
Creating Web Traffic “Out of Thin Air” - pulisse
https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/porn-runs-the-internet
======
username223
> And like so many things on the internet, the technique and even some of the
> traffic used to execute this burgeoning method of ad fraud, traces some of
> its origins to porn.

Sex: the true driver of most human innovation since forever.

> [T]he VP of content and marketing for DingIt, told BuzzFeed News that the
> site uses "4 independent traffic verification tools that monitor each view
> on our video player"...

I wonder how much that cost to develop and deploy.

Details at Slideshare, sadly...
[https://www.slideshare.net/augustinefou/traffic-
origination-...](https://www.slideshare.net/augustinefou/traffic-origination-
super-networks-83853611)

The fact that this is the foundation of the tech economy does not augur well.

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f2n
>Adam Simmons, the VP of content and marketing for DingIt, told BuzzFeed News
that the site uses “4 independent traffic verification tools that monitor each
view on our video player” and prevents any fraudulent traffic from viewing
content or ads on the site.

I wonder what the hell a "traffic verification tool" is.

~~~
manigandham
Vendors like WhiteOps, Integral Ad Science, Moat, Forensiq, DoubleVerify, etc.
that are used to see if visitors to a website viewing the ads are actually
people during normal browsing or whether they are bots or other fraudulent
behavior.

None of them work well.

~~~
f2n
What do they do to decide if a user if real or fake? I am not remotely
surprised that none of them work well

~~~
manigandham
That's their trade secret but distills down to measuring all the various
factors that a person actually reading a page would do: time, scroll
speed/depth, click rate/location, previous history, mouse movements, http, ip,
network traffic, browser profiles, etc.

Although these days with headless chrome and how easy it is to just record and
replay someone's session, it becomes incredibly hard to detect with accuracy,
especially while trying to not affect browsing behavior beyond the typical ad
load experience.

There is lots of overlap with this and other security-focused companies that
work with financial and government companies to protect their own websites and
apps, although it's easier when you own and control the site, proxies and
backend.

~~~
aw3c2
Jesus Christ, that is creepy and perverted.

~~~
pixl97
Welcome to marketing! Get out while you are still sane.

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StavrosK
I love the subtle dig, using "porn or illegal downloading site" as a stand-in
for "unscrupulous site". The two sets are not equal, and just saying
"unscrupulous" would have served better.

~~~
dmurray
Those are the two main types of site that Google ads won't touch, though. So
if they monetize using ads, they need to use an unscrupulous ad network.

------
eli
I think this sort of stuff resolves on its own in time. Eventually the
marketers actually paying for bogus ad impressions look at a spreadsheet and
notice that the despite strong numbers, these ads aren't translating into
sales or new user signups or increased brand awareness. And then they pull the
plug and put their ad dollars elsewhere.

~~~
manigandham
That already happens. Right now, net marketing spend of $1 still returns > $1
in sales or whatever value metric the marketer wants - so in effect all the
fraud is already priced in.

The problem is that the price is inflated and passed down to consumers so
there is still strong motivation to actively combat ad fraud, at least until
the cost of the combating is more than the savings, but that's a long way off.

~~~
eli
Presumably a competing ad network with less fraud will provide even better
returns and dollars will migrate there.

~~~
manigandham
Most ad network campaigns are bought through politics and relationships,
especially all the branding objectives which are a majority of the market, so
it's not that simple.

Performance marketers are definitely more sensitive but they're happily served
by Google and Facebook for now.

------
RileyJames
“It’s unclear what Haim’s current role is with DingIt, as he opened but did
not reply to two emails from BuzzFeed News. Visser opened but did not reply to
an email.”

I find it odd that they would report on “opens”. Particularly in an article
about how tracking / verification technology is so easily duped.

~~~
manigandham
There is a big difference between a tracking pixel image in an email that's
only delivered to a single inbox vs the vast environment of the open web with
all the various websites and ads that run.

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atesti
This is hard to believe that it really works:

a) For all these tracking scripts acompanying each ad it should be trivial to
detect that the window is invisible and really nothing is even hovered

b) For everyone it should be easy to detect that a page that was loaded in the
background redirects after a short time. It should be so easy to find these
pages manually and ban them.

Why does such an obvious and primitive technique like popunders with auto-
redirecting "webrings" even work at all???

------
blackflame7000
One of the sites he lists as fraudulent rargb.to is actually a torrent site as
large as thepiratebay

------
pgrote
What is the technical explanation of the invisible window mentioned? Do all
browsers allow it? Will an ad blocker stop it?

"A user often has no idea this is happening in the background, and in some
cases porn sites load the pop-under as an invisible window that can’t be
seen."

~~~
f2n
It's not terribly complicated JavaScript. A pop-behind is generally done by
calling Window.open() to open a new window, then Window.focus() to re-focus
the original window. Another method I've seen is opening a pop-up with the
original site, then redirecting the original window to the advertising site.
The MDN page for Window.open()[0] actually mentions some of the restrictions
around opening windows and focusing other windows that have been added to
browsers.

[0] [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/API/Window/open](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/API/Window/open)

------
zeta0134
Is there a policy on [NSFW] tags or the equivalent? Nothing about this
headline suggested to me that opening it while at work was going to plaster my
screen with a giant cartoon ass, and while I'm fortunate to work in a tolerant
space, others might not be so lucky.

~~~
always_good
Doesn't sound like it's anybody else's responsibility to help you dick around
while on the clock.

I'm not saying a workplace should care about you visiting a webpage with a
cartoon ass on it, but I just don't think it's anyone's problem but your own
since there are precautions you can take yourself, like using a separate
browser for dicking around with images disabled.

If you can't be bothered to do that, then why should anyone else.

~~~
dang
Yikes, can you please drop the nasty swipes when posting here?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

