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Comment by legonigel | Hacker News Reader

What is the incentive for the bot owners? Why do the bots download and install the apps? It has some (very small) cost to them, and I don't understand the value for them.

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The bot owner is also providing "ad space" to Google. Author pays Google to show the ad. Bot owner gets paid by Google to "display" that ad and for conversion. The bot themselves aren't getting paid for installing the application.

In a normal scenario, the provider of ad space would be a website or an application. Google would pay the owner of that space. On Youtube, that would be an ad served by Google paid to the channel owner.

I'm trying to confirm that I understand what you mean:

Bot farm is operated by a company that displays Google ads. This bot farm fakes traffic to the bot farm owner and simulates conversion Google wants to see. Google sees the high conversion and happily serves more ads to the bot farm owner. Bot farm owner is paid by Google for displaying the ads. The person paying for the ad gets screwed.

Nailed it. It's a microcosm of the entire economy. Success percolates to the least scrupulous, at the expense of everyone else.

yes,

in short, people/entities with websites employ bots to click and interact with the Google Ads on their website to generate fake ad revenue.

and the person running the ad campaign is billed for those fake interactions.

I'm guessing app ads are heavily botted because they're more costly vs. a simple ad that lands you on a website (edit: I was wrong, see reply by OP: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49665323)

That's it. The scammers display ads. Two scams: one is mostly or entirely artificial traffic; a second is eg low quality ad slots disguised as higher quality. For the latter, think ads in videos shown off screen with programmatic interaction to make it appear as if the legit traffic saw and interacted with the ads.

And I suppose Google has very little interest in stopping this, even though they should be able to detect it with their advanced “AI.”

That’s why you display ads only on the Google search webpages.

It’s been known for decades that third party website are just lost money.

And then, even Google own pages get clicked by bots but this time from competitors so you spend all your budget and they get cheap auctions.

I once did this by accident and without a bot farm. It was very lucrative.

What I did was create a game with an action button. Then I served ads right next to the action button. I didn’t realize people would miss click on the ads at a high rate, but they did. They fat fingered it, clicked the ad, I got paid.

I looked into it after a couple weeks because my click rate was crazy high.

That's definitely a core principle of crapware that's widely done. Put that ad 0px away from the "mash here like crazy" button, PROFIT!

The back button in Android seems to be a popular one especially when it's only contextually visible on some phones.

One reason: It helps makes the bot accounts look more legit. It's why Facebook bot accounts like random legit pages.

This was my thought too. It's easy to pretend to click one ad in order to make that ad money. But it's also easy for Google to tell apart a huge number of accounts that all clicked that one ad and no others. However, if a huge number of accounts simply click a whole load of ads there's basically no way to tell that it was targeted at any particular ad + they can bot for multiple ads at once.

Have to do the install to get paid for the ad click, right?

Surprisingly, no. 29 of the 30 zero-time installs had no click at all; Google credited them to someone watching the video. The install isn't what gets the farm paid. It's what makes Google's bidding think that placement is working, so it sends it more of your ads.

It probably also so Google doesn't statistically detect the action rate is too low and suspend the customer of the bot farm from getting paid.

likely they run an ad intelligence operation which requires them to click to see where the ads lead

upping the clickthrough rate on a low quality property to get paid for fake ad impressions?

Could be black-hat vulnerability scanners and so on.

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