Google emails in Adtrader lawsuit show company didn't refund ad fraud | Hacker News Reader

Google emails in Adtrader lawsuit show company didn't refund ad fraud

businessinsider.com

126 pointsmanigandham37 comments

There was another interesting case Google settled last year. When they ban Adsense accounts they refund advertisers whatever fraud incurred and the rest of the banned accounts' revenue, earned legitimately, they _____________. Someone they banned took them to court to solve this riddle.

After fighting the case for four years Google settled for $11 million on the grounds that it would be too expensive to show they weren't keeping that money, too.

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/adsense-lawsuit/248135/

I have a few friends who work at google and this seems like common knowledge. In conversation though it wasn’t nefarious, they just thought it was unavoidable and relatively constant so they reasoned that the inefficiency is built into the price. When I asked that they did to combat it, they weren’t aware. Hopefully this lawsuit shows the lengths that google goes to to reduce ad fraud.

But it seems likely to not be too effective. It just seems like the incentives aren’t there. It’s like when magazines estimate their readership, there’s no regulator checking their numbers so it’s just something buyers have to accept.

That's super sketchy, to be honest. For this to be relatively well known- but hidden from customers, which it certainly has been- this amounts to theft.

It’s like when magazines estimate their readership, there’s no regulator checking their numbers so it’s just something buyers have to accept.

Completely untrue. There are several organizations that audit print circulation very closely. And the more closely a print publication is audited, the more it can charge for advertising.

One org is The Alliance for Audited Media: https://auditedmedia.com

My source came from Time Inc. they showed me the audited numbers and also their estimated views based on doctors offices, friends loaning, etc. that number is audited in that they explain their surveys and whatnot, but it’s pretty specious. And advertisers don’t care so much.

Their account managers are great at helping people spend more money, but less helpful than Comcast at refunds when they make a mistake. We have spent a few million dollars over the years with Google, and one time they ran ads globally for 24hrs costing us about $4,000. Easy mistake on their part, but getting a refund was impossible. They have a monopoly and it wasn't a huge deal, but even fairly benevolent monopolies can be a bit abusive.

What's especially egregious here is that Google has products on both sides of the market (buying ads for advertisers and selling ad space for publishers).

When their buy-side platform is transacting with their sell-side system, it's all internal payments and should have no problem being refunded. Considering the size of the company and this being a core product, it's extremely hard to suggest this was just a technical oversight. The emails seem to indicate that they knowingly withheld this money.

EDIT: if you're going to downvote this, explain why.

This is the reason why open ad exchanges, which are slowly dying because of the Facebook/Google duopoly on inventory, are a better solution to avoid conflict of interests from monopolistic entities. But it comes with privacy implications that are not acceptable to most (ie share cookie data across more players than the 2 aforementioned companies).

I have noticed that anyone talking about Google negatively on HN gets an inital barrage of downvotes and then after a few days reaches to around 1 or 2 points.

It has been the same for almost all of my comments which talks down Google.

HN comments negative about FB can be positive or negative, depending on whether they focus on the company (positive) or on the nature of Zuckerberg (negative)

HN comments negative about Musk or Tesla are generally downvoted hard.

HN comments negative about Uber or Lyft are generally positive.

The comments downvoted most of all are those calling out the hivemind

One has to wonder what percentage of the endless billions in revenue earned over the years by Google has been fraudulent.

I'm guessing most of it. Was giving them $5k / month, turned it off... zero effect. Other than no more traffic from Romanian blogs that were always 404.

Out of our top 10 traffic sources, at least half were fraud from our Google spend. The other half was legit Google searches.

And our competitors imitated us, and poured even more into it because they didn't have our Google rank and likely didn't understand how to look for bad "traffic". So in a tiny niche of e-commerce Google was taking in at least $30/k a month, probably much more.

People blame AdWords for getting no result when they don't know how to use basic targeting and settings.

It's extremely easy to turn off non-google.com ads (ie. no partner network) and restrict geographic settings to just your target market.

AdWords is by far our most profitable advertising channel, but it took me a few years to fine tune it.

I disagree. I manage a few small (<$10k/month campaigns) and Google is constantly advising bad moves. They recommend networks I’ve repeatedly turned off. They recommend geographic regions where I don’t operate. They recommend keyword combinations that have nothing to do with my site.

The default recommendations from AdWords are always bad for me and always very much more expensive. If I just accepted their recommendations and then their recommendations to up ad spend, I would easily pay 10x.

Maybe google is good for everyone but me. But maybe google just makes recommendations in their interest instead of mine.

Even with close attention, I find that I have to walk the line to not screw up because Google is trying to trick me. I feel similarly about Facebook’s changing privacy stuff. Like it’s me against the firm.

I agree 100%.

I've never had a consultation with one of Google's reps where the suggestion didn't increase my spend, while giving a worse ROI. At this point, I don't believe it's incompetence, it's systematic malice.

But I wasn't talking about using any of Google's suggestions, by phone or their automated recommendations. I was just referring to simple a/b testing and systematic use of negative keywords and fine-tuning settings.

11pm-5am is universally disabled for all my campaigns for example. My customer base simply isn't awake and buying at these times, because they have jobs. This alone dropped ad spend by 25% while only reducing conversions by 5%.

Not to mention that they repeatingly shows ads that I have taken the time to click "Not interested" on, to which they have answered "We'll try not to show you this ad again."

They either lie or they have just failed badly so far.

So some poor smuck - or rather a wealthy owner of a number of scammy sites - is getting fleeced, month by month, as AdWords keeps insisting on insulting me by suggesting my current family isn't good enough.

Hah! I get way more traffic and conversions by advertising about $150/month through Craigslist. I tried spending that much a day with AdWords, with all the targeting and settings fine tuned to my market, but never reached the quality traffic I get through the classified advertising.

There’s a difference between a campaign with bad quality scores or bad conversion rates with a campaign that basically fails to attract any humans at all while still spending a great deal of money.

The former requires a huge amount of knowledge and talent which is highly valuable. The latter should be able to be taken for granted, but in actuality is the most important thing to guard against.

Wow. I wonder if the entity that was Blekko and is now just a post office box somewhere could get back the hundreds of thousands of dollars Google decided not to pay out because they didn't like something about them. I'm sure the advertiser's never got any money back.

Here is a recent WSJ article on the topic with a few more details in it: https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-to-refund-advertisers-af...

One of my past employers, a major Adnet with whom I only worked 6 months, employed a lawyer company full time just to just scoop and snoop their employees social media posts.

I got to know that when I simply wrote some bare speculations and musings of how the industry sees ad fraud, and got a call just 8 hours later.

The entire topic is a "don't ask, don't tell" thing in the industry.

Not really. Not having fraud would be a huge competitive advantage, so of course ad companies are investing huge resources into fraud prevention.

That said, the assumption is that advertisers are the victims here. However, in reality ad spending is driven by huge multinational, bureaucratic and dysfunctional companies. For many of these companies the goal is simply to spend the allocated budgets, and forget about sanity and KPI-driven processes. In that sense advertisers and fraudsters are willing accomplices.

Not having fraud is only an advantage if it can be proven definitely enough that you don't have any (which is impossible). Everyone claims they're combating fraud, it doesn't really mean anything and it's already priced in to the market.

>>Not really. Not having fraud would be a huge competitive advantage, so of course ad companies are investing huge resources into fraud prevention.

What if they decide to have just enough fraud? Make money but advertisers see it as cost of doing business

You miss my point. Ad networks and ad tech companies aren't aiding and abetting fraud. For them it is a cost center. Advertisers are the ones aiding and abetting fraud.

tech companies are going the way of banks

That's a little aggressive but yes, many of the major networks have a lot of fraudulent traffic that they do know about but yet do not do all they can to prevent.

This is because many of these companies are paid by volume and percentage of media spend so they are incentivized to increase traffic, not limit it.

https://outline.com/aA7HS5

Non-Paywalled link.

Also there are some Android apps that ask you to click ads after a certain usage. Even though I have reported the app no action was taken.

Thanks.

Hacker News should promote non-paywall links, when available, as a general policy. non-paywalls are more user friendly.

This has been a settled issue for years. You'll find it in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html and there's more explanation here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20033431 and marked it off-topic.

Maybe that should reviewed at some point given that 1) more sites are putting up paywalls and 2) they are being made harder and harder to bypass.

HN users are also adblock users. Publishers want to make money so you should expect to see even more paywalls in the future.

Someone ripped off a whole industry who considers humans to be easy manipulated sheeps and animals. Crocodile tears everywhere.

While the advertising industry is not exactly a paragon of virtue, we are talking about nearly 9 digits of money being stolen, if we speak bluntly. That's a lot of money; a lot of lives and families affected in a negative way.

Advertising may indeed be evil, but this is one advertising firm stealing from another, to nobody's benefit.

Scam technology improvements can be beneficial in the long run? Same rule applies after all too military technology research?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com