
Google emails in Adtrader lawsuit show company didn't refund ad fraud - manigandham
https://www.businessinsider.com/google-emails-adtrader-lawsuit-refund-ad-click-fraud-2019-5
======
benologist
There was another interesting case Google settled last year. When they ban
Adsense accounts they refund advertisers whatever fraud incurred and the rest
of the banned accounts' revenue, earned legitimately, they _____________.
Someone they banned took them to court to solve this riddle.

After fighting the case for four years Google settled for $11 million on the
grounds that it would be too expensive to show they weren't keeping that
money, too.

[https://www.searchenginejournal.com/adsense-
lawsuit/248135/](https://www.searchenginejournal.com/adsense-lawsuit/248135/)

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prepend
I have a few friends who work at google and this seems like common knowledge.
In conversation though it wasn’t nefarious, they just thought it was
unavoidable and relatively constant so they reasoned that the inefficiency is
built into the price. When I asked that they did to combat it, they weren’t
aware. Hopefully this lawsuit shows the lengths that google goes to to reduce
ad fraud.

But it seems likely to not be too effective. It just seems like the incentives
aren’t there. It’s like when magazines estimate their readership, there’s no
regulator checking their numbers so it’s just something buyers have to accept.

~~~
reaperducer
_It’s like when magazines estimate their readership, there’s no regulator
checking their numbers so it’s just something buyers have to accept._

Completely untrue. There are several organizations that audit print
circulation very closely. And the more closely a print publication is audited,
the more it can charge for advertising.

One org is The Alliance for Audited Media:
[https://auditedmedia.com](https://auditedmedia.com)

~~~
prepend
My source came from Time Inc. they showed me the audited numbers and also
their estimated views based on doctors offices, friends loaning, etc. that
number is audited in that they explain their surveys and whatnot, but it’s
pretty specious. And advertisers don’t care so much.

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jcampbell1
Their account managers are great at helping people spend more money, but less
helpful than Comcast at refunds when they make a mistake. We have spent a few
million dollars over the years with Google, and one time they ran ads globally
for 24hrs costing us about $4,000. Easy mistake on their part, but getting a
refund was impossible. They have a monopoly and it wasn't a huge deal, but
even fairly benevolent monopolies can be a bit abusive.

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manigandham
What's especially egregious here is that Google has products on both sides of
the market (buying ads for advertisers and selling ad space for publishers).

When their buy-side platform is transacting with their sell-side system, it's
all internal payments and should have no problem being refunded. Considering
the size of the company and this being a core product, it's extremely hard to
suggest this was just a technical oversight. The emails seem to indicate that
they knowingly withheld this money.

EDIT: if you're going to downvote this, explain why.

~~~
ganeshkrishnan
I have noticed that anyone talking about Google negatively on HN gets an
inital barrage of downvotes and then after a few days reaches to around 1 or 2
points.

It has been the same for almost all of my comments which talks down Google.

~~~
TAForObvReasons
HN comments negative about FB can be positive or negative, depending on
whether they focus on the company (positive) or on the nature of Zuckerberg
(negative)

HN comments negative about Musk or Tesla are generally downvoted hard.

HN comments negative about Uber or Lyft are generally positive.

The comments downvoted most of all are those calling out the hivemind

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isnetea
One has to wonder what percentage of the endless billions in revenue earned
over the years by Google has been fraudulent.

~~~
byron_fast
I'm guessing most of it. Was giving them $5k / month, turned it off... zero
effect. Other than no more traffic from Romanian blogs that were always 404.

Out of our top 10 traffic sources, at least half were fraud from our Google
spend. The other half was legit Google searches.

~~~
username444
People blame AdWords for getting no result when they don't know how to use
basic targeting and settings.

It's extremely easy to turn off non-google.com ads (ie. no partner network)
and restrict geographic settings to just your target market.

AdWords is by far our most profitable advertising channel, but it took me a
few years to fine tune it.

~~~
prepend
I disagree. I manage a few small (<$10k/month campaigns) and Google is
constantly advising bad moves. They recommend networks I’ve repeatedly turned
off. They recommend geographic regions where I don’t operate. They recommend
keyword combinations that have nothing to do with my site.

The default recommendations from AdWords are always bad for me and always very
much more expensive. If I just accepted their recommendations and then their
recommendations to up ad spend, I would easily pay 10x.

Maybe google is good for everyone but me. But maybe google just makes
recommendations in their interest instead of mine.

Even with close attention, I find that I have to walk the line to not screw up
because Google is trying to trick me. I feel similarly about Facebook’s
changing privacy stuff. Like it’s me against the firm.

~~~
username444
I agree 100%.

I've never had a consultation with one of Google's reps where the suggestion
didn't increase my spend, while giving a worse ROI. At this point, I don't
believe it's incompetence, it's systematic malice.

But I wasn't talking about using any of Google's suggestions, by phone or
their automated recommendations. I was just referring to simple a/b testing
and systematic use of negative keywords and fine-tuning settings.

11pm-5am is universally disabled for all my campaigns for example. My customer
base simply isn't awake and buying at these times, because they have jobs.
This alone dropped ad spend by 25% while only reducing conversions by 5%.

~~~
eitland
Not to mention that they repeatingly shows ads that I have taken the time to
click "Not interested" on, to which they have answered "We'll try not to show
you this ad again."

They either lie or they have just failed badly so far.

So some poor smuck - or rather a wealthy owner of a number of scammy sites -
is getting fleeced, month by month, as AdWords keeps insisting on insulting me
by suggesting my current family isn't good enough.

------
ChuckMcM
Wow. I wonder if the entity that was Blekko and is now just a post office box
somewhere could get back the hundreds of thousands of dollars Google decided
not to pay out because they didn't like something about them. I'm sure the
advertiser's never got any money back.

------
stoev
Here is a recent WSJ article on the topic with a few more details in it:
[https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-to-refund-advertisers-
af...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-to-refund-advertisers-after-suit-
over-fraud-scheme-11558113251)

------
baybal2
One of my past employers, a major Adnet with whom I only worked 6 months,
employed a lawyer company full time just to just scoop and snoop their
employees social media posts.

I got to know that when I simply wrote some bare speculations and musings of
how the industry sees ad fraud, and got a call just 8 hours later.

The entire topic is a "don't ask, don't tell" thing in the industry.

~~~
otabdeveloper2
Not really. Not having fraud would be a huge competitive advantage, so of
course ad companies are investing huge resources into fraud prevention.

That said, the assumption is that advertisers are the victims here. However,
in reality ad spending is driven by huge multinational, bureaucratic and
dysfunctional companies. For many of these companies the goal is simply to
spend the allocated budgets, and forget about sanity and KPI-driven processes.
In that sense advertisers and fraudsters are willing accomplices.

~~~
onetimemanytime
>> _Not really. Not having fraud would be a huge competitive advantage, so of
course ad companies are investing huge resources into fraud prevention._

What if they decide to have just enough fraud? Make money but advertisers see
it as cost of doing business

~~~
otabdeveloper2
You miss my point. Ad networks and ad tech companies aren't aiding and
abetting fraud. For them it is a cost center. Advertisers are the ones aiding
and abetting fraud.

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Crosseye_Jack
[https://outline.com/aA7HS5](https://outline.com/aA7HS5)

Non-Paywalled link.

------
darkhorn
Also there are some Android apps that ask you to click ads after a certain
usage. Even though I have reported the app no action was taken.

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hcnews
Thanks.

Hacker News should promote non-paywall links, when available, as a general
policy. non-paywalls are more user friendly.

~~~
dang
This has been a settled issue for years. You'll find it in the FAQ:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)
and there's more explanation here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989)

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20paywall&sort=byDate&...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20paywall&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix&page=0)

We detached this comment from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20033431](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20033431)
and marked it off-topic.

~~~
qwbfv
Maybe that should reviewed at some point given that 1) more sites are putting
up paywalls and 2) they are being made harder and harder to bypass.

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LifeLiverTransp
Someone ripped off a whole industry who considers humans to be easy
manipulated sheeps and animals. Crocodile tears everywhere.

~~~
falcolas
While the advertising industry is not exactly a paragon of virtue, we are
talking about nearly 9 digits of money being stolen, if we speak bluntly.
That's a lot of money; a lot of lives and families affected in a negative way.

Advertising may indeed be evil, but this is one advertising firm stealing from
another, to nobody's benefit.

~~~
LifeLiverTransp
Scam technology improvements can be beneficial in the long run? Same rule
applies after all too military technology research?

