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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

The market is full of fraud, and the surveillance exists as a counter to the fraud. Users are surveilled in an effort to prove that they are real users, not bots that are being used to fake impressions or clickthroughs. It's all very messy.

Place yourself in the shoes of an ad buyer: a random website offers to display your ad. How do you know what you're getting?

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Only some billing models are vulnerable to fraud though. The old school "your ad here for 2 weeks for this price" is not vulnerable to it since you're no longer charging per click/impression.

The "measurement function" becomes the uptick in sales resulting from the unique link embedded in said ad and ultimately the money that lands in the bank.

Sure it is. Just figure out what IP the advertiser is checking from (if they have time to check at all) and show the ad to only that IP. The slot can then be sold repeatedly.

That's trivially negated by services which constantly monitor the website from thousands of residential IPs all around the world.

Until you negotiate for the next cycle and the ad buyer realizes nobody clicked the link

Lots of people clicked the link, it's just that they were all people with botted machines.

The company could still tell from there being a 0% conversion rate.

Maybe their landing page just sucked.

Yes, share of voice is a lot simpler to reason about and is still done nowadays. It all comes down to yield maximization. One buyer may buy x% of impressions of y quality, so the publisher/website will try to extract as much value from the remaining impressions by auctioning them. There's certainly a lot of lemons that are created in that process.

You don’t. I don’t place an ad on the side of a random bus, instead I place it on the side of a bus that drives a route and schedule I know.

If I buy a newspaper ad I don’t buy unless the paper is well known enough that I can trust their number they claim is their total circulation.

Yes: for the web this means no one buys ads on the bottom 99% of sites.

But the ad networks also serve fraudulent ads and even worse, malware. How is that an improvement?

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