Hacker News Reader

raimundjosson Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

So much of social media pre-supposes that no entity would spend the kinda money to influence an issue. They didn't take a state with limited resources into account.

raimundjosson Cloud-based Chrome, Firefox or Brave browser that is also multiplayer

No Edge browser? Just kidding.... I couldn't understand what you meant by multiplayer till I watched the video. That's interesting... you basically made all web apps instantly collaborative

raimundjosson Giving the Dry-Erase Whiteboard a High-Tech Makeover – MIT Technology Review

Now if only they have a mobile app.....

raimundjosson Why AppLovin was acquired for $1.4B and who's next

Looking at the exits here, why do people say adtech is out of fashion. I mean, there are some really big exits here.

raimundjosson These are the SDKs Pokemon Go uses to build a hit game

With explosive growth, the last thing they want is to monetize it so soon. They'd follow the FB and Youtube playbook to get it to even higher scale and stickiness first before selling it themselves. The sponsored location type ads make more sense that throwing up a video ad, which totally ruins the experience.

raimundjosson What would happen if we fired all nuclear missiles on earth at the sun?

The Sun will feel a small itch

raimundjosson High-Speed Ad Traders Profit by Arbitraging Your Eyeballs

Totally agree with this is why especially FB is winning. Especially in Mobile where every user is pretty a logged in user on FB, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc. Plus non-inferred actual demo data. Even Google can't touch FB...

Everyone else who's peddling non-logged impressions with BlueKai data, good luck - first, Bluekai is only accruage 1/3 of the time. Second, majority of those are bot views.

Attribution like you describe is notoriously hard to measure. As views get to mobile, FB wins again since most apps use FB auth.

raimundjosson High-Speed Ad Traders Profit by Arbitraging Your Eyeballs

I think the analogy here with Wall St is apples and oranges. In Wall st, the security traded is fungible. Here in the ad world, an ad view could be high quality or lower quality. It could be a bot or a human looking to buy something.

I am an engineer who spent 12 years in the ad tech industry. This problem is especially acute in the online video ad side where dollars are exchanged based on views and CPMs, not someone buying something online (this being more accountable is less open to abuse). In my old job, we tested what % of traffic are fraudulent. These traffic are daisy-chained from one ad buyer/seller to the next. Inevitably it will hit someone unscrupulous. In aggregate we found anywhere from 20% to 95% of the traffic we see for video ads to be fraudulent.

There are some very sophisticated bot farms out there that gets around detection, mostly operated out in Eastern Europe and Asia. If you look at Comscore 100 video sites, you can always tell who's gaming the system when from one month to next, an unknown brand just jumped high in the top 100.

This is the reason Facebook had shut down Liverail that they spent $450M on. Super high percentage of ad fraud.

raimundjosson Why Apple needs to buy Dropbox

I think that ship has sailed. Drew selling out now would be a crush to his ego especially he rejected Steve Jobs. I also doubt Apple would pay their asking price.