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Comment by judge2020 | Hacker News Reader

judge2020

> Malicious actors are almost certainly incredible revenue drivers for Google, and people on the ads team are protecting them because they make their metrics look good.

This is one of the downsides of a Google monopoly (/single advertiser market): they don't have to care about click fraud besides making sure it doesn't show up in headlines. Even if Google suddenly had a reputation for click fraud, not advertising on YouTube and the rest of the web can be a death sentence to staying competitive in your respective market.

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I'm reminded of the whole Facebook "pivot to video" scandal, where they were telling media producers that people were watching video ads at massively inflated rates compared to reality, and there was no way to check Facebook's reported numbers, since they controlled the infrastructure. An entire industry moved from text to video based on lies. I'm sure some sales folks did well for themselves as hundreds of writers lost their jobs.

If you advertise on facebook you don't care too much about reported numbers. It's add spend in, conversions out.

The facebook targeting back 2 years ago at least, amazing. There is a niche for hyperspecific advertising and facebook just crushed it (I'm not posting on facebook / no facebook app, so I think they suck for human health).

The parent is correct.

What a lot of HNers don't understand is that:

1) if you're a digital marketer with a budget, you have to spend the budget. Even if you know the metrics don't add up, you just keep spending until somebody finds a platform with a better ROI.

2) ad platforms don't like to talk about their secret sauce, because that would attract scrutiny.

IIRC CollegeHumor was nearly sunk by this debacle.

And as bad as click fraud on Google and Facebook is, I don't see how more advertisers would help. The only way they could really improve fraud detection is if Google Analytics were instead some sort of public utility. And even then I don't really see how you could get a competitive marketplace for fighting fraud. You would just have to trust that the analytics utility was legit.

And anyway GDPR/CCPA type legislation is probably a better route, which if anything makes fraud detection even more difficult.

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