1. Why?
2. How widespread is this in general? How long before most web advertising is bot-fraud as users learn about ad-blockers?
3. Didn't realise my mouse traces were being recorded by advertisers in such detail.... I do not like this.
2.) I haven't been able to find meaningful info on this yet.
3.) I work in e-commerce tech. I had NO IDEA how bad it was before I got into this industry. Just had a sales call with a company who is tracking 400 unique data points per second on users. They track mouse clicks, mouse movements, what your highlight, how long on site, navigation pattern, buying behavior form other in-network sites, page position, etc... and then use that data in real time to dynamically generate promos and offers to "encourage buying behavior".
It does automatically what I'd been manually doing with Adblock i.e. block loading resources from facebook when not actually on facebook.com, and a whole lot more. Useful tool.
2. The article shows a bunch of these ghost sites so I would suspect that it's common in the world of scamming/ghost sites to drive up their CPM (Cost per Thousand). Hell, if I was running a legit site, I'd outsource the bullshit ghost sites to a Russian company so that my own CPM gets higher. As an example: I bet the value of "Baby Powder" as a search term is probably twice what it should be.
3. Get "Live HTTP Headers" or run your traffic through a proxy and see how many HTTP requests you generate just using a basic ad. I worked in Rich-Media Advertising and the way we tracked was every interaction. Right when I left in 2008-2009 we started tracking more and more. Really depended what the client bought/paid for. But we'd always track opens, clicks, etc.. the basic stuff. We didn't do heatmaps or X,Y coordinate tracking, but we had the data.
It was impressive to see, we would host our units on Akamai and due to the sheer traffic were unable to do real-time SQL inserts, so we would crunch the HTTP logs in hour increments after the fact to generate the data. So a typical GET string would be ad.domain.tld/?id=adunitMD5&type=Click&x=0&y=0&action=MD5
Of course it wouldn't be that verbose, but the GET string would be quite long with all the data. This was all done through a combo of JS and ActionScript.
[1] http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/meet-most-suspect-publ...
Don't they get more bread and butter because they charge advertizers for the fraudulent clicks too and profit from them? It's not like the advertisers can ignore Ad Sense and go to a competitor easily without losing a lot of traffic.
I was just wondering who it benefitted. I guess the site operators themselves, but it seems pretty underhand.