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Comment by osrec | Hacker News Reader

I am finding Google adverts less and less effective for an e-commerce business my parents run. I think it may be because consumers are getting better at ignoring the ad-noise on the web, and this is potentially quite worrying for Google and other ad based businesses. It's not beyond the realms of imagination that this fake traffic could be an attempt re-bolster their main revenue stream, and they've been caught out by their customers!

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Don't forget the rising rates of adblock shifting which demographics actually see the ads.

https://pagefair.com/downloads/2017/01/PageFair-2017-Adblock...

> It's not beyond the realms of imagination that this fake traffic could be an attempt re-bolster their main revenue stream

It basically is beyond imagination unless you think they have a new income plan that just needs one more quarter. Google's long-term value is in the conversion rates of long-term advertisers: drop conversions in half with fake traffic and next month they are going to offer you less than half the bid or nothing if they have high site costs per visitor. I.e. licensed booking listings.

Probably partners that share immediate revenue with Google but are less invested/secure in their portion of the long term value of that stream are behind it.

I don't disagree with your comment, however, I am often surprised by the short-termism demonstrated by executives. It may not be Google's strategy, but I am sure they are well aware of it happening, and in that sense it feels like a lie of omission. Apologies if I sound cynical, but I would guess that a company that has been running an ad platform for the past 17 years clearly knows the difference between authentic and fake traffic.

It is a certainty that some traffic is fake.. In this case it is doubleclick on websites and (from the commission numbers) probably over other ad networks, so Google has one connection's header and a few ms to triage the traffic. But the anomalies there are probably not so different than if I setup an open proxy and invite real people to use it.

Being cynical makes sense, but then it is actually more likely that Google has been generating fake traffic on fb than fake traffic for itself and vice versa. FB spent years being irrelevant to much of the market while getting a lot of money from less savvy advertisers for bot networks. I don't think the short-term revenue was worth it to them and I would be surprised if their exec bonuses weren't mostly hurt by missing targets and losing big advertisers.

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