An inside look into the illicit ad industry
ariadne.space
ariadne.space
The CFO and I were convinced that everyone would switch to "CPA" or per-action models (you only pay on the ad if the click resulted in a sale/conversion etc) that seemed like a much harder thing to defraud. But for brand impressions? That isn't something you can do easily.
Our crawler uncovered a registrar that had sold thousands of domains on one of the odd top levels to a scammer who had populated them with duplicate data driven "forum", "blog" and "review" sites. At the time the crawler would flag sites with identical copy and this person had been fairly clever in that they clearly had a crawler of their own and they crawled through forums and just duplicated all of the messages and then populated their "fake" forum with them (as an example). If you looked at one "page" it kind of made sense (it clearly was written by a human) but different responses were talking about randomly different things (likes one post on cats and then a post on rebuilding an engine).
We speculated it had started as a black hat SEO operation and then expanded into an ad fraud farm. But still it was amazing to see what was perhaps hundreds of thousands of "web pages" that existed simply to exploit a way to extract money out the web ecosystem.
Even Google analytics are so convoluted now that they really make a simple process of tracking real engagement into a maddeningly confusing bowl of spaghetti.
The people that seek to overcomplicate the web also create wild pyramid schemes for profit that really corrupt purpose and utility of the Internet. It won't be long before we begin to see completely fabricated statistics everywhere, and it will feed into misled investors and more deception.
I'm glad we still have the ability to create our own web sites and resources, many companies have been lobbying to take that ability away from us, to drive costs of doing so up wildly, and to cripple our ability to have an even playing field.
I don't run ads on my personal web sites though, it's better I don't contribute further to the problem.
My friends and family don't realize why I'm such a pessimist when I speak about the Internet and Social Media now, I worry about them being scammed and influenced by the fake aspects of certain business and celebrity online.
If there's one thing that the Pandemic has shown, it's who had money and who was faking. There were many people using black hat techniques to fake popularity, success, and fame and that began to dry up quick every time Google pushed an algorithm update.
The sad reality is that normal creators, and business owners that don't participate in the ad/manipulation madness can't ever make it to a point where they'll be visible, and the Internet can't ever return to the point where equal opportunity existed because of all of the now embedded ad-based revenue culture that we all let take hold of it.
The only way to thrive moving forward will be to create small (focused) communities that avoid the current pitfalls of ad based communities, and to be able to sell valuable and highly useful products and services within them that fund reasonable expansion and operation of those communities.
Ads are just a dirty business at this point.
While I don't buy that this is the only view at the time, and that there was no dirt to find, I believe that there was a time were ads were imagined as a way to inform the consumers, or at least convey some kind of information to them.
Unfortunately, the market doesn't optimize for what's right, only for what's profitable. The too may or may not aligned at first, but give it enough time, and it will deviate.
Billboards a bit problematic if they distract drivers but otherwise don’t bother me much either.
It was quite fun for a while, and some of the tools and techniques ended up having applications beyond ads, for example developing 0-day techniques to unmask Tor and VPN users (webRTC leaks, etc.) that could then be reused on seized/honeypot onion sites to catch predators.
Aa well as end users via subsidizing the ad spending for the ad buyers. Who you think pays for the ads in the end? It's us, the consumers.
Everything 'security' in the world is the same way.
The market for [non-FDA] diet pills, MLM eBooks, "mind, body & soul" empowerment videos, etc. is massive - even more so during the pandemic when employees are getting bored at home.
A business I knew with saw revenue rocket during the last 2 years, and they owned the whole stack - affiliate marketing schemes, an ecommerce platform (which still supports IE7!), virtual call-centres, right down to a payment processor (that also accepted adult content, CBD products, etc.).
The experience really opened my eyes into how much money there is to be made by... how can I put this politely.... exploiting overweight gulliable people with low self-esteem.
We use 3rd party impression and click tracking, along with pairing purchases to user/session ids to make sure our ads our working. If a user tries to mask their data from us, they simply come in as direct traffic, and we don't attribute that to our ad campaign.
If this fraud stuff trips you up you aren't doing it right.
That mentality, across the entire ad industry, is how I retired before 40. Assumptions of security, understanding, and operating knowledge create huge blindspots, and those were my flow state.
[1] And that there are no relevant extensions, and no one has modified the browser itself.
I'm thinking that might not be as bad of a thing as you might be making it out as. Sometimes, you just need to light a match and watch certain things burn. Allow their ashes to be fertilizer for the regrowth period.
Unfortunately, in the world of today, I think the underworld of slimey devs would fill the void faster, and implement "new" that appeals to their needs.
Specify a subset of the language and guarantee that if on sticks to this subset it will run in a simplified and heavily optimized branch of the code.
Comments in here and the post itself are such a niche that only people browsing hacker news get to see.
Evil person creates a (simple, weak) good site, and sells ads on it.
Advertiser pays Evil person to show ads on simple, weak, good site.
Evil person then displays those ads (via iframe) on Pirate Bay.
Advertiser thinks the end-user visited Good site.
The ads are not fraudulent per se -- real humans are seeing the ads and interacting with them.
For example if I have an image and need to be 100% certain where it was loaded, is that possible to do with some very high level of certainty?
this is the value add of closed platforms. though not perfect, they have the most reliable ads. amazon, google, facebook, netflix, pinterest, tv. any fraud just makes these platforms more money so what's the incentive? maybe there are some edge cases with revenue sharing models. the fraud that i can think of on these platfroms is the extent that the quality of platform is misrepresented [1].
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/18/facebook-knew-for-years-ad...
The victims are good publishers ( miss out on ad dollars that would have gone their way) and advertisers (who have generally moved their money to walled gardens where there isn't an agency incentive problem).
I.e. as far as I understood the particular situation described by OP, the breach of contract happens between the site and network, not between the network and advertiser.
Same thing as this article, but without actually building the technology themselves, simply being the middleman.
They’ll be upset if this “gray” traffic doesn’t convert well, but Lexus buyers just might be the type with the disposable income for gambling.
That’s a joke of a quote. You could say that about literally any industry and it would never be true. If a company solely exists to scam others, over the long term it will not last. Adtech provides digital marketing which drives actual revenue and profits for businesses. There certainly are scammers, but this quote just ignores an entire legitimate industry.