Comment by ZoF | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ZoF | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I feel like you're misunderstanding the situation to be honest...

>As far as they are concerned fake and real plays are not much different

This is flagrantly false given that they do care whether plays are legitimate because they do want to be able to verify with advertisers that plays are served to credible clients...

Are you implying that Spotify would expect that advertisers are stupid/inept enough to not notice when a large number of ads are served to fake/bot consumers?

Spotify as a company has the prerogative of acting with integrity in these situations if only for future maintainability/acquisition of relationships with advertisers.

Even if an advertiser was inept enough to not notice their ads were served largely to bots the value of those ads would still ultimately be lowered by them being served to bots. e.g. if 1000 ads are served and 500 are sent to bots, the overall value of each clicked ad is eventually lowered by 50%. This is assuming an advertiser is so inept they aren't measuring clicks per served ad, which doesn't even occur.

I think you're fundamentally misunderstanding why spotify _does_ have to maintain the credibility of those ad clicks/listens/etc...

Advertisers may or may not care. Many are indeed both stupid and inept. Their clients should care, but may not be technically savvy or aware enough to care. Fragmentation in advertising also makes accountability a lot harder.

Spotify definitely has to care in the long run, but it may be better for their chances of making it through that IPO window to see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil until someone forces it upon them. If it worked for Facebook and Twitter, why wouldn't it work for Spotify?

Honestly, this is one of the reasons why 'free' services provide such low value to advertisers unless there's world class fraud fighting capability at the company. If the service is paid, it's significantly more expensive to generate fake traffic. But that'd be bad for the loosey goosey user numbers (AKA 1990s era 'eyeballs') that so excite momentum investors.

Sure, maybe they could get to an IPO without addressing the issue, that doesn't in any way invalidate the legitimacy of the posted article.

There is a vulnerability. It is exploitable. In the long run spotify _will_ be negatively affected if it isn't addressed.

Honestly surprised that there is any arguement whatsoever to the contrary.

If it was, 'well they can make it to IPO before addressing it' as you've stated, sure, that's valid. The parent was saying, 'it's not an issue, it's a matter of perception'.... Which is extremely naive and shortsighted. Perception is the very thing that drives advertisement cost.

Nope, doesn't invalidate what he did. Everyone would be better off if this was either cleared up or if other streaming services with models less prone to fraud could pop up.

Is it my tone then?

Rereading my posts I do seem like a braggadocios douche, but I'm not incorrect at all I don't think; the comment I'm replying to is incorrect though.

That I genuinely feel is true.

Yes the parent comment you were replying to was off base and you were right to correct him. You didn't seem rude to me. I was being a little bit sarcastic about Spotify riding a fraud-wave to a public offering based on inflated numbers.

> As far as they are concerned fake and real plays are not much different beyond maintaining credibility with their advertisers.

No real desire to argue the semantics of what I wrote. This is bizarre. Anyhow, the difference is that one situation is an issue of perception and the other is of actual fraud. Not sure why you think perception and reality are identical things.

What?

Botnets 'listening' or 'streaming' is fraud.

That it's not immediately identified is obviously not an issue. E.g spotify isn't affected by the fact that the steps outlined in this post occurred. They are however affected by the fact that this is possible on a larger scale.

The post has demonstrated that the cost of server time for generating 'listens' is less than the amount of royalties paid out. Therefore any artist with the appropriate technical ability could code up a botnet that generates him more revenue then he is spending whilst having literally 0 legitimate fans/listeners.

Are you seriously not able to understand why this is an issue?

Yes; In isolation, this singular post isn't a problem. But when freemoneyforbadmusic.ru pops up offering 10000000 listens for 5$ spotify will have a real problem.

What are you not understanding about this?

There's nothing really semantically wrong with what you've said. It's just factually incorrect.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com