
Publishers Bought Millions of Website Visits They Found Out Were Fraudulent - tysone
https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/these-publishers-bought-millions-of-website-visits-they
======
reustle
> An estimated $16 billion will be lost to ad fraud this year, and a
> significant portion of that will go to criminals who use bots and other
> nefarious means to siphon money out of the digital ad ecosystem.

That's a mind bogglingly big number, if true. I don't really find myself
feeling sorry for advertisers, though.

~~~
ghostbrainalpha
You shouldn't feel bad for the advertisers, but you should be worried about
the content producers you love who provide you free content based on
advertisements.

If true fraud levels were exposed it could shift the digital economy in a
massive way.

Say you have an unpopular dishwasher and it breaks. It's great to go to
Youtube and find someone showing you how to fix the problem even for a
relatively niche dishwasher. But if the ad money dries up for that content
producer, that video won't be there the next time you look for it.

Or you will be forced to pay $1.00 to watch it.

~~~
userbinator
_It 's great to go to Youtube and find someone showing you how to fix the
problem even for a relatively niche dishwasher. But if the ad money dries up
for that content producer, that video won't be there the next time you look
for it._

Not everyone who makes YouTube videos is doing it for ad money, especially the
sort of content you're referring to. A lot of people just do it to document
things for themselves and use YT as a "convenient place to put videos"; the
fact that everyone else can see is incidental.

~~~
chamakits
Very true.

But the only reason that YouTube is there as a platform that allows people to
upload videos for free is that they expect to make money either off of that
video through ads, or through other videos through ads.

~~~
manmal
Not necessarily true. Some want to get famous with their videos, some want to
express themselves in a creative way, or spread ideas, or build an online
following to capitalize later on...

~~~
mikebenfield
I think the point is that _Youtube_ expects to make money off that video. If
_Youtube_ could not make money from people's content, it wouldn't exist.

~~~
nightcracker
For a while now I've been thinking about the idea of having a state-funded
free and open video and image sharing platform. In the modern world I view
sites such as imgur and youtube as vital infrastructure, and would really like
to see them removed from commercial influence.

Just like roads need to be created regardless of their profitability, I think
it's important for society that we have means to share and view image and
video content regardless of profitability.

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skywhopper
Every layer of abstraction and complexity is another chance for fraud and the
advertising and content generation industries are layered like onions.

These business models seem like they’ve been modeled after real world JIT
manufacturing logistics. Deliver X units of product A to site B on this
schedule to meet these quotas and fulfill this growth pattern.

But real world manufacturing chains deal in real physical goods that can be
easily verified at the point of use. But in the world of online content
manufacturing, all the intermediary products are ephemeral electronic side
effects of human action that are easily duplicated artificially.

I hate to say that this world is due for a bubble burst but I hope it happens
sooner rather than later. Because if it’s working as envisioned currently then
our world is going to get more and more unpleasant.

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acchow
A bank spends $1000 on advertising and it ends up with dozens of accounts and
credit cards opened and they decide it's a good ROI. So they spend another
$1000 on advertising and get the same results again.

Why does it matter that millions of the ad impressions were fake?

~~~
saas_co_de
It matters to buzzfeed it their competitors are getting deals off fake traffic
:)

But really, when you are a large corporation that advertises through hundreds
of channels there is no way to attribute conversion to particular ads. You are
paying to have your ads seen by real people to create brand awareness and get
the multiple touches that will result in conversions. If those ads aren't
getting seen then obviously they are not effective.

~~~
walshemj
There is if you manage you ppc and display advertising properly. btw I think
you misusing channel here there are not "hundreds of channel's".

A channel is say Display vs PPC or Organic - I think you meant campaign.

~~~
saas_co_de
You are only talking about online advertising.

I am talking about large corporations like JPMorgan Chase (the subject of the
article) that are on the internet, tv, radio, billboards, print, sponsoring
conferences, sports teams, lobbying governments, thousands of physical
locations and ATMs that people see every day, etc, etc, etc.

Even with a PPC ad that results in a conversion can you really attribute that
sale to that particular ad?

For a large corporation no, because you can't tell what part of the sale is
due to the corporation's existing brand that is built up through exposing the
consumer to that brand thousands of times across multiple media.

Conversion rates for digital ads are only meaningful relative to the
conversion rates for other digital ads. They do not not allow you to attribute
a value to digital advertising relative to the rest of your ad spending.

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thisisit
Why is it legal to buy any amount of traffic and specifically "view" ? Most of
the time even if the traffic is "real" it actually originates from some
developing country.

Edit: Here's the part I am referring to:

> _Publishers often buy traffic at the end of the month or quarter to ‘make
> its numbers.’_ Traffic sellers often promise the publisher that the traffic
> is human and will pass through all ad fraud detection filters.

So I am not questioning advertising but blatantly buying traffic.

~~~
soared
Are you asking why advertising is legal?

Edit: In response to OP's edit. "Buying traffic" is literally just
advertising. You spend x dollars and that drives y traffic. Its worded like
that so it sounds bad.

~~~
eric_h
As someone who's built a few sites that relied on "buying traffic" to increase
user growth, we always called it "buying traffic" and I don't really think it
sounds all that bad.

The problem is when you're paying per impression in advertising, as that's the
easiest to game - the number of shitty impressions I've seen coming from
small, not-well-known data centers has taught me that cost per impression is
so prone to advertising fraud as to not be worth it.

~~~
soared
Yeah, so blacklist that data center. You can't just spend money and assume
everyone will give you a good deal. Optimize your campaign to buy good
traffic.

~~~
eric_h
> Yeah, so blacklist that data center.

The most egregious fraudulent traffic came from at least a dozen different no-
name data centers, and it was actually easier for us to cut out the fraudsters
selling us the traffic than to blacklist the traffic itself (even though it
was several steps away from the original source the traffic was purchased
from).

The traffic itself was actually rather easy to identify independently of its
actual network source, because they were using Selenium locked to a specific,
outdated version of Firefox that also happened to consistently throw some
errors that our standard infrastructure monitoring caught and alerted us to.

I still think that cost per impression is a difficult traffic source to
properly verify (especially if you end up with a traffic source that is
botting from compromised PCs) and as such should be treated with skepticism.
Cost per conversion/install/etc. generally seem to be slightly less gameable
(excluding, of course, the farms spread around economically disadvantaged
areas where workers have hundreds of actual devices on which they are
installing apps to game the cost per install ad traffic)

~~~
soared
Yeah cpa is less gameable for sure. I don't have any exposure to that.. I've
only ever seen cpm. (Or cpm converterted to ecpa after the fact)

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anonymous5133
If the stats are true then the whole internet ecosystem is at risk. Just look
at where the big internet services get their money. It is all advertising. If
the ad impressions are bunk then eventually advertisers will pull their
budgets due to declining sales or adjusting their ad budgets.

Also consumers are getting smarter by using ad blockers.

The only thing left is these schemes making the illusion that real people are
watching.

~~~
tzakrajs
Yeah I was also thinking (orthogonal to this specific post) that if you show
people ads of things they were already going to buy, then you can attribute
your impressions to the conversion. The business can become predicting what
people will buy versus directly influencing what they buy. That isn't to say
that there is no value to advertisers, but it might be oversold, especially
for large brands.

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seem_2211
Surely part of the reason that this is the case is that online ad impressions
are a fraction of the price of traditional media.

You can "reach" thousands of people for less than $200 online, whereas
conventional advertising is substantially more expensive.

This has to be one of the underappreciated reasons that traditional media has
been savaged so badly by the internet - the price difference is stark,
especially on a CPM level. But that price difference is also jacked up by
massive fraud everwhere - for example Facebook has told advertisers they have
access to more people in the US, than live in the US.

That's not to say that traditional media is clean in how they measure their
audience, but at least with a traditional ad you can turn on the TV and watch
it, or pick up a newspaper and read it, or drive past it. How many digital ads
never get seen by a human?

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vonnik
Talking Points Memo put out this great piece on the glut of publishers and how
advertisers want video more than website visitors do:
[http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/theres-a-digital-
media-c...](http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/theres-a-digital-media-crash-
but-no-one-will-say-it)

Fraud seems to happen more frequently in situations of distress. Like Madoff,
who had to expand his fraudulent operation to hide his past wrongdoing.

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jumpkickhit
Ages ago when I'd see something like this, I'd grab their affiliate code from
the URL, then email the advertiser the site and offending affiliate code to
them as an FYI.

No idea if anyone ever bothered to look, I just moved on.

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rak00n
Why can't we do ad payments based on location? I know it's not foolproof but
that will at least not reward click farms or IOTs from third world countries.

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vernie
My favorite part of this article is the block of bright red text advertising
their tip line. Who has any interest in snitching for the benefit of
advertisers?

~~~
yodon
That sort of banner is trying to get reports from disgruntled former employees
of the ad-fraud business

