
Clickbait and Traffic Laundering: How Ad Tech Is Destroying the Web - johnks
https://kalkis-research.com/clickbait-and-traffic-laundering-how-ad-tech-is-destroying-the-web
======
AJ007
I wrote quite a bit here in other comments, then I read some more and looked
closer at the Kalkis-Research site. Please if you are a journalist and are
going to link to this article, take a closer look at the writers.

Is this even a real site?

a) Only the 3 posts about Google are free. The other articles have very short
descriptions and say you can buy them for €10,000. The thumbnail image
accompanying the buy link is the same in all. They may not even exist.

b) For all the details and charts in the Google pieces, they say "BEARISH
-70%" but have absolutely no math or estimation about how they came to that
conclusion.

c) The authors are pointing out fraud largely outside of Google's traffic
ecosystem -- ad exchanges, content recommendation ad networks -- but some how
Google is the company that will lose half of its value. They couldn't be
bothered to look at other public adtech companies?

e) What they outline definitely with regards to worthless ads being sold is
definitely real, occurring, and I'm not contesting that.

~~~
kalkisresearch
We're detailing the -70% in our first piece, it's based on the assumption of a
30% reduction in profits (so a 10%-15% fall in revenue, especially now that
Alphabet's moonshots are eating up more & more of ad revenue from Google),
which would lead to a repricing of the stock from "growth" to "value", and
thus a P/E of 15 instead of 30. Fraud is part of Google. Spider.io discovered
bot clicks on Youtube ads, which we mention. Not long ago, news came out that
a botnet had infected AdSense for Search ([http://marketingland.com/botnet-
hijacks-search-results-sipho...](http://marketingland.com/botnet-hijacks-
search-results-siphon-google-adsense-search-revenue-177468)), so the actual
google.com ad real estate that's considered the best in the world. No one is
safe. We are new and we do exist. You can check our profiles on LinkedIn, the
names are real & all. If you drop us a line by email, we'll gladly answer. You
must also aknowledge that every piece needs substantial amounts of work, so
someone real has to actually put in all the manhours. Notwithstanding the
technology that's behind the charts. The posts on ad tech are free because we
need to make a name for ourselves. The thumbnails suck because we overlooked
it, focusing on everything else, thanks for pointing that out :) Cheers

~~~
shostack
And where have you factored in the attempts Google makes to stamp out fraud,
such as by refunding clicks they identify as fraudulent? [1]

[https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/42995?hl=en](https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/42995?hl=en)

------
hanginghyena
Sorry, this is faux outrage. Some real world perspective:

\- Content promotion is different than display ads, at least in terms of how
receptive the audience is to buying. There's lots of research around this
(nobody trusts display ads).

\- Most content promo widgets run way below the fold and are a last squeeze on
the traffic before it leaves your site. The alternative to not running it is
earning nothing, not swapping it out. Generally you've already flashed your
own related content widget at the visitor.

\- You may hate it but... you clicked on it. We're giving you what you want.
If you like looking at stupid cat pictures (or worse), someone will give you
stupid cat pictures. We're not paid to provide moral or intellectual
censorship...

\- Old School Traffic Washing... so what? You take a bunch of junk traffic and
filter it into real humans who are in a relaxed and receptive frame of mind.
Often with some level of intelligence about what they are interested in, via
the stuff they click on. That's actually a good ad audience.

Seriously, do Google display advertisers reduce their rates because the last
search on Google was for "my filthy secret"? No, that space runs at the same
rate.

What's next, you gonna ban advertising from stupid TV shows too? There's stuff
on cable that's easily as bad as many click-bait sites, in terms of
intellectual content.

As long as it's not a bot and the brand ad is running next to content
appropriate for a brand ad, not seeing what the problem is here. If you don't
like it, don't place it on your site or click on it.

[I'd be more outraged about pop-ups and toolbar widgets; that IS a UX
interruption and often non-consensual...]

~~~
mtrn
> You may hate it but... you clicked on it. We're giving you what you want.

You tell me once, I need X, I won't care. You tell me ten times a day I need
X, I might get tired. Color me pessimistic, but people in general just need to
be told with clear words over and over what to do and without a strong
independent or stubborn mind they will follow.

~~~
hanginghyena
My machine learning algorithm says you will click on. So Dance, Monkey,
Dance!!!!!

<I think we've finally found skynet. They live at Outbrain.>

------
salmon30salmon
One aspect of web ads that nobody seems to mention, especially with click-bait
articles, is that people click them. They work, and they work very well.

Within the insular world of tech people, it all seems so absurd that anyone
would be interested in following these ads and click-bait articles, but the
truth is people enjoy that sort of content. This is why gossip magazines sell
like hot cakes.

I am not sure what the solution is. People like all sorts of things that are
bad for them.

~~~
combatentropy

      > I am not sure what the solution is.
    

I boycott them. Google News will present three articles about the same thing,
and I will click the one whose headline is most like what a headline should
be: an actual summary of the story. Sometimes all of them are clickbait, so I
just click the one for the site that I like most. It was surprising when I
first saw that even respectable companies like Time and USA Today had adopted
the clickbait style with gusto.

I'm not saying that this boycott will catch on and change the world. It's just
my own little war.

    
    
      > Within the insular world of tech people, it all seems so absurd
    

It's not because I'm in tech that I am wise to their tricks. It's because of
my writing background. I have only bits and pieces of evidence from my own
non-tech friends, but I'm pretty sure most people are aware that ads and
clickbait are manipulative and that gossip magazines are the linguistic
equivalent of junk food and bad for the heart.

And while I said I was dismayed to see the old guard like Time and USA Today
adopt the tactic of clickbait, most disconcerting of all is to see everyday
people start to adopt it. I've seen quite a few blog posts and Medium articles
posted on HN with clickbait titles. And on a certain video production forum, I
see members starting threads with clickbait subjects (something like "I bought
this camera, and you won't believe what happened!"). Forum members get no
money for clicks. So why do they do it? Maybe they just want some attention.
But I'm a little worried that it's just unconscious imitation, that
clickbaiting is catching on like a bad habit.

~~~
rms_returns
Another problem is how do you decide that something is clickbait without
clicking it? Agreed that most of the catchy headlines are actually clickbaits,
but there could be always some that are genuine.

Think of clickbaits as a marketing tactic. On the way to your workplace, you
see hundreds of those salesmen trying to sell you something by telling tall
tales. Your impression would be like, "Hey, not these stupid fellas again.
Next time one comes near me, I'll start a war on them!".

However, if you think about it, a substantial portion of those salesmen (at
least 20-30%) are genuine people who are just earning their livelihoods. You
know that even after accounting for some of their exaggerations, their
products are sometimes actually useful to you!

~~~
combatentropy
> how do you decide that something is clickbait without clicking it?

It's easy. The headline should tell the whole story:

    
    
        "Acme Widget stock down 2.5%"
        "CERN sientists discover Higgs Boson"
        "Smith and Jones tied in polls"
    

There is no mystery ("Acme Widget stock makes startling change"). While
there's not much room for detail, still: 1) I know what the article is about,
2) I know whether I would be interested in the rest, and 3) I can get a
summary of the day's happenings just by skimming the headlines. This was the
original purpose of headlines and one of the main reasons for the article
itself following a structure called the Inverted Pyramid. The headline told
the whole story, just in outline. The first sentence of the article told the
whole story again, just with a little more detail. The first paragraph covered
the whole story again, in yet more detail. Want more details? Keep reading
paragraphs. You can stop at any time. Your only loss is some detail. Compare
that to the circuitous, long-winded introductions of many blogs, where the
writer finally gets to the point about two thirds through.

Clickbait deliberately withholds information, instead of giving all it can in
the room that it has. Clickbait churns up questions, headlines give answers.
Clickbait lures you into a story that, in the end, was not interesting to you.
Headlines help you know whether the story will be interesting to you or not.

~~~
chaz
News stories are different from editorial, opinion, informational,
entertainment, etc. articles. For example, the top article on Google News for
me right now is a NYT editorial: "The Jobs Report Is Not Quite as Terrible as
It Looks." If I saw that on old-fashioned newsprint while skimming down the
page, I would definitely stop and read it. I also clicked the article to read
the story on GN.

Is it clickbait? How would you retitle this article?
[http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/04/upshot/the-jobs-report-
is-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/04/upshot/the-jobs-report-is-not-quite-
as-terrible-as-it-looks.html)

~~~
combatentropy

      > How would you retitle this article?
    

I don't think the headline is clickbait: "The Jobs Report Is Not Quite as
Terrible as It Looks." It's vague, yes, but it would be hard to cram much more
into the headline.

If you read the article, the reasons he gives for "why the jobs report is not
quite as terrible as it looks" is a hodgepodge of unrelated things: (a) the
report's margin of error is 100,000; (b) a three-month average is better; (c)
a wave of people are retiring; and (d) "as the economy approaches full
employment, jobs growth must slow."

It's hard to summarize it better than: "The Jobs Report Is Not Quite as
Terrible as It Looks Because . . . It's Complicated" (haha) or maybe "The Jobs
Report Is Down From Last Time But As Expected for a Mature Economy." More
descriptive, but kind of a clunker. I didn't say writing tight headlines was
easy.

Either way, I am not irritated at all by the original headline, because it
gives me an accurate indication of whether I would read the rest of the
article. In my case, I wouldn't. I look at the economy like the weather:
complex, hard to predict, and of little effect on me unless it's really bad.

    
    
      > News stories are different from editorial, opinion,
      > informational, entertainment, etc. articles.
    

I agree. Sometimes you're in the mood for a rambling essay. Some things are
complicated or indeterminate and cannot be easily summed up.

------
afarrell
I have, very occasionally, been extremely grateful to have seen ads. I don't
want ads to go away, I want irrelevant ads to go away. I really wish that:

1) When I bought something on Amazon, they would advertise products other than
the exact one I just purchased.

2) There was a chrome app which would, every week, ask me what personal
projects I was working on and then replace the existing ads I saw with ads
that would be relevant to the problems I'm willing to spend money on.

~~~
whatever_dude
For 2), if you're an Android user, you might want to install the Google
Opinion Rewards app. It's an application that shows (sponsored) user research
surveys, many times well targeted ones. The app is very clear about how your
answers to some questions are added to your Google Ad profile, to show you
"more relevant advertising".

On top of that you get paid a few cents for answering the questions, which can
accumulate pretty fast. I hate to sound like a shill, but I've been using the
app and I never pay for Android Play apps anymore just because of credits
accumulated through surveys I have answered. And I don't even take any of the
questions that will add to my Ad profile, so I've actually been skipping about
80% of them.

~~~
Animats
Or you could install our Ad Limiter[1], and block most Google ads in Google
search results. Google is getting in your face with their entire screens of
Google ads for some searches.

[1] [http://www.adlimiter.com](http://www.adlimiter.com)

~~~
whatever_dude
This seems unrelated to the original post's request. He does not say he wants
to see fewer ads, nor ads for specific brands, but rather more customized ads.

------
malchow
Coowner of one the larger premium ad exchanges here. I see a lot of folks
concerned about clickbait. I genuinely think this concern is overblown.

Clickbait articles service people who want them: people who are looking for
quick payoff content.

And that's most people. US Weekly, People Magazine –– this is all clickbait.
Even programs like NBC's Today Show and Tonight Show: dashed-off, quick-hit,
prefab bits––each of which is probably actually an ad, for something. And in
between those ads, there are––wait for it––more ads. Most of media is
clickbait and has been for a very long time. Even for Hacker News readers,
reading solely The Economist can get boring after a while. (A real short
while, if you ask me.) There's nothing wrong with fun.[1]

I see some people here concerned that clickbait sites are wasting advertisers'
dollars, but that isn't true, either. Advertisers do not purchase ads on
websites. They purchase audiences. BMW wants BMW intenders, and doesn't
(within a reasonable bound) care in which app or on which site it can locate
them. BMW buyers don't watch exploding watermelons? Nonsense! _That 's_ why
adtech exists––because finding the right people is vastly more important than
the distinct complexion of the publication itself. [2]

[1] [http://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-
idleness/](http://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/)

[2] Of course, there are good and bad ways to find the right people. I admit
that readily.

~~~
davemel37
What about the rampant fraud, bots and arbitrage between exchanges that do
nothing to provide real value and that exchanges have no incentive to correct
and according to some prominent advertisers are actually happy about all the
bots and fraud?

As someone paying for advertising space, why do I need to spend time and money
just figuring out which of your placements are bot traffic to exclude them,
and which of your publishers are just arbitraging taboola's traffic?

~~~
x0x0
If you buy ads on adx / high quality networks, it certainly minimizes the
pain. That plus a little human review of top demand partners and you'll be ok.
If you want to go after every scrap of traffic and chase bottom tier ad
networks, you get what you get. And from the perspective of an ad buyer, the
fraud gets priced into what they pay anyway.

~~~
davemel37
> the fraud gets priced into what they pay anyway.

Does unsustainable medical costs worry you? Because all they did was price in
the malpractice insurance and fraud.

It's just not good enough to say, its ok to pay for fraud because we dont care
to fight it.

There is very real opportunity cost for every dollar going to all the
stakeholders in the advertising chain.

------
gizi
The presence of honey attracts bees, the presence of horse shit attracts
flies, the presence of sheep attracts wolves, and the presence of manipulable
people attracts manipulators.

If these people started visiting another part of the web, "Ad Tech" would
immediately re-emerge there too. The tigers just follow the herds of wild
buffalos.

So, yes, watch out, if you can see wild buffalos, that means indeed that the
tigers cannot be far away.

The article wants to jeopardize the god-given right of some of the
manipulators to manipulate the manipulable crowds.

"Ad dollars are being stolen from publishers who actually put in an effort to
create original, useful content. This is very wrong."

Ha ha ha hah ha!

Apparently, there are legitimate and illegitimate manipulators. The good and
the bad thieves! The good and the bad burglars!

They are in a daggers-drawn contest on who exactly has the right to rip off
the idiots!

Yes, good question, who is the one who legitimately "owns" these idiots?

~~~
yolesaber
Actually bees make honey. It's pollen that attracts them.

~~~
talaketu
Bees collect pollen, but prefer nectar to sugar water.

------
netghost
Can we maybe re-title this as "10 Amazing Ways AdTech is Destroying the Web"?

~~~
BallinBige
"You won't believe #6"

------
mwexler
Not saying this destruction is happening or not, but their data to support
their claims is dreadful. All circumstantial viewing of links and pages,
google news trends, and Alexa profiles. Sadly, these days claims that may be
correct can be ignored when the supporting data supplied is weak (and vice
versa).

------
franciscojgo
Title should be "How Affiliate Marketing is Destroying the Web".

~~~
jamiequint
Actually it shouldn't be because this has nothing to do with affiliate
marketing.

Most affiliates get paid on a cost-per-action (CPA) basis, so they're actually
extremely disincentivized from buying against laundered traffic because it
doesn't perform well.

~~~
franciscojgo
EDIT: Immaturely commented without reading article in full. Now get the
"laundered traffic" issue. Thanks for correcting me. Either way, kept my
initial response.

Jamie, I don't understand what you mean by laundered traffic.

The clicks generated by click-baits, advertorials, etc you see on the sites
the study mentioned are real, non-bot traffic.

The ads you see there do in fact direct to shell sites, more commonly referred
to as "bridge" pages. All these sites do is create a conversion funnel that
starts with (for example) priming the reader about "fit girls" and end up in
an advertorial for a diet pill.

It's not affiliate marketing per se, as nowadays companies have their own
media buyers, but the fact is that businesses that are profitable enough to
profit from high volume, high chargeback rates are shady business that are
usually very active in affiliate marketing and CPA-networks. AKA, loans,
insurance, diet pills, etc.

So yes, it's not affiliate marketing, it's actually shady businesses. But it's
easy to make a single business compliant and run "good ads", whereas it's not
that easy to make thousands of affiliate compliant. And that's where you see
the problem.

These affiliates are the ones that turn to shady tactics and click-baits, etc
(which is simple a strategy to increase click-through-rates) to maximize their
profit.

~~~
jamiequint
This is the traffic laundering part. From the article:

"visitors are sent to low-end websites. But if you happen to be of high value
to the ad tech industry (based on your IP), you’ll be redirected through a
loop of various shell websites, spending a fraction of a second on each, in
order to increase the apparent quality of these websites’ audience."

------
chucknibbleston
This is interesting but the fact they list "adchoices" as a site's
monetization makes me wonder how much they know about adtech...

~~~
xufi
That's a very good point. Based on my personal experience ,I noticed
especially in the last year or 2. When I tried to block the new Facebook ads
that they were putting in different parts of the page and they were becoming
more cluttertish to the main news feed. Also.Forbes (who caught this early on)
doesnt let you proceed to go on their site unless you turn off ad blocking

------
jordanpg
A good reminder that the business model of the free-content internet is a
pathetically weak house of cards. Between the trivial availability of ad-
blockers and the laughable vapidity of the form taken by most ads, I think we
are due for a correction in the sector of ad-supported content.

As others have pointed out before, I don't think we'll be losing much of great
value and there are a huge variety of alternative revenue models available for
user-supported content.

And good riddance. If I go the rest of my like and never see another ad, that
will be fine with me. Same goes for just about all the free content I
currently consume. Won't miss it.

~~~
davemel37
>free-content internet is a pathetically weak house of cards.

>we are due for a correction in the sector of ad-supported content.

In my opinion, the problem is with the ad tech companies themselves more than
the free-content internet.

I don't think the free-content is the problem as much as the incentive of ad
tech companies and ad agencies to ignore or perpetuate fraud, arbitrage and
gaming the system, and the branding advertisers who are too dumb to demand
real accountability.

Essentially, all these VC backed ad-tech companies need to show growth, so
they want the fraud, bots and low quality ad impressions.

Big brand advertisers fool themselves into thinking the quality of the
placement is less important than reaching the right people, so they keep on
paying for garbage impressions, feeding these unsustainable ad tech companies,
without demanding bottom line accountability for measurable results.

and... Ad agencies are compensated with an archaic model from back in the day
when they earned commission from the publishers, so they want as much ad spend
as possible. Plus, they like be treating like kings by the VC-backed ad tech
companies.

It's all one big party, where the consumers suffer and the legit, performance
advertisers suffer.

There is still, despite over 3000 marketing tech startups, no one really
serving the ad buyers needs in a significant way.

we don't need another bid algorithm or vanity metric system... we need ad tech
that systematically roots out bots, fraud, and is accountable to bottom line
results for advertisers instead of acting as a broker that makes money
regardless.

Build that tech and you will have a billion dollar company.

------
ChuckMcM
I think this quote illustrates the entire motivation for the article:

 _" Ad dollars are being stolen from publishers who actually put in an effort
to create original, useful content. This is very wrong."_

This quote taps into the fact that for 10 years you could have a blog or
online site of really high quality content (defining quality by originality,
accuracy, and presentation) and ads on the site would pay for the organization
to present that information. Then about 5 years ago things fell off a cliff
and these sites found their AdSense checks drop 80 - 90%.

There are a lot of things at work here however and not all of them were
obvious to publishers.

Of course there are "content mills" and "content farms" and "robo content",
all names for web sites that were throwing together hundreds or thousands of
articles of derivative content. Many it seems driven by the simple idea that
you could pay people $1 on mechanical turk to read an article, and paraphrase
it as a new article, throw that up on your "news" site and collect $3 to $4 in
ad revenue. The more money you put in, the more money you got out, and these
things are really huge.

The second was of course that people could "man in the middle" ad networks,
buying an ad on one network and selling a dozen ads on a different network. So
your Google Ad for "secrets to getting designer shoes at 1/3 the price."
linked to your page of a dozen ads for cut rate shoe companies. $1 of ad spend
arbitraged into $1.50 or more of ad revenue.

And finally the real poison in the well, Google for years has reported its CPC
numbers going down (Cost per click, the amount an advertiser pays Google for
an ad). Of course reading the top line and bottom line numbers off their
reports will obfuscate it. Google adds more ads on all their properties to
boost volume, Google cuts under performing projects to reduce costs, and they
buy (or divert) as much traffic as they can to their properties. The end
result is they meet their numbers, but the "partner sites", their checks keep
going down and down.

It is odd that the CPC value of ads going down, which drives the reduction in
revenue at ad supported sites, forces sites into one of two places (after they
have cut costs to the bone), they can either get more aggressive about their
ads (to get more clicks to replace the revenue) or they can shut down (as Dr.
Dobbs did). Or they can add a paywall (which may kill them anyway depending on
how it is implemented).

The business model is dying, and greed is helping it along.

------
old-gregg
This is selfish, but I don't mind what's happening with online advertisement
industry. During the 2000s it went overboard and finally triggered the market
response I'm thankful for.

We have wonderful things like uBlock and yesScript that allow you to fine-tune
your exposure to ads and Javascript with ease. My online experience is
wonderful: clutter-free sites, fast loading times and my battery lasts forever
due to minimal Javascript exposure.

The web audience has self-selected into two groups now: the ad-consuming and
ad-blocking ones. You don't even need to be particularly tech savvy to opt to
never see ads again. Nothing to be outraged about.

Even those parallax scrolling sites aren't a problem anymore: the second you
see something fly to the left or zoom on you when you try to simply scroll
down, reach out to that sweet yesScript button, and bam! - the insanity stops.

The only thing I found no easy answer for is those sticky CSS "navigation
toolbars" that so many of sites started to roll out. These ridiculous
contraptions sometimes occupy up to 30% of vertical real estate and I haven't
found a blocker for those yet. 90% of the time they go away if you turn off
Javascript for the offending site using yesScript, and in the remaining 10% a
custom uBlock rule will do the job, which is a bit annoying.

------
TheBiv
Given that Alphabet has 686.56M outstanding shares at the moment, this
research firm believes that Google's market cap will go from it's current
$495B to $137B.

~~~
rbinv
This "research firm" has been super bearish with regards to Google/Alphabet
and is obviously short. All of this "adocalypse" talk seems somewhat
overblown. Besides, even if Google's display ad business went to zero, it
would certainly not exactly kill 3/4 of their revenue and/or profits (because
there's still all the search ad business).

------
bencoder
I've recently had a recruiter send me emails with clickbait titles, that I've
fallen for:

\- Java vs Scala - The JVM Battle...

\- Elasticsearch vs SOLR within AWS...

------
6stringmerc
Yeah in my opinion traffic laundering - well, fake traffic as a general thing
- is a real issue with the arts and entertainment sector - the desire to have
something go viral is intense. It may not be jacking ads to show other
information, but as far as using web resources in a fraudulent manner, it's a
relative. Clicks beget clicks. It's actually baked into the design of
websites: Reddit, HN, Facebook...all these sites cater to the idea that a
swarm will raise something above the fray and get attention.

There are _numerous_ services that offer indie musicians batches of clicks or
followers or what have you. I stay far away from all that because, in hard
terms, I want to track organic metrics. Well that and the general principle of
thinking pay-for-fake-listens is essentially gutter-trash dishonest behavior.
Others...obviously don't feel the same, so the industry exists.

------
Animats
This is a mirror view of another phenomenon - Google and Facebook are sucking
up more of the ad revenue. They're over half of all online ad revenue now, and
climbing.

Google's solution to web spam has been to go into the web spam business and
monetize it. Search Google for "credit card". The entire first screen is
Google ads for marginal credit card providers. Five years ago, the top results
were for many of the same marginal credit card providers, but they were
organic results not monetized by Google.

So with Google having taken over the most profitable parts of web spam, the
remaining players are fighting over the scraps. That's what this article is
about.

------
CaveTech
The "seedier" actors in the ad space have always been about arbitrage. You can
argue all you want how they're destroying the web, but the fact is they can
purchase cheap traffic and remonetize it for gain. That's the definition of
arbitrage and it exists in all types of industries, and is usually not viewed
negatively.

Advertisers are in full control of assigning value to a traffic source by way
of demographic targeting and bidding... Either the Advertisers are still
profiting over the whole interaction or they're bidding too much for their
traffic. It's not the middle men who are to blame.

~~~
dave2000
You can argue all you want "how they're destroying the web, but the fact is
they can purchase cheap traffic and remonetize it for gain. That's the
definition of arbitrage"

People don't have a problem with arbitrage. It's just the annoying ads when
you're surfing the net.

------
FussyZeus
I love this in a morbid way. The ads are mistargeted, the viewership is fake,
and what remains of the clicks is half accidental.

The only reason any of this makes any money is because there is money to be
made in pretending it's 1995.

------
dharmon
Can someone explain how the toasted balls play works? Are they arbitraging by
buying cheap porn ads then selling higher priced ads to the same traffic?

I don't see how this would work, except for the paragraph that follows in the
article talking about "laundering" traffic to make it appear higher quality,
so maybe they get good money for their ads? But still, CPC is generally not
cheap compared to CPM.

~~~
mattlondon
Buy traffic from porn ads at say $0.05 (I am making these figures up) per 1000
impressions with the hope that perhaps 5% click through to your site (again,
making up click-through rates).

On your page (i.e. the page where people go if they click your ads), you host
advertising from others - that advertising might be pay-per-click or pay per
1000 (CPM).

The numbers: So lets say you pay 5c for 1000 ads and you get 50 visits to your
site, or to think of it another way $1 gets you 1000 visitors to your site.

That means that you either need to find a cost-per-1000 advertiser that is
over $1 per 1000, or you need to find an advertiser that pays enough per-click
on their ads to cover that $1 cost, e.g. if you get a 1% click-through rate on
the ads on your site, that $1 to get 1000 visitors will also get you 10 ad
clicks, so if you can find a pay-per-click advertiser that offers more than
10c per click, you're making money.

~~~
AJ007
They are buying pop ups so the user doesn't need to click anything. The ads on
the publisher's side are sold on a CPM basis so they don't need to click there
either. The math just isn't going to work if you need to buy clicks on one
side and sell them on the other.

The big magic was basically video ads on the ad exchange. The advertisers paid
more and had no actionable metrics to track, much less tracking clicks. There
is some smart pricing, so the CPMs do get driven down, but not to 0.

The hard part to this is what happens when you don't get paid or worse you get
a bill going back months for money already paid out.

------
dc2
Third paragraph in has a typo:

> _It also have remarkably little user interaction with its content._

Who is Kalkis Research? How am I supposed to take them seriously?

------
dave2000
I think I'm supposed to enable JavaScript for this site to make the tedious
cookie warning which covers half the screen go away.

~~~
maze-le
I always open up my developer tools, find the div containing these warnings
and remove them.

~~~
jeromegv
Try the "Kill sticky" bookmarklet to save you some time
[https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-
headers/](https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/)

------
funkdobiest
I think "Ad tech" is a bit too generic as there are many players, and pieces
in this game and some are very legit, while the others they talk about are
not. Unfortunately the bad guys, give them all the bad image.

------
some1else
I find it interesting how the media accepted their large bounce rates, and
decided to monetize them with Taboola and Outbrain.

------
meeper16
First AOL, then geocities, friendster, myspace, facebook and now ad tech...

------
dgaisan007
That's exactly why everybody should start using services like
[http://html5maker.com](http://html5maker.com) to create their ads

------
bllguo
Isn't this title itself clickbait?

