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Comment by seviu | Hacker News Reader

I once worked for the yellow pages in Switzerland. Our paid clients had a dashboard which reported how many users visited their business entry.

We at engineering decided to filter out bots. Figures fell dramatically by more than 50%.

In less that a day business mandated us to remove the filter.

Bots are real people after all

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This is essentially fraud. Your company was made aware that it was selling a product with wildly different characteristics than advertised, and chose to cover it up.

There are defensible business reasons for this, in having a contract already in place at the old CPM, so being unable to double the CPM and half the views mid-contract... but still pretty much fraud.

Sounds like even more fraud. Here you can apply the new filter to historic data or create a new metric version and keep the old version to avoid breaking continuity in what's measured.

It sounds like the customers demanded the fraud remain, for their own internal Potemkin purposes.

Possible, but not substantiated by the GP comment, which makes yours purely speculative.

> In less that a day business mandated us to remove the filter.

How is that not substantive?

My impression is that the question is whether “business” in this instance refers to the Yellowpages company itself, or the companies that make up their customers base.

Yes, and my read is that "business" was internal to Yellowpages.

Way back when I work in an ad based company, click fraud handling was under my overseeing. We caught about 20 percent of clicks as fraudulent and filtered them out before billing the ad placing vendors. It was a constant battle with the sales team to relax the rules, as any clicks filtered out cut into the sales revenue. Sometimes we got the customers on our side as they ran their own analysis on the billed click report and came back demanding refund as they found a bunch of fraudulent clicks.

Yeah, the incentives there are obviously misaligned. I wonder if there is a potential way of making advertising click through tracking following the "I cut the cake, you chose the slice" model.

Some countries have property taxes where you declare the value and the government retains the right to purchase the property for that value for example.

My first thought was to make the advertising cost driven by revenue on the site. But that just reverses the incentive.

People will just pull ads if the ROAS isn't there. Performance marketing teams aren't fools.

Altering data would mess with everything. Why is unverified traffic increasing? What's wrong with new marketing efforts? Marketing just requires fixed definitions. e.g. if you have 97% bots but it remains constant that's okay. I know I am spending $x to get $y conversions. I can plan over time, increase or decrease and I can plan. I won't be willing to pay as much as with 0% bots (will pay far far less) but I can set my strategy on this.

It's not that it's x% bots that is the problem. Growth team doesn't adjust strategy on percentage-bot. Growth team adjusts strategy based on return on ad spend. If 0% bots but no return, way worse than 5x ROAS with 99% bots.

I cut / you choose works in some situations.

In others you'd want, say, auditing or independent third-party verification.

In this case, perhaps an audit involving the deliberate injection of a mix of legitimate and bot traffic to see how much of the bot traffic was accurately detected by the ad platform. Rates on total traffic could be adjusted accordingly.

This of course leads to more complications, including detection of trial interactions, see e.g., the 2010 VW diesel emissions scandal: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal>, or current AIs which can successfully identify when they're being tested.

On further reflection: I'd thought of raising the question of which situations cut/choose does work. Generally it seems to be where an allocation-division decision is being made, and the allocation is largely simultaneous with the division, with both parties having equal information as to value. Or so it seems to me, though I think the question's worth thinking about more thoroughly.

That's a subset of multi-party decisionmaking situations, though it's a useful one to keep in mind.

I vaguely remember someone winning a noble prize for economics for coming up with ways to apply cut/choose in financial transactions but I couldn't find it in a quick Google. It may have been nearly 20 years ago though.

It's not that misaligned.

Basic ad ops has ad buyers buy ads from different vendors, track which converts (attribution, which has flaws, but generally is decent signal), and allocate spend via return on ad spend. So it hurts the vendor at least as much as the buyer by inflating the cost per action / damaging roas.

I've seen people but cpc campaigns and only place ads that don't convert. So they get the benefit of the branding instead. I guess more modern auction algorithms factor this in

Makes me think of the recent thing where YouTube stopped counting views with ad blockers. The Linus Tech Tips people worked out they were still seeing the same ad impressions and revenue despite views dropping by half. Unfortunately, sponsorship deals are often sold on viewership and I'm not sure even LTT has the clout to convince them nothing is functionally different.

YouTube didn’t stop counting views with ad blockers. It was one blocker extension that added the view counter api to the block list.

That's splitting hairs, but in a way that's important to the conversation.

If YouTube served gigabytes of the video file for 40 munutes and human watched it for that time, but they didn't send a request to `youtube.com/api/stats/atr/` and periodically to `/stats/qoe?`, did the video actually get viewed?

I think a reasonable person would say that the person viewed that video. Only a programmer would suggest that wasn't a view because they didn't properly engage the statistics and tracking endpoints.

But so much of the industry is built on deeply invasive tracking and third-party ad networks that this is a normal thing.

Youtube might not really care about accurate view counting in that way. In fact, Youtube likely does not care at all about traffic that won't view an ad, and they have demonstrably been hostile to that traffic for a while. Someday youtube hopes that nobody with an adblocker ever views any video, and has no intention to track their view attempts.

If that causes a problem with Youtubers making a paycheck from external sponsors, Youtube really really does not care, because sponsorships are money that youtube doesn't get!

Youtube is downright hostile to creators who don't make the "right" content, which means new videos at a perfect schedule that all have the exact same "taste" such that viewers can mindlessly consume them in between the actual ad breaks youtube cares about. The more and faster people accept this, the more likely we get improvements.

It took over a year for youtube to agree to let people swear in videos without punishment, including videos that are set as "These are not intended for children", after they unilaterally introduced this swear downranking several years ago.

Youtube cares about Mr Beast and that's about it. If you do not run your channel like Mr Beast, youtube hopes you die painfully and think about your mistake. Youtube actively drives creators making actual art, science, knowledge, and other types of videos to burnout, because Youtube considers creators to be a renewable resource worth exploiting, because there will always be 15 year olds who want to become influencers.

It is not "deeply invasive tracking" or "programmer thinking", it's entirely business. Google's business is ad views, not video views. They want to measure what they care about

I think most websites would break if a 3rd party script started blocking things. Theres also the fact that view tracking is fairly complex since they need to filter out bots / ad fraud.

And just the fact that if users have a privacy extension blocking the view tracker, is it not just respecting their wishes to not be tracked?

if a bot (or whatever latest of download tool) was served gigabytes of video, does that mean a human eventually viewed it? no.

So now we have to pass the touring test before the video is served? :)

It takes a long time to get there, but you'll eventually arrive.

>> In less that a day business mandated us to remove the filter.

Did something similar at a small company I was working at. The VP of marketing sat me down and told me to do the same thing.

After the meeting, I was told by another dev that the VP was tying a monetary value to specific clicks and if I was filtering out the bots, it would make his data look bad and reduce the amount of potential revenue for the company he was touting.

I think you can see how the bots were actually helping him promote how awesome a job he was doing with our web properties to the owners.

He idea of "reality" and how things work, even if the idea is "they work bad", is more important than any other argument or reality. That's true at personal level and even truer at any organizational level.

Well yes but seems business has decided truth is worth less than money. Or now that i think of it, everything is worth less than money. Even, money is the only thing worth anything. They don't care about people, pride, products, or truth.

I think the way it goes is more "What is true? It's that if I bury this truth, I will have more money."

Interestingly, I think money is increasingly its own falsehood now. A lot of rich people are finding that they pay a lot to get what's basically a scam, like Sam Altman's swimming pool that leaked and ruined the rest of the house [1]. There's a reason that Billionaire's Bunker [2] is entering the cultural zeitgeist despite fairly terrible plotting, dialogue, and acting.

[1] https://fortune.com/2024/07/17/sam-altman-infinity-pool-mans...

[2] https://www.netflix.com/title/81606699

Half my advertising budget is wasted, I just don't know which half... In many corporate cases vague metrics meets the KPI better than accurate ones

I worked for one of the mag7 doing customer support bot tech. Clients internal metrics around containment consistently showed better results than ours - even though you'd normally expect them to be putting pressure on their vendor. because it was a kpi for their internal team to look good to their bosses

Could you have... maybe eased it in over time? So for example, every 4 days, filter out an additional 1% of the traffic detected as fake.

That is worse. Now you have a bunch of companies wondering why their engagement is falling over a whole year, some dude's getting fired for not doing his job, etc. etc.

The correct thing to do, probably, is to just provide the new data to the customer without changing what they were already looking at. So a new widget appears on their dashboard, "52% bot traffic", they click on that, and they see their familiar line chart of "impressions over time" broken down as a stacked line chart, bottom is "human impressions over time," top is "bot impressions over time," and the percentage that they were looking at is reported either above or beneath the graph for the same time intervals. Thus calling attention to the bottom graph, "human impressions over time," and they can ask your sales people "how do I get THAT number on my normal dashboard?" and they can hem and haw about how you have to upgrade to the Extended Analytics Experience tier for us to display that info and other business nonsense...

Point is, you stimulate curiosity with loud interference rather than quietly interfering with the status quo.

Fair enough, although in that circumstance I think you'd have to mark the non-human traffic as "unverified traffic" to soften the blow

With numbers like, if it scares customers a good strategy is to implement the filtering very gradually over time, over 6 months or a year. The fall off is way less scary, and it can be described as improving bot filtering.

It’s not as honest, but more palatable unfortunately

Couldn't you kept it in and labeled it as bots? i.e. using stacked barcharts and such.

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