Tbh I'm all in favour of ad fraud because it undermines the whole industry which I'd love to see disappear.
I love running ad nauseam which instead of hiding ads clicks them all in an invisible browser, making advertisers pay for ads I didn't even see. And devaluing the entire concept. I wish ublock origin did this too, it's so common that it would totally screw up entire ecosystems. The number of people running ad nauseam is unfortunately minimal.
And no, I'm not doing anything illegal. I can do whatever I want with the content on my computer. Ad fraud is a term invented for websites creating artificial clicks so they get paid, the end user doesn't benefit from it.
If your service providers are funded by ads, and ads begin demanding "verified clicks", your service providers are greatly incentivised to begin pushing for locking down your ability to run what you want on your own hardware. Through manipulation of web standards, or through lobbying.
BTW Google had another go at forcing Treacherous Computing on people. This time it's a reCAPTCHA successor, which requires the user to scan a QR code using a Google/Apple owned phone.
I feel like it is actually payment pages where I see these kinds of bouncers the most, though. click fraud is inefficient, but payment fraud can actually ruin a business.
The currently mainstream payment solution hurt privacy even more than the current ad tracking. We'd need something like GNU Taler for that. I wonder what the world would look like if the Chaum E-Cash - Microsoft Windows cooperation had worked out.
The HTTP protocol and HTML fromat that Tim Berners Lee created, were meant for sharing documentation and information which foster collaboration via internet. It wasn't really meant for doing business in trusted environments.
The WWW acronym should stand for Worldwide Wild West.
I think the end user will benefit from any of this happening. As a user myself, I'm so tired of "forced ads", which makes me think a high percentage of ads revenue is fake/generated, not genuine.
Surprising it is taking advertisers this long to wake up, considering the decades I've been reading articles on HN about the massive fraud rates from entire fraud ecosystems.
The saying in marketing used to be: "Half of all marketing dollars are wasted, but we never know which half".
In the internet, it seems to be more like "90% are wasted" and literally never even get a human impression, nevermind a human click-thru and sale.
What was always surprising to me was how the advertisers just went along with the scam. Perhaps as if the marketers' bonuses depended more on advertisement budget spent instead of sales increased.
If that's the case, what is making them catch on now?
The entire internet ad business has never made sense to me. Have you ever clicked any of the links? The landing pages were always confusing and not at all designed for you to engage with them.
I used to think, okay, I guess they don't care about visiting their sites and just want to get eyeball impressions to stay relevant in the cultural zeitgeist.
Then I learned how ads worked in the print industry, where it is assumed in the calculation that every magazine changes hands through at least twenty people who all look at all ads. So maybe everyone was just already used to getting screwed over paying for ads.
Then there's the fear of missing out angle. People paying for ads don't know whether it makes a different, but are too scared to find out. I also once read about a small business that took that risk and found out not paying for internet ads made no difference whatsoever.
Maybe it's time for an entire country to decide to just straight up outlaw all internet ads for a couple years and force everyone to find out what happens.
It was generally believed that "pivot to video" was entirely fraudulent.
What's happening now is the retreat from the open internet; users are either taking the Google AI search summary as gospel and not clicking through, or just going to chatgpt by themselves. Traffic from actual humans to non-FAANG pages is falling.
Open web display inventory is a mess. Nearly entirely fraudulent. Every person in the supply chain for open web display inventory, sometimes even including the Chief Marketing Officer of the firm purchasing the ads, is incentivized to turn a blind eye to fraudulent impressions. Fraud is ultimately paid for by shareholders and owners.
This is because everyone in the supply chain is paid per impression, so they don't have any real incentive to root out (or even discover/report) fraud unless the buyer is leaning on them to do so. An unsophisticated firm looking primarily at reach and impressions as key performance indicators sees those KPIs inflated by fraudulent impressions, so even the purchaser isn't really incentivized to discover fraud in those instances. And if you suddenly decide you do care about fraud after not caring about it previously, you're faced with the prospect of having to report to your stakeholders that the metrics you've been giving them have been bullshit for years.
If you're looking at conversions as your key performance indicator then you do care about fraud and will lean on your ad buyer to discover and reduce it, or else just avoid open web display inventory entirely and buy exclusively on platform properties like LinkedIn or Instagram.
There have been various efforts to reduce fraud for a long, long time. Obviously nothing so far has really comprehensively worked. But there are some people in the industry who do make their money and earn their reputations as fraud-fighters, and they continue pushing new solutions. If the fraud problem for open web display inventory could actually be solved it would probably result in a bonanza for anyone positioned to capitalize on a fraud-free supply chain, so some people are incentivized to chase the dream (or at least convince others that they're earnestly chasing the dream).
Back when 90% of ad spending was wasted, they still made money from the 10% that resulted in sales. That expectation was built into the CPM/CPC, and hence the ad budget.
With the amount of bot traffic I'm seeing these days, I would guess that the waste ratio is more like 99% now. That means a 90% reduction in conversions for the same ad budget. Surely someone is feeling the difference.
The article is about email marketing. Some company has a proprietary algorithm that purportedly detects whether a click is legitimate based on 8y of development and data collection.
It’s definitely a race against the growing capabilities of the models in use and one that will be very difficult to win which is why there has been a significant push toward verification across the Internet—not because of the children, but because of the revenue.
I mean it’s a marketing PR piece that’s likely targeted toward CMOs who are in love with email marketing.
Email marketing is inexpensive, easier to measure, relies on the ridiculous CDPs and ESPs they’ve been tricked into investing in, and the measured numbers are larger than other digital channels.
The problem isn’t that bots are clicking, it’s that those big numbers aren’t going up and to the right in a reliable way any longer and those CMOs need to change how they’re measuring media.
At the end of the day, CMOs need to be measuring contribution to revenue, not meaningless marketing metrics the rest of the C-suite doesn’t give the slightest of fucks about. But that’s super hard for most organizations without competent Marketing Science or capable agencies, and it’s seemingly expensive because their budgets are already tight from all of the fly-by-night shit they’re over invested in. So; they continue to push what they know as well as chip away at their budgets with silly providers who provide little value instead of biting the bullet and doing the right thing.
Presumably a verified click is a click traceable to an attested human identity through your government's soon-to-be-implemented "KYC to use a computer or smartphone" policy.
Just lock down the OS so we can send a reliable signal whether the click originated from a real hardware input device or was software-driven
Oh, you programmed your Arduino to present itself as a mouse via USB, so you can do automated click-fraud that way? No problem, only certified hardware allowed as input devices from now on
I'm not sure what we are going to do about robot arms using touchscreens, or little devices that trick mouse sensors into thinking it's moving. Maybe continuous fingerprint reading?
> I'm not sure what we are going to do about robot arms using touchscreens, or little devices that trick mouse sensors into thinking it's moving. Maybe continuous fingerprint reading?
Heartbeat monitor paired to your mouse's fingerprint readers under the mouse buttons while your webcam verifies your Face ID?
"Approved live human detected: Please spit in DNA analyzer to verify."
Big picture, it kind of blew my mind a few years ago when I realized this: If one concern is the surveillance panopticon thing, it's mitigated by the fact that online advertising itself is a business "fraught" with the fact that there is just as much of an incentive for the seller of ads to be loose with the truth and to use those sorts of tactics as it is for anyone else.
Tbh I'm all in favour of ad fraud because it undermines the whole industry which I'd love to see disappear.
I love running ad nauseam which instead of hiding ads clicks them all in an invisible browser, making advertisers pay for ads I didn't even see. And devaluing the entire concept. I wish ublock origin did this too, it's so common that it would totally screw up entire ecosystems. The number of people running ad nauseam is unfortunately minimal.
And no, I'm not doing anything illegal. I can do whatever I want with the content on my computer. Ad fraud is a term invented for websites creating artificial clicks so they get paid, the end user doesn't benefit from it.
Seems like important context behind the push for things like Web Environment Integrity (similar in concept to "trusted computing" if you were around for that controversy in the early 2000s): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Environment_Integrity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Computing
If your service providers are funded by ads, and ads begin demanding "verified clicks", your service providers are greatly incentivised to begin pushing for locking down your ability to run what you want on your own hardware. Through manipulation of web standards, or through lobbying.
BTW Google had another go at forcing Treacherous Computing on people. This time it's a reCAPTCHA successor, which requires the user to scan a QR code using a Google/Apple owned phone.
> This time it's a reCAPTCHA successor, which requires the user to scan a QR code using a Google/Apple owned phone.
I can't wait for the future where I need a burner phone and a robotic arm just to browse the internet.
People need to just take responsibility and pay for shit.
Like if you don't want to be kicked around, you need to be the one kicking.
People interpret business as hostility because they cannot conceive of the idea that they themselves should pay for a service.
When I do pay for services, they can just add ads anyway to get more money. Look at Netflix or Amazon prime for this, or even cable.
How do I pay for something with a guarantee they'll leave the ad money on the table?
I pay for Ars, I pay for YouTube, I pay for discord nitro at the highest tier. Notice that all of those services are still ad funded?
I feel like it is actually payment pages where I see these kinds of bouncers the most, though. click fraud is inefficient, but payment fraud can actually ruin a business.
The currently mainstream payment solution hurt privacy even more than the current ad tracking. We'd need something like GNU Taler for that. I wonder what the world would look like if the Chaum E-Cash - Microsoft Windows cooperation had worked out.
The HTTP protocol and HTML fromat that Tim Berners Lee created, were meant for sharing documentation and information which foster collaboration via internet. It wasn't really meant for doing business in trusted environments.
The WWW acronym should stand for Worldwide Wild West.
Advertisers should be grateful I even skimmed the subject line
AI scraper traffic from residential bots is skewing all statistics.
That's why I created my own advertising platform for my niche. Loaded server side, only geo and context targeted.
No cookies, no focus on views.
Only click tracking (minimal bot noise).
I do have to find advertisers myself, but I rather go after advertisers with a good name than display scam ads for toe fungi remedies.
No, they should demand 'Verified Purchases'. We know this is technically possible.
I think the end user will benefit from any of this happening. As a user myself, I'm so tired of "forced ads", which makes me think a high percentage of ads revenue is fake/generated, not genuine.
Surprising it is taking advertisers this long to wake up, considering the decades I've been reading articles on HN about the massive fraud rates from entire fraud ecosystems.
The saying in marketing used to be: "Half of all marketing dollars are wasted, but we never know which half".
In the internet, it seems to be more like "90% are wasted" and literally never even get a human impression, nevermind a human click-thru and sale.
What was always surprising to me was how the advertisers just went along with the scam. Perhaps as if the marketers' bonuses depended more on advertisement budget spent instead of sales increased.
If that's the case, what is making them catch on now?
The entire internet ad business has never made sense to me. Have you ever clicked any of the links? The landing pages were always confusing and not at all designed for you to engage with them.
I used to think, okay, I guess they don't care about visiting their sites and just want to get eyeball impressions to stay relevant in the cultural zeitgeist.
Then I learned how ads worked in the print industry, where it is assumed in the calculation that every magazine changes hands through at least twenty people who all look at all ads. So maybe everyone was just already used to getting screwed over paying for ads.
Then there's the fear of missing out angle. People paying for ads don't know whether it makes a different, but are too scared to find out. I also once read about a small business that took that risk and found out not paying for internet ads made no difference whatsoever.
Maybe it's time for an entire country to decide to just straight up outlaw all internet ads for a couple years and force everyone to find out what happens.
I can't remember the last time I clicked an ad link. I can't even remember a brand I've seen advertised.
It was generally believed that "pivot to video" was entirely fraudulent.
What's happening now is the retreat from the open internet; users are either taking the Google AI search summary as gospel and not clicking through, or just going to chatgpt by themselves. Traffic from actual humans to non-FAANG pages is falling.
Open web display inventory is a mess. Nearly entirely fraudulent. Every person in the supply chain for open web display inventory, sometimes even including the Chief Marketing Officer of the firm purchasing the ads, is incentivized to turn a blind eye to fraudulent impressions. Fraud is ultimately paid for by shareholders and owners.
This is because everyone in the supply chain is paid per impression, so they don't have any real incentive to root out (or even discover/report) fraud unless the buyer is leaning on them to do so. An unsophisticated firm looking primarily at reach and impressions as key performance indicators sees those KPIs inflated by fraudulent impressions, so even the purchaser isn't really incentivized to discover fraud in those instances. And if you suddenly decide you do care about fraud after not caring about it previously, you're faced with the prospect of having to report to your stakeholders that the metrics you've been giving them have been bullshit for years.
If you're looking at conversions as your key performance indicator then you do care about fraud and will lean on your ad buyer to discover and reduce it, or else just avoid open web display inventory entirely and buy exclusively on platform properties like LinkedIn or Instagram.
There have been various efforts to reduce fraud for a long, long time. Obviously nothing so far has really comprehensively worked. But there are some people in the industry who do make their money and earn their reputations as fraud-fighters, and they continue pushing new solutions. If the fraud problem for open web display inventory could actually be solved it would probably result in a bonanza for anyone positioned to capitalize on a fraud-free supply chain, so some people are incentivized to chase the dream (or at least convince others that they're earnestly chasing the dream).
> If that's the case, what is making them catch on now?
Perhaps the threat that "AI" will soon be the only "eyes" that see (and subsequently ignore) their online adverts?
Back when 90% of ad spending was wasted, they still made money from the 10% that resulted in sales. That expectation was built into the CPM/CPC, and hence the ad budget.
With the amount of bot traffic I'm seeing these days, I would guess that the waste ratio is more like 99% now. That means a 90% reduction in conversions for the same ad budget. Surely someone is feeling the difference.
Analogue hole. This 'Verified Clicks' doesn't make sense.
What makes a click 'verified', bots can still click links with browser use anyway and you will not be able to tell.
https://archive.ph/PIrQi
The article is about email marketing. Some company has a proprietary algorithm that purportedly detects whether a click is legitimate based on 8y of development and data collection.
It’s definitely a race against the growing capabilities of the models in use and one that will be very difficult to win which is why there has been a significant push toward verification across the Internet—not because of the children, but because of the revenue.
And I have a proprietary algorithm that can identify whether Brooklyn Bridge is up for sale or not.
I mean it’s a marketing PR piece that’s likely targeted toward CMOs who are in love with email marketing.
Email marketing is inexpensive, easier to measure, relies on the ridiculous CDPs and ESPs they’ve been tricked into investing in, and the measured numbers are larger than other digital channels.
The problem isn’t that bots are clicking, it’s that those big numbers aren’t going up and to the right in a reliable way any longer and those CMOs need to change how they’re measuring media.
At the end of the day, CMOs need to be measuring contribution to revenue, not meaningless marketing metrics the rest of the C-suite doesn’t give the slightest of fucks about. But that’s super hard for most organizations without competent Marketing Science or capable agencies, and it’s seemingly expensive because their budgets are already tight from all of the fly-by-night shit they’re over invested in. So; they continue to push what they know as well as chip away at their budgets with silly providers who provide little value instead of biting the bullet and doing the right thing.
> ... whether Brooklyn Bridge is up for sale or not.
My "Magic 8-Ball" says: "Signs point to yes."
"Please drink verification can" (Black Mirror)
Not Black Mirror, 2013 vintage 4chan.
I stand corrected. It seems like the inspiration was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits , but that doesn't have the same link to advertising. Although it still looks alarmingly prescient.
Presumably a verified click is a click traceable to an attested human identity through your government's soon-to-be-implemented "KYC to use a computer or smartphone" policy.
The ad fraud could still come from malware running on KYC’d computers, while the owner of that computer is blissfully unaware.
Just lock down the OS so we can send a reliable signal whether the click originated from a real hardware input device or was software-driven
Oh, you programmed your Arduino to present itself as a mouse via USB, so you can do automated click-fraud that way? No problem, only certified hardware allowed as input devices from now on
I'm not sure what we are going to do about robot arms using touchscreens, or little devices that trick mouse sensors into thinking it's moving. Maybe continuous fingerprint reading?
> I'm not sure what we are going to do about robot arms using touchscreens, or little devices that trick mouse sensors into thinking it's moving. Maybe continuous fingerprint reading?
Heartbeat monitor paired to your mouse's fingerprint readers under the mouse buttons while your webcam verifies your Face ID?
"Approved live human detected: Please spit in DNA analyzer to verify."
Big picture, it kind of blew my mind a few years ago when I realized this: If one concern is the surveillance panopticon thing, it's mitigated by the fact that online advertising itself is a business "fraught" with the fact that there is just as much of an incentive for the seller of ads to be loose with the truth and to use those sorts of tactics as it is for anyone else.
They won’t.