How much of your audience is fake?

This is exactly why social networks are far less valuable than properties like Google that started with algorithmic foundations as opposed to rebranding the next geocities. I'll never trust facebooks numbers on their fake profiles especially when Yahoo kills close to 1mil fake profiles every month and while Ashley Madison was rife with them. Reddit started this way too, with tons of bots, fake accounts etc. We just don't know how many fake or synthetic Astroturfed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing accounts are really out there. I have a close friend that ran a consumer oriented search site with 50 million monthly active users and he showed me that if certain sites, not his, did not make it easy for fake accounts to be auto generated from various advertising groups and spammers, then they just would not get the bloated monthly active user numbers they wanted.

Ironically, Google the term "buy facebook accounts". This is the elephant in the room nobody wants to talk about in the social networking space. 50% or more of the social networking profiles out there could be fake given bots, systems and marketplaces that auto generate this stuff in mass amounts to spam and siphon ad dollars.

Another way to look at this is based on how and why virus makers target PCs along with how many PCs are currently affected.

Not many fake 'searches' are happening compared to fake bots and social networking profiles. Yet another reason why Google makes $70 billion per year.

I find the whole soft white underbelly of internet advertising interesting in that pollutes the entire advertising pool. Even ads that are "legitimate" are lost in a sea of click bait and click fraud and morass that is covered in the article.

It makes me wonder about companies that get a large part of their income from advertising (Google...). Once the ad market descends into a cesspool that no legitmate company will dip their toe into, can companies that depend on advertising revenue survive on the self-serving, artificial, and mostly automated, ad market?

Any clever advertiser doesn't judge the success of a campaign by its number of clicks, but by its number of conversions (and ultimately, revenue). What's become a new pain in the advertising space are spam/ghost referrals, messing your analytics only for the sole purpose of making you visit their websites, also adding up to the stack of fake audience of your site (which the article fails to mention).

Modern web advertising networks are an example of data telling lies we (or advertisers) want to hear.

The dream has always been to connect each advertising dollar spent to revenue generated. The reality is that data only exists in people's heads, is spread out over time, or is in their social interactions. My hunch is at least half, if not more, of all positive impact of ads (for the ad buyer) is generated this way. The data isn't low quality... it is literally impossible to collect.

For example: You research items on your desktop, then actually make the purchase on your phone while taking the train home. Maybe they can connect you to that purchase with enough tracking; So what if your neighbor or coworker asks about the product? Can't track that one.

Another example: You hear ads on a podcast for Igloo and when work starts asking about preferences for Confluence vs Jira you mention looking into Igloo. Your company ends up adopting it. Later you grow from 20 people to 3000. There's absolutely no way for Igloo to connect the dots leading to a 3000 user account. Let's say after discounts that's $300k/year. If Igloo paid $200/episode * 52 episodes/year * 20 podcasts = $208k. That's an absolute steal just to acquire that single customer.

Yet another example: You may be 24 with no kids living in an apartment but will you always be that way? Smart car makers understand that if you have a good experience with your first car in their brand you're much more likely to buy a larger car from them when you have kids, or a more luxurious car when your career advances. How can you figure out if the dollars spent advertising to the college kid with no money is wasted in that scenario?

So that's the great lie... that somehow all the tracking cookies, comScore profiles, etc will make advertising more effective or has some benefit period, regardless of fraud or click bots.

Advertising on the web right now is a fool's errand in many cases. I'm glad because it gives the small guys like me a chance to exploit the system to buy ads on lower-volume sites directly from the content creators and reach a good sized audience.

This is such a re-hashed story. While not good, it's not the big issue people seem to think they keep discovering.

For non-brand advertising this is easily solved by down funnel tracking. Any marketer worth their salt tracks to the 'ultimate goal' and will avoid shadier networks by results based tracking. End of the day marketing value comes down to a ROMI metric. It doesn't matter if 50% of the impressions are fake as long as the total investment pays off. For brand marketing I simply follow the networks that show DM performance as an indicator of quality display.

Generally the worse point for junk clicks is mobile display - particularly in app. Id never advise RON campaigns here without tight monitoring. I like to build white lists rather than a black lists for companies where I handle their marketing for display on mobile.

Interestingly I've been noticing increasing bot clicks on Google search ads. If I can detect this is makes me really suspicious why Google, with all their data/prowess is not.

This would really make interesting reading if someone wants to show this to the world. Even more interesting than the 2012 FB 80% bot claim: http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/30/startup-claims-80-of-its-fa...

"The most startling finding: Only 20 percent of the campaign’s “ad impressions”—ads that appear on a computer or smartphone screen—were even seen by actual people.

“The room basically stopped,” Amram recalls. The team was concerned about their jobs; someone asked, “Can they do that? Is it legal?” But mostly it was disbelief and outrage. “It was like we’d been throwing our money to the mob,” Amram says."

Every time I see an account of an advertiser seeing a viewability metric, it reminds me how scare tactics always work to drive sales. Viewability tech is very nascent and is often just guessing because there are so many variables out there that can give it both false positives and false negatives.

However, giving such numbers to advertisers drives sales of your tech big time, even if the number cannot be verified because it's such a scary number.

For this article? Most of it, because the animations annoyed all the human readers so much they closed the tab.

This is absolutely hilarious. And another powerful argument in favour of powerful ad blockers. Let the ad malware talk to the bot viewers and leave us out of it.

(That said, I'm still trying to work out how to unblock Project Wonderful, a non-arsehole ad network, in uBO. Seems to require picking the precise JS they serve.)

If you have any kind of posting allowed on your website, 80% of your server power is being used to deal with bots.

Good luck dealing with ipv6 traffic where their behavior cannot even be tracked across connections.

I'm already seeing bots that do not repeat an ipv4 in their farm for hours and that is with one attempt every few seconds.

Would be an interesting tactic for e.g. Microsoft to secretly set up a click-spamming botnet so as to pollute Google's click-through measurement enough that advertisers no longer trust it. Would that even be illegal?

I'm now very interested in making my own bot to generate views? Any code out there?

This comes from a coder that had 100 twit bots, before twitter banned my API access.

Aside from bot traffic, a significant percentage of "legitimate" traffic seems, anecdotally, to be engineered accidental clicks -- the mobile site that is constantly pushing content around in the hopes that one of your screen interactions accidentally yields an ad click. As one of an endless number of examples, a well respected, major recipe site has a mechanism to change the servings, and first you have to click on a "servings" button, and then on the actual serving count. After clicking on the servings, several hundred milliseconds later an ad appears exactly where the count input is, and clearly considerable engineering effort went into designing this, and many other, accidental interactions.

For what? I can only speak for myself but my immediate reaction is to click back and feel annoyed, and consider ad blocker options. It has never led to engagement or a purchase. Ever. The end result is that the performance of ads simply collapses, and sites have to get even trickier to entice accidental clicks. Rinse and repeat.

If you work in the "trick click" space, you are just dooming yourself. It is a race to the bottom.

Very insightful. Thanks for sharing.

Great article, thanks for sharing.

> He dismisses the idea that it’s hard to tell genuine traffic from fake. “The whole thing about throwing your hands in the air and saying, ‘I don’t know, maybe it’s real, maybe it’s not real’.