There's not enough humans on earth to generate the quantities of ad impressions | Hacker News Reader

There's not enough humans on earth to generate the quantities of ad impressions

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45 pointsllimos21 comments

Curious to hear from folks who actually work in the online ad industry: I've repeatedly heard the author's claim (and other similar claims) repeated in multiple forums and chats about online advertising, i.e., 70% of ad impressions are bogus and driven by bots. I'm curious to know whether this is an actual problem and if so how the ad industry is handling this.

I know someone who worked in the ad bot industry. It’s real. Fake clicks, fake impressions, and all that. He eventually got out and went into adtech to build detection methods. Probably better career move for him.

Who pays for fake click bots?

Not sure how prominent this is, but if a business buys some online ads then their competitors have an incentive to see those ads rendered useless by quickly depleting their budget on bogus clicks.

Publisher fraud is an ongoing problem in the cheap end of the market.

Is that publishers misreporting clicks or paying bots to generate clicks

Artificially generating clicks or views. Every ad tends to carry it's own JS click/render callbacks, so generally not relying on publishers own numbers.

> Curious to hear from folks who actually work in the online ad industry

Two points:

a) Online ads are a shit sandwich for the advertisers from the points of view of quality and features. They only tolerate it because TV and print ads are dying as a medium.

b) Statistics and probability theory are used to filter the shit and connect online advertising to real-world metrics. It's a cost of doing business but it's a problem easily solvable by classical mathematics.

Click fraud is very real, but the big players ploughing money into digital ad spend are not idiots. There is a huge shift towards conversion/action driven advertising. Advertisers can see how much of an effect a particular ad channel had on the final conversion e.g purchase of a shoe/add to cart. Just talking about click/ad fraud without talking about counter measures/best practices is just click-baity usually.

Dumb question. Where do fake clicks come from and how are they different from nonconverting clicks

No not a dumb question at all. Hard to give an exhaustive list. One example is say you are a Facebook/Insta influencer who is promoting a link to a product. You might have an incentive to inflate the engagement rate with that link. Just engagement will be likes/clicks on the post/link. By tracking conversions you can try to mitigate this type of behavior to an extent.

Spam impressions/clicks are real and it is why fast/accurate spam classification is one of core competency of ad networks. It is also the reason why advertisers are rapidly moving to more conversion driven goals rather than optimizing for clicks.

... core competency of ad networks

What happens if they are not really all that competent? Or at least not that competent all the time.

Do the ad networks make more or less money as a result of their incompetency?

Then advertisers will move to more proven big names, like Google and FB which have proven records on spam detection, so less revenues on others. Keep in mind that ad networks' profit is bound by advertiser budget and the only thing that advertisers care about is ROI, not # of clicks or impressions. If you don't make advertiser happy, they're always ready to move the budget to other networks.

I am sure there is fraud, but a single Google page can show 10 advertisements and those all count as impression..

So what you're pointing out is that the accounting associated with online advertising is itself a form of fraud?

Musing: Japan has a lot of "useless jobs", but these are basically social help in disguise: they keep money flowing to a lot of the population, including the elderly.

I wonder if the ad industry is a version of that: advertisers pay a lot of money and that money flows to overpaid programmers (us) making the latest JavaScript framework to, who knows what "world-critical" function.

Hollywood also has the strange accounting that most of a movie's profits is spent in advertising it, i.e. the money flows into the studio's subsidiary that pockets the money and spends a fraction of it to print and put up posters. I wonder if these subsidiaries are in tax havens...

15 trillion bid requests isn't the best metric to use.

The SSP I used to work for had 150ish DSPs attached, of course not all of them received bid requests for a given incoming impression, no point sending a banner bid req to someone only interested in video.

But yeah, bid requests are more of a function of auction participants rather than unique impressions.

And we all know how ad infested websites can be these days, if you have say 10 ad spaces on a page, and 100 DSPs want to bid, you're looking at up to 1000 bid requests generated from a single page view.

(OpenRTB has support for sending multiple impressions in a request, but when I was there, very few of our DSPs had implemented it).

Stupid is as stupid does.

As long as business is willing to throw big bucks at online advertising, there will be people looking to tap into the money stream and siphon it off. And by most accounts, they are pretty successful at it.

In most of the world, ad fraud is not even illegal. It's like the perfect crime --- zero risk, all reward.

Instead of trying to prevent the fraud, the ad brokers running the auctions and networks are accused of being one of the participants. This is part of the multi-state antitrust case filed against Google.

classic dotcom bust logic.

aliens...

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