After running Google Ads for a couple of years, our current exclusion list has over 4000 networks just in the US.
You know all those trojan infected smart TVs and home routers and such? That's one of the things they're doing.
And the pay for these things is "access to 500+ TB Jellyfin-like movie services for free"
Of course, it's all pirated out of country. And the pay is being a residential proxy.
And piracy being the only way to actually own, I'm not imaging this will stop anytime soon.
Theres your answer.
Also most of them are for pirating live TV. You can't watch live TV through Bittorrent, you just can't, it doesn't work that way. Sports fans need less than 5 seconds of latency relative to the loudest neighbor they can hear, or they'll hate your service.
Once the word gets around, even small non-techy businesses will pick up on it.
For some more context: We run a business based on data scraping and metered residential proxies have never been cheaper. Countries that used to be 10 USD/GB just ten years ago are down to 1 USD.
How does that work? Wouldn’t Hetzner know who you are (because you pay them), meaning that if you’re caught pirating on it they could just know it was you and hand you over?
And don’t think Herzner wouldn’t hand you over. My only experience with them was during a job, when an external company complained about something on a single section of a massive website (everything was legitimate, we weren’t doing anything remotely shady) and Hetzner straight up took the whole website down and demanded a change. Shoot first, ask later. I wasn’t directly involved with managing the website, but the whole thing soured me on Hetzner.
I've received a nasty letter from the ISP over BitTorrent (someone's phone joined my wifi, torrenting without my knowledge), but using a VPN seems sufficient. I think the Hetzener suggestion is a VPS for running the software stack. You could alternatively self host on hardware in your home.
Source? There's definitely shady people paying people to host proxies, but hyperscalers doing it would be surprising.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=span+resi...
https://www.span.io/blog/span-announces-xfra-a-distributed-d...
Web scraping (for LLM inference / training) I guess has transformed "residential proxies" into a giant industry.
Google has to be careful, ads that convert less are less valuable (duh) and what happens is not "well the business will just buy more ads", but "well the business has a 35% gross margin and marketing expenses already account for 20% of gross profit, they can't just buy more ads"
Don't all water companies do it?
And while it may point at what we could do with Google and the likes, the risk profile is still a bit different (make many people ill or die vs "unknowingly" stealing some money).
I find online advertising crooked as hell. Google charges by the impression and knowingly allows huge percentages of fake impressions. How is that anything other than fraud?
It’s not because it’s online advertising. And that sucks.
They get paid for adverts to bots don’t they? Unrelated?
Tends to be how it goes once you reach a certain size.
the only reason I got the go-ahead for the effort was because one of our upstart competitors who was handily eating our lunch had implemented this years ago, started advertising based on it, literally pointed to the fact that we didn't do this yet, and then this was followed quickly by all of our other competitors implementing this, too. at this point we were well inducted into the illustrious halls of companies who stopped giving a shit about their core product with leadership blaming everyone but themselves for the fact that we were churning faster than we were net-new-ing
and even then it was a half-assed, resource-starved implementation that got dumped on regularly. have left the org since and couldn't be happier
That is not how an organization fighting ad fraud would structure itself.
Alphabet does not have an abundance of technical incompetence. But it does have the strongest of incentives to ensure ad budgets get spent quickly and no meaningful disincentives.
I mean what’s the OP going to do, go to Google’s competition?
It’s also built into approximately everyone’s phone.
It's not that they're not trying, it's just a very hard problem.
In the ad marketplace there are four participants: the advertiser, the user, the network (Google), and the publisher (also Google for AdWords, other websites for AdSense and so on, and effectively the channel owner for YouTube).
In the click spam or botnet case, the bad actor is the user, who is usually associated with a publisher trying to get extra money (although not always - there's reasons like auction manipulation where some advertisers run click bots too). In the bad-ads case, the bad actor is the advertiser.
At Google, each of those problems has their own well funded team, but they do also share some data to help catch rings of bad guys.
Suppose 50% of used laptops are good and worth $1,000, while 50% are bad and worth $400. Since you cannot tell which one you are buying, the average value is 0.5x1000 + 0.5x400 = $700, so you will not want to pay more than about $700.
But owners of good laptops may refuse to sell for $700, so more good laptops leave the market and the chance of buying a bad one increases. And the only guy selling for $700 is the lemons.
Problem 2: The theory assumes buyers already know how many bad products are in the market, but in real life they often do not.
Its obvious this market for lemons can’t be true
Your "point 1" is literally the argument of the paper. If that scenario arises, the market collapses and no further sales can be made. That's the whole problem. As someone who takes a percentage of every sale, you want to keep the lemon-sellers out even though in the short run they make you extra money.
Your "point 2", if it's meant to be a rebuttal, isn't much of one. Buyers don't need to accurately know exactly what fraction of sellers are fraudulent; if they believe that it's 50-50, the same thing happens, even if the true rate is 80-20 in favor of good sellers. Conversely, if buyers are overly optimistic about quality, the market can persist despite a level of fraud that's higher than should be tolerated. But in any case, things like reviews and external reporting should eventually give them good information.
Most marketers should know exactly how effective their ads are by measuring to the end of the funnel. This is standard for most business and while bots are a problem, if you're judging online advertising at the front end of the funnel that's to a large part on them for a bad setup and/or optimisation.
Maybe this is a cynical take, but, if they get to the bottom of things, and show their boss/client that the ad-spend is not returning so much, it seems it would portend bad things for the marketer.
I really don't know, and it seems like a very hard problem.
Maybe this is the time for that Upton Sinclair quote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it,"
I am asking because I maintain botnet ASNs that are spamming/phishing/scamming our customers, and this would be a nice complementary category for it.
Most often I realized that a lot of those "growth" companies have rotating ASNs that they go through after each larger spamming campaign. I'd assume they do the same thing in the admob/adclick world.
It is absolutely ridiculous that you have been either victim shamed, blamed or simply neglected by Google into doing it yourself.
In a mall, you expect to see mall cops ... where are they?