Reverse-engineering Google’s "Skip Button Guarantee"(checkmyads.org) |
Reverse-engineering Google’s "Skip Button Guarantee"(checkmyads.org) |
Their claim was basically – "we found some Google video ad fraud!". Well guess what, Google knows and agrees that there is fraud. So do all the advertisers who pay them. The question is really about how much fraud there is. Google says that it actively keeps it under a certain %, and advertisers are generally okay with that number.
Now the report makes the usual claims – ads run on shady sites, ads viewed by bots, ads muted or obscured, ads unskippable and against policy etc. When you read through and try to find actual numbers for the severity of these issues, they just skip over it with weasel words. Just read their opening statement:
> However, this research report finds that for years, significant quantities of TrueView skippable in-stream ads, purchased by many different brands and media agencies, appear to have been served on hundreds of thousands of websites and apps in which the consumer experience did not meet Google’s stated quality standards. For example, many TrueView in-stream ads were served muted and auto-playing as out-stream video or as obscured video players on independent sites. Often, there was little to no organic video media content between ads, the video units simply played ads only.
"significant quantities", "many different brands", "appear to have been served", "many ads were served", "Often"...you can keep reading as long as you like, and will not find a single objective number or percentage. Unless someone can conclusively find that, no one is going to take them seriously.
I’m a bit confused. The Adalytics report definitely defines numbers and percentages of the samples they looked at. Obviously only Google will have the authoritative final numbers, but they are also the ones most incentivized to keep them as opaque as possible. I admit I’m not very familiar with the ad business, and know that a fraud is rampant, but there is a difference between a rampant 5-10% fraud to 50–60%. The first few paragraph list a lot of percentages from that report
Original report: https://adalytics.io/blog/invalid-google-video-partner-truev...
Several years ago I looked through our referrers and immediately disabled search partners for all of our ads when I saw the actual sites.
Many were just clones of the Google search results UI but with ads indistinguishable from search results. Their play is to buy ads on Google themselves, while showing partner network ads on their own confusing “search results” page. They arbitrage traffic by buying ads on cheaper keywords and then getting visitors to click a more expensive ad they serve by being in the partner network.
From what I saw, I can only imagine the vast majority of human clicks through these pages are totally unintentional or confused.
Who else could get actual numbers of scams they run vs legit ads ? There's no other entity that sees every single of the ads they serve, so we'd need a trustworthy insider leak to meet your standard.
It's like taking a sample of a swimming pool, to check the chlorine levels.
I'm reminded of that quote "a man doesn't understand when his pay depends on him not understanding". Do you by any chance work in the advertising industry? (To be absolutely clear, if you work for google the answer to that question is yes)
Edit: not just a rhetorical question, I'm genuinely waiting for an answer to this.
- Upton Sinclair
I'm trying to find them motivations behind this thing.
They aren't exactly shy about their motivations. The site says their mission is:
> "holding the surveillance adtech industry accountable for abuses against advertisers and consumers, and spearheading the development of a transparent, efficient and privacy-focused digital advertising marketplace. "
Google is the #1 game in town (arguably the only game) so they need to convince advertisers that Google's ads are not serving their interests so that they'll be receptive to an alternative. It's entirely possible that they are correct and that Google is actually screwing over advertisers, I have no idea, but I suspect that it'd be more persuasive to demonstrate that their new ad platform actually serves advertisers better in real world scenarios than to just complain about whatever crap google is pulling.
The article cites specific examples of fraudulent spend, with screenshots, etc., on comically easy to detect domain names, including ones that other parts of Google block.
Also, they’ve progressively taken action to expand the percentage of advertisers they can defraud, and also to ensure the fraud is difficult to detect.
On top of all that, it is only possible due to monopolistic bundling of YouTube and the ad networks, in a scheme that could be a textbook example from “anti-trust litigation 101”.
> The fraud rate is somewhere between 50-90% of revenue, and adds up to billions.
This is the only part that is relevant, and if you have a source for this then do share it.
How about actively keeping that at 0%?
Practically impossible. A sufficiently well-developed bot is indistinguishable from the least technically-savvy legitimate users that clicked on an ad. Unless you have a novel way of filtering out the 2 from each other, the costs for performing such filtrations compound linearly at best & exponentially at worst.
I occasionally like to look at the DailyMail but when it complains and blocks me for using an adblocker I just nope out. I've seen what that site looks like without serious adblocking and I'm astounded any sane person could ever endure that experience. It's bad enough with adblocking.
The only places I really visit now are small forums, a few Reddits, HN obviously and not much else.
As an example of just how broken and manipulative it all is. Open Google. Search for apples.
It tells me it found 8,540,000,000 results (0.38 seconds). Wow. Big DATA! Click to page 10. Click to page 11. That's the last page for me now and it now says at the top: Page 11 of about 103 results (0.70 seconds).
That seems pretty broken to me for the biggest search engine on the internet. Oh and forget trying to manipulate the query string like the good old days, it's now just a big old long list of encrypted garbage.
the fact that the in your face malpractices are so foregranted that people reach for indirection or edge cases when throwing shade at the ad industry just highlights how one-sided the battle's become.
Online ads were supposed to fix this problem.
That is why every serious advertiser runs their own analytics about how many people visited their site from the ad, return per ad spend etc.
Of course this is harder to do on broader, brand awareness campaigns but can still be tracked to an extent.
Take it with a grain of salt
My disclosure is: I make a purely interactive ad product that only appears in first-party inventory like in social media feeds. In my opinion this is a non-issue if you... Make ads people like.
Here's an example of a highly successful interactive ad creative: https://appmana.com/watch/virtualtestdrive - per 1 million visits, the average engagement time was 65s. A typical video ad has a median of 0s of watch time, and 2.1s on average (hence 5s YouTube ads).
There's nothing new here. Even John Oliver will talk about ads people like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Kfx2fANELo.
At the end of the day, either you make a good creative or you don't. Everything else is noise.
Super cool interactive ad BTW!
There used to be great ads. Campaigns on TV and print media that people would talk about. That just doesn't happen online, and every single ad to me is, as you say, noise.
If you care about money spent, you should calculate ROI for each third-party site and filter out those which give low returns. And not expect that Google will do that for you.
The company used GVP to provide ads to the site owners. Many of the sites were straight up serving pirated content monetized directly with gvp.
The way this was “allowed” was that the company would receive a DMCA request for the pirated content and we’d have to take it down… within 5 days. So we would wait 5 days and take it down.
In that delta, everyone made money. For the 5 days everyone made enough to stay in business and still “comply with the law”. Most of the company’s operating capital was sourced through this takedown period. 100’s of thousands a month.
It actually made the content more valuable because it introduced scarcity. The content was mostly Indian cricket matches and the only way to watch them online was pirated in this manner.
So justify it however you want, gvp and google ads in general are totally trash. Oh and we had frequent issues with advertising metrics being wrong between 5-25%. When I inquired… that’s just how they do it. It’s an “estimate.
RussiaToday.com
Pravda.ru
WND.com
Zerohedge.com
Breitbart.com
Newsmax.com
Whatfinger.com
TheBlaze.com
TheFederalist.com
Hannity.com
The original report is more informative and worth the read.
It kind of makes the analytics useless because there's most more inconsistency in the medium where the ads are displayed (eg, not YouTube) so you never know if fluctuations actually mean anything.
1. Internet ads were supposed to solve the “who’s watching” problem. By letting advertisers target their audiences and display ads on vetted sites.
2. *but* Advertising companies also offer stuff (either browsers or product features) that are on the “bleeding edge” when it comes to protect their users privacy.
3. Marketing departments anywhere from big to small sized companies know and/or deal (kinda..) with advertising fraud cuz they want to “show work”/“good quarterly results”..
4. Most of the users, just want to freely access content in order to trick their minds into feeling amused when in reality their just bored
5. Only a small fraction of the remaining users (from 4.) are capable of understand and deal with all this..
So.. The Internet is either doomed if this continues, or in the process of becoming an even bigger trash can if “they” get way with this :/
Anyone here up to starting Internet 2.0?! :)
They simply operate as a taxation on businesses for junk marketing that, at best, treads water with organic results. And that filters down to every price we pay as consumers.
When you read stories like this, remember that you are paying more for everything so Google can do this trash.
Lol, that takes me back to CS101 in college circa 2004. Our professor Loved Google at the time. When he was introducing binary search he opened google and did a search a showed us that top number. Then said “This is the POWER of binary search!!” Ngl, I was impressed at the time. It’s a funny memory.
I'm told I got 8,760,000,000 "results" but only get to see 1 page of 45 links (some being ads). The "more" page shows only 8 recipes, another "more" another 8 recipes, then my only choice is "less"!
Of 9 billion results, I can see only 60.
Google is broken. I thought it would happen, but I did think they would last longer than this.
Not really. There isn't much value to be gained in ranking and sorting a bigger top N of the 8.5 billion results. It is better to encourage people to refine their queries to something less general.
For instance, search for: "how voltage affects metal in a frozen liquids"
About 15,100,000 results (0.41 seconds), but you can't get past page 10. Page 10 of about 92 results (0.44 seconds)
And on page 10 is a result with this as it's description:
"lyrics to let it go. wolf pup for sale. the taste of chicago 2015 hours. crash landing auto water. prefect des yvelines france. 90s music hits playlist."
Sorry, but it's broken. You can argue until you're blue in the face, but it didn't used to work like this.
My search experience has been consistently the opposite. Google rejects more defined queries. The more terms you add to your queries, the more likely it’s that it’ll just ignore them.
This is a recent trend btw. It wasn’t that use 4 or 5 years ago, but it’s certainly increasingly random the more terms I add to my search query.
One of my biggest pet peeves with ChatGPT is how conversational I have to make my query to be. I can’t just type terms and let it figure them out. But that’s to be expected I guess. Google search seems to struggle with both atm. I have no doubt they are aware and working on it, but it just sucks atm
https://adalytics.io/blog/invalid-google-video-partner-truev...
There's a detailed methodology section. I haven't verified their results, but they report finding things like muted, autoplaying ads even on big-name sites like the New York Times.
A few key quotes:
"For one major infrastructure brand approximately 73% of their TrueView skippable in-stream budget was spent on Google Video Partner sites or apps whose ad delivery does not appear to be consistent with the TrueView or in-stream requirements."
"A major consumer goods brand had 75% of their TrueView budget delivered against Google Video Partner (GVP) sites or apps. 56% of their total TrueView budget was spent against websites which served TrueView ads in muted or non-in-stream video players [...] 19% of their TrueView skippable in-stream ad budget delivered against ineligible mobile apps which are not video streaming apps[...]"
"A Fortune 500 brand had approximately 57% of their total TrueView in-stream ad budget served on GVP sites and apps. 35% of their total TrueView budget was spent against websites which served TrueView ads in muted or non-in-stream video players [...] 8% of their TrueView skippable in-stream ad budget delivered against in-eligible mobile apps which are not video streaming apps."
I'm no marketing expert, but 43-73% of one's ad budget basically being thrown away seems like not great results.
However I do feel Google's cost is more universally applicable. Tons of product types aren't commonly procured via Amazon: All business types, whether products or services, end up paying the Google tax.
anyway, i don't disagree with the rest. just feel that being called out for whataboutism here is a bit unfair.
Also just to be clear, clicks are not likely to be randomly distributed between legitimate and spam sites. If advertisers are paying for plays, they need to be able to see that information as well.
If I was spending money on video ads now I would be somewhere between cancelling my ad spend and calling a lawyer.
But you would have nothing to retort if they tell you you're an outlier, or your specific niche has bad actors that skew the results and they'll look into banning one or two of them (and come back to us again when they get replaced, we'll again clear a few token users)
And maybe the edge of the pool closest to the person taking the sample is the deep end where mostly adults swim, but if they walked a bit further and took the sample from the shallow side with the babies and toddlers they'd find out the water is actually 50% piss with more than trace amounts of feces mixed in as well.
If you care about excrement content, that should be another study.
Bottom line: Representative sample https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_(statistics)
You may see an online ad two weeks ago and buy the product today, how do you attribute that?
You know what the buyer was looking at
And nobody is forced to use a discount code.
They’re running EU ads on household-name Russian government propaganda sites in the middle of a war. Manual curation of a block list should’ve caught that!
Patio11's soundbite as often shared puts the cart before the horse.
He says that the "optimal amount of fraud is non-zero" as if allowing some fraud is necessary for society to function. But what he actually means is that since not all fraud is prosecuted and prevented, allowing some fraud is just the price we pay for actually getting things done.
Take the analogy of food processing. It is accepted that some small percentage of ground coffee will be insect or rodent remains and their feces. It's not like making ground coffee requires animal remains and feces.
I read Patio11's soundbite to mean that ground coffee requires animal remains and feces.
> The law of diminishing returns is not natural law - it is just an observation of something that happens in practice but not always. E.g., people often choose to spend time and treasure treating an incurable cancer or send the Coast Guard to search for five people in a submersible.
Most of the time we choose to value human life at approximately infinity (especially our own lives!). When one side of the equation is near-infinite, it makes sense to keep going long after the curve has begun to flatten, but that doesn't prove that returns don't diminish, just that the value of the goal is extremely high.
Diminishing returns isn't a natural law in its own right, but it's the direct result of natural laws. It has its parallels in half lives, in the inverse square law, and in basic probability theory. While the probability of something is high, it's easy to find and eliminate because random chance is on your side. When it becomes lower, random chance starts to work against you.
You should (re)read my comparison of Patio11’s framing of our acceptance some amount of fraud with our acceptance of some amount of animal remains in coffee. It couldn’t be more obvious that I don’t agree with his framing.
Also, Patio11 himself says this quote ended up on the cutting room floor and treats it as a catchy sound bite in his article. Which is to say I did read the article and not just the headline…
The correct framing is “since we accept some fraud, the optimal amount of fraud must be non-zero”.
As written, it sounds like society can only function if there is some amount of fraud.
I gave this analogy to a sibling comment of yours. Maybe it will help clarify my point. We accept some adulteration (let’s say it is 2% for conversation sake) in coffee. That’s not the same as “the optimal purity of coffee is 98%”. The optimal purity of coffee is 100% but since we can’t guarantee that some not-coffee stuff has mixed in with coffee, we live with 98%.
But that would be a completely useless thing to say, because we can’t get your Camry to c. There is a whole system of tradeoffs that we all know exists.
Google could easily lower ”bad things” to 0 by shutting down tomorrow. The government could easily eliminate racism by nuking everyone. None of those are interesting or intellectually stimulating discussions.
“Optimal” is different than “perfect”. Everyone else here is talking about it from a system view.
We can't eliminate murders but do we say the optimal amount of murders is non-zero? Instead, the right framing is "we live with some numbers of murders in aggregate because eliminating all murders is impossible". It's not like we need some number of murders for society to survive.
The use of the word optimal implies some murders (or fraud) is necessary for society (or financial transactions).