet bombing or waging a war - all depends on how you define war. Its just sending a message, if enough people send the message things will change. If not, they will continue to get worse.
It depends on how it is used, but I would have no qualms about going after the egregiously annoying and inherently dishonest ads. Those are the ones where even the advertiser knows that a click indicates absolutely no intent to explore or to buy, the reader was just tricked into triggering a booby trap. Some pages are so bad that it feels like navigating a veritable minefield, you dont know where to position your mouse to read the damn article. To all who wants to go after these guys, godspeed. I dont use adblock, but I do use flashblock and nuke javascript on all except a few whitelisted sites that I keep expanding as needed.
But seriously, I am genuinely tickled that my sarcastic comments on this post was mistaken for genuine lack of knowledge regarding paid reviews and submarine articles.
My goal was to point out that if one kills one specific form-factor it will reappear in some other form-factor and it already has; to point out that the notion that reviews, articles, word of mouth can be a substitute for ads is a silly idea [0]. Paid reviews and submarine articles being some of the other form factors. Those reviews and articles are just as dishonest if not more so and ignoring them to target others rather indiscriminately is not going to result in a better web. Thats closer to a baby throwing a tantrum than anything else.
An indiscriminate war against all ads is just childish and silly. Silly is the sweeping notion that _all_ ads are essentially motivated by malice [1] and only does harm to the reader.
How do you get reviews when people have no idea the product exists in the first place? The amount of ignorance these comments have about why marketing in general is a necessary part of business is disheartening.
I imagine a single state-owned database where merchants enter detailed product information. The consumers may then query the database at their leisure.
I'd trust the UK civil service to do that. The hardest but would probably be verification -- does that lasagne really only have beef in, was the cocoa for that chocolate actually grown in a Fairtrade farm, in Ivory Coast, etc..
And if there is a change in the political spectrum, will you still trust them? My government lost my security clearance application to who knows who. In return, I got some credit monitoring and a form letter.
I disagree. A large advertising budget will win more eyeballs but that doesn't meant a shitty product will have a free reign. A product has to work hard to justify its value. Yes, marketing and advertising is misused to make people pay more for the same thing, but that doesn't mean that chief benefit of advertising, which is discovery, is lost in the process.
I would keep ads. But I would prefer if advertisers are not allowed to lie or make unverified claims on ads. I would perefer to be able to take an advertiser to court for the claims made. That still leaves a lot of room for word play and weaseling ..."upto 80% improvement in blah", but better than nothing.
There are laws and guidelines stating that claims made in ads have to be backed up, or at least not misleading and there are companies who've been fined or forced to take down ads because of it.
Demonizing the anti-advertisement camp doesn't help your case. There are legitimate reasons people dislike the deep penetration of advertisements in every area of life. I personally consider ads unethical, and I don't care if I decrease the effectiveness of what I consider to an unethical practice, in fact it's a joyous thing to me.
Your tone convinced me to go to the distance of moving to AdNauseam, and I'll be changing my recommendations to friends on unmetered connections as well.
It is not Schadenfreude, it is war and arguably a defensive one. And if you believe ads are wrong then it really doesn't matter whether it is a big or a small company that does it.
YouTube already ruined the CPM of creators several months ago, through a bunch of hair-brained schemes to try to appeal to advertisers that were scared by flat-out lies by WSJ.
AdNauseum was created long after the "adpocalypse". I would not be surprised if some people are using it in protest of YouTube's attempts to ruin the ability for independent media to fund themselves.
I can imagine several reasonable belief systems that would justify attacking advertisers; for example, if you view advertising as a form of psychological pollution.
However, given that one generally chooses to go on websites that serve ads, I think it's harder to justify messing with web ads as opposed to, say, billboards.
It's not schadenfreude, and this latest uptick in AdNauseam installation&use is not caused by anti-ad attitudes, but
as backlash against what is perceived as thought policing by google, mostly in form of demonetizing and silencing popular YouTube users who lean right in their political expression.
Yeah its a politic war. I believe it all started when some people on the left got some companies to pull their ads from some right wing Fox anchor. Unless someone knows of events older than this?
The earliest notable one I can think of is the whole Kellogs and Breitbart incident. However, specifically relating to Google, I'd say it's the James Damore political silencing by Google. And even more recently, Youtube has started censoring controversial videos and putting them inside a "gimped" version of Youtube. I.e. no likes/shares/related videos. It really is turning into a 1984 scenario.
You think Google can't detect this? Enough advertisers have conversion tracking that Google can detect if a person is clicking a zillion ads and never actually converting, in addition to the other multitude of ways they detect fraud. I'm sure in the battle between fake traffic producers and Google there are probably tricky ways you can fool Google, but a person clicking every ad is not one of them.
Also... this doesn't actually hurt Google. If the percentage of fake traffic goes up, the cost per click will just go down over the long term. And what, advertisers are going to lose faith? Give me a break. It doesn't matter if the traffic is 0% fake or 90% fake, all that matters is if the traffic is making you a profit or not.
> It doesn't matter if the traffic is 0% fake or 90% fake, all that matters is if the traffic is making you a profit or not.
Only under the assumption that no competing, superior technologies exists. The worse the efficiency of the ad-model, the more attractive the alternatives will be.
Criticizing Microsoft over delivering an inferior user experience twenty years ago is in the same category as the critique against Google: as long as they have complete control over the market, it doesn’t matter at all. But when competing, superior technologies start appearing, it becomes their downfall. And the worse the user (advertisers, in case of Google) experience, the greater the incentive for competing technologies to appear.
What alternatives? The key product here is Google search which is what attracts the consumers. The advertisers are dealing with Adwords not because Adwords is the greatest platform in history, but because Adwords is the platform where the consumers are. Ad fraud, no matter how massive, has no effect on the consumer side of Google search.
Google has a strong incentive to fix this because any money going to scammers is theoretically coming out of their own pockets as advertisers lower their CPCs to adjust for lower conversion rates, but it isn't an existential threat to the marketplace. Cut out the scammers and the CPCs adjust back upwards as conversion rates increase.
And again, Google has the tools to find the scammers. It's a game of whack-a-mole for sure, but at the end of the day the higher the level of fraud on the marketplace the easier it is to catch, so the scammers are somewhat limited in how much damage they do.
I’m not claiming any alternative exists right now. I’m saying that the less efficient Google is at converting dollars paid by advertisers into visitors, the greater the pressure from future (unknown) technologies that eradicate the inherent inefficiency in Google’s model.
If I knew exactly how to capture Google’s ad revenue, I would be starting a company rather than writing comments on HN.
> It's a game of whack-a-mole for sure, but at the end of the day the higher the level of fraud on the marketplace the easier it is to catch, so the scammers are somewhat limited in how much damage they do.
This is a perfect summary of what is going on.
In this case I trust Google because their incentives are aligned with advertisers', and they certainly have both data (from Google Analytics and other sites) and means to distinguish between a human and a bot.
> In this case I trust Google because their incentives are aligned with advertisers
Is it?
The better the overall search algorithm, the less the need to hack around it by paying for placement..
Some level of 'bad results' helps ensure that ads are needed in the first place,
and junk sites provide a ready source of bad results..
Now, when junk sites cause you to lose revenue, the equation gets unbalanced,
but that is not to say having the variable equate to 0 is good either, because the revenue would lessen..
Obviously it can't simply allow the fraud because that would make google fraudulent itself, but at the same time they cant just outright ban crappy sites, since there are so many that are only marginally crappy but otherwise legitimate, and could only be unwilling participants in someone else's dishonest scheme..
I would argue that google is attempting to maximize a set of equations here, and since at some point there is a grey area between 'crappy scammish sites' and 'full on fraud', google has some leeway to what extent it polices the grey area, and, further, to some extent can do this at advertisers expense so long as 'the house wins' to borrow gamboling terminology..
> The better the overall search algorithm, the less the need to hack around it by paying for placement..
All the things you need are not necessarily known to you in advance. It’s entirely possible that someone has created a new product that no one knows about, and allowing these companies to pay for visibility allows you to discover these ideas that you might end up finding useful. The idea is that when advertisers pay for placement, they better have a useful product (that can recoup the cost), or else they’ll be throwing money out the window.
true, but which likely-related things are shown is also a decision for the algorithm to make, and one which can be skewed in a variety of positive or negative ways
4chan has been shilling it quite heavily as well, and (of course) they've been championing articles like TFA as proof that their technique is working. I personally think that there is a fair point to make that Google has already been sabotaging people who were trying to make a living off advertising (see the YouTube "adpocalypse"), so I can see where the anger might be coming from.
I used to work in ad fraud detection (eg. publishers buying fake clicks) about five years ago and fake clicks were a bigger problem than people talk about. I would be surprised if 4chan is more than a drop in the bucket.
There is no proof it does. Even before it Google has estimated the fraud traffic compositing of 20% to 30% of all its inventory. I think 4chan bros are too caught up with themselves to think that a bunch of ideologists can cause tens of billions of damage.
Yes, it's seen as, probably correctly, the only way to do anything that'll affect Google. Outside of getting laws changed, that is. It probably won't be effective - the people handling ad fraud are probably not the ones pushing their censorious politics. But hey, unlike most slacktivism, this causes them real damage.
I imagine the response will be to ban people's Google accounts, for those dumb enough to sign in while using AdNauseum. (Anything more forensic might be a target for trolls.) We'll see if Firefox caves to pressure like Pale Moon did.
This might be quite dangerous if used without a solution to anonymize your IP and block all third party cookies, as it will expose your browsing habits and could even let advertisers de-anonymize you. Knowing that you regularly visit e.g. 5-10 specific domains can be enough to uniquely identify you in a dataset containing millions of people depending on the relative popularity rank of these domains. I would therefore be very cautious with this as it might do serious harm to your privacy. Not interacting with ads and not sending any data about you to the ad provider is still the best option for that. Also, most fake clicks can be easily detected (because you e.g. do not interact with the ad content after clicking on the ad), so it might not even do much harm to the ad providers (if that's the reason why you use the system, which I do not endorse personally).
> As the collected data gathered shows an omnivorous click-stream, user tracking, targeting and surveillance become futile.
This is (IMHO) a flawed and dangerous view, as by clicking on the ad you provide valuable information to the provider (I.e. that you visited the website on which the ad was embedded) and this information can be used to build a pretty detailed view of your browsing habits. As the largest ad networks have very high coverage on many domains (Google e.g is present on more than 80 % of the top 100k most popular domains) you will give them a wealth of data about you, which IMHO is a privacy nightmare.
If you are not running an ad blocker they already know you are visiting those sites from the trackers accompanying the ads, now they will also see a click from you which will make their database about your interests become less accurate.
Yes, but one of the points of running an ad blocker is to avoid sending any information about you to third-party trackers, clicking on every ad nullifies this, even when blocking the third-party cookies. And as I said I don't think that it will make their databases less accurate, as it's often easy to separate false clicks from real ones (due to different engagement rates and requests).
I'm not sure this actually IS related. I think bot traffic is a bigger problem. Are you saying there's as much fake ad click traffic from AdNauseam as there is from bot traffic?
I suspect part of the uptick in fraud was Google's release of headless chrome. It uses less memory than other approaches, so any click farm converting over would have more capacity.
A big chunk of "google's ad traffic" is fake and always has been. It's hard to quantify though, it's up to each business to evaluate whether paying for ads on google makes sense.
When you're on the inside the fake traffic is not so hard to quantify. Problem is that if you've taken the time to quantify it then your staff might start feeling obligated to do something about it. Like talking to customers. Ignorance, as they say, is bliss.
I am finding Google adverts less and less effective for an e-commerce business my parents run. I think it may be because consumers are getting better at ignoring the ad-noise on the web, and this is potentially quite worrying for Google and other ad based businesses. It's not beyond the realms of imagination that this fake traffic could be an attempt re-bolster their main revenue stream, and they've been caught out by their customers!
> It's not beyond the realms of imagination that this fake traffic could be an attempt re-bolster their main revenue stream
It basically is beyond imagination unless you think they have a new income plan that just needs one more quarter. Google's long-term value is in the conversion rates of long-term advertisers: drop conversions in half with fake traffic and next month they are going to offer you less than half the bid or nothing if they have high site costs per visitor. I.e. licensed booking listings.
Probably partners that share immediate revenue with Google but are less invested/secure in their portion of the long term value of that stream are behind it.
I don't disagree with your comment, however, I am often surprised by the short-termism demonstrated by executives. It may not be Google's strategy, but I am sure they are well aware of it happening, and in that sense it feels like a lie of omission. Apologies if I sound cynical, but I would guess that a company that has been running an ad platform for the past 17 years clearly knows the difference between authentic and fake traffic.
It is a certainty that some traffic is fake.. In this case it is doubleclick on websites and (from the commission numbers) probably over other ad networks, so Google has one connection's header and a few ms to triage the traffic. But the anomalies there are probably not so different than if I setup an open proxy and invite real people to use it.
Being cynical makes sense, but then it is actually more likely that Google has been generating fake traffic on fb than fake traffic for itself and vice versa. FB spent years being irrelevant to much of the market while getting a lot of money from less savvy advertisers for bot networks. I don't think the short-term revenue was worth it to them and I would be surprised if their exec bonuses weren't mostly hurt by missing targets and losing big advertisers.
Clickfraud has been a problem for as long as online ads exist. Its widespreadness has caused ad revenues to decline to the point of non-profitability years ago, and many web media outfits to close shop. On what basis should customers be refunded without actual, objectively measured clickstream data? This piece feels like a media campaign to make AdSense appear as premium service over alternatives to me.
The point is that, without incentives for quality content creation, there aren't that many web resources worth searching anymore. Have you checked your web usage recently? Do you actually go to Google search for your daily web consumption? Or could your search needs be fulfilled by, say, better StackExchange search?
Google is struggling to keep growth as ad revenues go to more evil companies such as Facebook, as their AMP project shows.
That's an interesting point and I suppose the answer is maybe but what I've found is that the best, or certainly the easiest, way of searching StackExchange is Google.
I agree, but wonder if it's mostly habit(been using that single search box for over ten years, and I'm reluctant to add one more click/step to the process when I can just press enter right now and then filter through the results page). I still have to remind myself to use the !bang function of DDG even though it's often a faster, more direct path to the results I want. For me, only after it slowly becomes habit does it truly feel easier
While the article talks about Adsense fraud, there's a ton of fraud happening on Adwords as well like competitors or bots that click on your ads to deplete your ad budget. Google provides refunds for some of those fraudulent clicks as well.
I'm a developer at https://www.clickcease.com/ a company that's been fighting click fraud for the past few years. If you're affected by click fraud, we can detect fraudulent ad clicks and automatically file refund claims with Google.
I find this really interesting. We’re all familiar with exploiting vulnerable software, but this appears to be exploiting a vulnerable business model.
Does this attack work with Facebook as well? I think the difference in client authentication might prevent this attack on Facebook (just ban accounts that click too many ads). But, on the other hand, Google might be able to use IP-addresses to accomplish the same.
Taking it to the next (morally questionable) level would be a virus that infects regular consumer devices, and delivers fake clicks from seemingly honest clients.
That should be relatively easy to detect, since the actors must have an account with Google, through which they receive payments for ad clicks. Google would just have to find a copy of the malware, and see which accounts the clicks are targeted at.
What I’m talking about would be impossible to detect, since it just amounts to regular users clicking regular ads. But it would also be more challenging to profit from, so it would amount to sabotage more than a profit scheme, unless somehow coupled with short-selling Google stock (a bit more far-fetched, admittedly).
Step 3 is actually "lose everything because Google announced something neat" or "lose everything because that quarter Google announced better fraud control and increased revenues".
For a different perspective, I had a business software product for a particular targeted use case that could ONLY find customers through targeted ads, particularly on Google. The company could have not existed without Google ads and the customers would have not solved their problem without Google ads.
Nike, P&G and Apple will get by if they can no longer advertise because they're firmly entrenched in people's minds. But if you're starting a competitor, or any new business really, I don't know how you'd find customers without ads. If someone's saying "just use product hunt" or some other website dedicated to new products, they should remember that the vast majority of new businesses are small, local ones - barbershops, florists, massage parlours etc, not tech startups that will eat the world.
It doesn't necessarily need to be targeted web ads, I suppose you could use newspaper ads, or TV or physical letters, or spam email. Any of these work, but I think a new business would probably get the most bang for buck by targeting.
Human benefit? The trash bags full of money being thrown around the room, while we fight over the scraps?
Or we can talk about the purposeful obfuscation of the industry. How you have no way of verifying clicks, or views, or anything. How Cost Per Click is just an arbitrary number you and unknown others compete against, all for the pursuit of fake traffic and the hope of winning the advertising lottery.
It is more worth your time to play Three Card Monty on the street corner, because at least all parties agree that game is fixed.
When the online advertising bubble pops, it's going to go off like a fucking bomb, and we'll all be lucky to survive it.
I agree advertising certainly has a place and tradeoffs. It's seems more like a cost shifting, less direct, obfuscated payment terms model than 'free'. Certainly people being advertised to are paying for it because the ads are successful, just not a direct exchange of money for content/service but instead a payment of time/attention for psychological manipulation/impression which will result in a direct payment sometime in the future(if the advertising party is successful)
Is the economy a zero-sum game? Just because some people are making money doesn't necessarily mean others are losing money.
And even if it is a zero-sum game, it would be a form of wealth redistribution from rich consumers to poor consumers. No one wants to advertise to poor people, they only want to advertise to rich people. But making a product ad-supported makes it free for everyone. Rich people's eyeballs are used to subsidize poor people's content.
I was some of the human time and productivity lost due to ads.
Getting them to admit any wrong, from a technical issue, to anything, is like pulling teeth from a live dinosaur.
Good. Hopefully they take their refund and invest it in something useful. But knowing the industry, the refund was in the form of an account credit, and that money is already lost to the system regardless.
The account credit probably goes to the agency, and the actual customer is none the wiser. Or it gets credited to some kind of covering-our-asses fund that can be used by the agency to make the click-through cost look a little less bad at the end of the next quarter.
Which account registered the "fraudulent * " clicks? That account receives $X per click, which we've determined, and no you can't see our math. Proprietary information, don't'cha'kno.
*Advertising host admits no wrong-doing, has investigated itself, and found itself not at fault. Offer subject to limitations. See Attorney General for details.
"Just imagine for a second the total time lost due to..."
Did this many times over the years with respect to time lost as result of being forced to use a substandard operating system. Because it came preinstalled on PCs like the ones in used offices and there was no 386BSD yet.
The www did not come "preinstalled" with ads. But some companies want it to seem that way. False claim: "If no ads, then no www."
I've often questioned the somewhat symbiotic nature of scam sites and googles ad revenue - if things were too easy to find, there would be less need for ads in the first place..
Not that the simple existence of such a program precludes this.. they could just be using it to tune the equation when the sides get out of balance..
Google, I'll take my refund for childrens foreign language learn your ABC's and Peppa pig traffic anytime you like. Or reimburse for hours wasted on phone to your Indian call center.
People just want free stuff. Google did introduce a program (Contributor) which would allow users to pay to fund their content creators without seeing ads. Last I heard that program was not doing well.
Patreon itself seems to be going strong, but I've only seen a handful of users making anything close to a livable income, and I check out profiles almost every time someone plugs theirs. Usually it's a laughably small amount. The successful users are popular enough to make still an order of magnitude more with ads, sponsorships, etc. I love the model and hope it keeps growing, but it's not there yet.
How do you expect to pay for something and have it work without being logged in to some system? Be it some over arching login system like Google or per logins per website.
Despite what your opinion might be on the ethics and justifications of the people involved, I find it quite concerning that they're being painted as "ad fraudsters". This sounds like the same Orwellian re-definition of words as "piracy". There is no implicit or explicit, social or legal contract that says if I click an ad that I must then purchase the product. Nor is there any agreement that if I click an ad that I have to be interested in the product. So you couldn't really argue it's deception. And most importantly, I have no financial gain from doing it (EDIT: assuming that I'm not the person who is making money from the ads). The term "fraud" is an intentional misuse of the word to frame the conversation in a way that is quite deceptive.
Is exploiting a flaw in the existing CPC advertising system "fraud"? No. Is it unethical? Possibly, depending on what your view is on the justification. You could argue that devaluing the worth of tracking-based advertising is trying to do a net good, and that it might counteract Google's attempts to become a monopoly in online advertising. But you could also argue it's going to ruin small businesses that rely on advertising as a significant part of their income.
>There is no implicit or explicit, social or legal contract that says if I click an ad that I must then purchase the product. Nor is there any agreement that if I click an ad that I have to be interested in the product.
I understand you want to fight ads but your comments (e.g. your usage of "I" as in the "websurfer enduser") are not relevant to this particular WSJ story.
In this case, the "click fraud" is the correct label because the website operators (not the websurfer) of ad inventory explicitly agreed to Google's AdX policies.[1][2]
Yes, you're right that the end user didn't make an explicit contract. However, the website operator/seller that voluntarily opted into the AdX exchange _did_.
Like you, I'm also hypersensitive to Orwellian doublespeak but in this case, your vigilance is misplaced. Your comment (almost verbatim) is more relevant for the AdNauseam thread that's currently on the front page because that _is_ about endusers fighting back with the justification that they didn't agree to any ad Terms-of-Service.
I think you're missing the point of "click fraud[1]". Unscrupulous actors are using botnets to "click" ad network links on their sites, which they then get money for.
I'm penalized about 15% of my revenue every month due to invalid traffic. 99% of the traffic is organic, and google doesnt give me any idea where this invalid traffic is coming from.
It's called fraud because it's systemized. An individual accidentally clicking on an ad, or clicking on an ad without been actually interested in a product is far from suspicious, we've all done it and we'll do it again. But that's not what this is about.
Say you have a couple of web sites and you've strapped AdSense on them. Income is ok but nothing spectacular. One day you decide to go black-hat. So you purchase a couple hundred static IPs or even better rent them from private proxies. Then you set-up a bot that systematically clicks on your ads. If you keep it low profile without becoming greedy it could run for years without anyone taking notice.
Then some other day you become greedy. You realize that if you scale your model it could bring you shitloads of money. So you build a malware and distribute it to tens of thousands of PCs. Actually you don't even have to write the code yourself, malware has been commoditized these days. So now you have 100k PCs which means that you have tons of traffic. And since you only have a handful of websites you commoditize the "business", offering ad clickthroughs for money to various publishers. Run it for a couple of years and you've become a millionaire. At this point of course eventually Google will shut you down because they have a whole department of very smart people who're monitoring these things. But nothing stops you from building other sites or no sites at all if you drive all your traffic to third parties. And let's not forget that AdSense isn't the only form of advertising. There are ads based on mere impressions. Which means that all you have to do is drive traffic to those sites.
This isn't a far-fetched scenario, it's already happening in unprecedented scale. Estimates indicate that at least 30% of ad traffic is fraudulent. Take a look at Methbot [1] for example. A botnet that was set-up to deliver fake video traffic and netted more than $5M daily.
Not to mention bots to scrape other legitimate sites and recreate them only with slightly reshuffled texts and a bazillion other ads and links to legitimate and illegitimate other sites, paid spamming to spread your malware and drive traffic into your network, spoof SEO and fake promotions by spam commenting on websites, blogs, etc. I'm probably missing a few thousand other things.
Worked in webhosting for a couple of years.. it was amazingly eyeopening to contend with the fact that yes, people actually make all of that junk content that I do my best to ignore, and that there are reasons behind it...
> An individual accidentally clicking on an ad, or clicking on an ad without been actually interested in a product is far from suspicious, we've all done it and we'll do it again. But that's not what this is about.
I have to admit that I was hoping that is what this would be about. I suspect that almost all ad clicks on mobile devices are "accidental" in the sense that those pages are optimized to ensure the maximum number of accidental clicks.
It is a soft form of fraud when they know bots and dodgy apps are being allowed to take clicks as legitimate advertising. There are tools that pick this up as well as analysis to encourage refunds from AdWords but for some reason Google have lagged on this technology, dispute a massive information advantage. Maybe it is innocent reasons. But I don't believe that. So I feel they are doing fraud in a light form by not improving tools as well as they can to remove bad clicks and take the payment.
Surely the attacker has agreed to the terms before displaying the ads and are in breach of that agreement? They are getting money through deception. Sounds like fraud to me.
Off topic, ish, but this is the first WSJ article I’ve looked at in a loooong time that didn’t paywall me. Did they change their practices on that recently?
you'll notice this particular article doesn't have a key next to it indicating a paywall. CMO Today seems to be heavy on the non-paywalling, for whatever reason.
The people regularly reading CMO today has to be a very valuable audience -- they probably make a ton of money selling that data as anyone selling into Marketing departments would pay a lot to be able to target those folks.
Content can't cost more than its advertising, or it's a loss. You're probably attracted to more-valuable articles, which likely cost more than their ads generate.
Some of us tried to sound the alarm on fake traffic before Google IPO'd and WSJ or some other major news source wrote about it at the time days before their IPO, but no one cared at all. Everyone wanted Google to become the greatest in history based on a business model that acknowledges fraud but regards it as mere noise as opposed to mortal threat. Well, the whole point of warning the public before their IPO was to prevent the giant economic disaster that this can lead to. But Google was clever and managed to find a profitable business with Android and maybe other streams of revenue. I wonder how this will play out.
The subreddits mentioned above are alt right subs like /r/The_Donald . They are openly protesting the firing of the memo author by using extensions like AdNauseum that interfere with Google's revenue stream.
It's not just the memo author, google has started a campaign of indirect censorship by punishing what they call 'controversial content' in doublespeak but mostly boils down to 'right-wing leaning' on YouTube by a) demonetizing channels/users b) disabling commenting and embedding videos for those users too.
Google thinks it's acceptable to wage an economic war against people who don't think the way Google approves, and the users are simply accepting the new rules of the game.
Easy. March on Google was planned in support of that guy. So why not an electronic protest to follow? What is the hard part about making the connection. Wait, a trick question, right? You're baffled...
No, it's a response to recent policy changes at google that suppress right-wing thinking/publishing, as part of the larger-scale online suppression of it marketed as 'fighting the fake news':
