Good luck on that. I have sympathy for OP, but running ads is really hard. It's why most people set targets for things that happen in the app (OP updated to a target of winning a game, not just installing), and why companies have entire teams dedicated to monitoring Google/Meta/X ads. Trial runs are often thousands of dollars, and it's easy to evaporate money. I've made the same mistakes, and its why y-combinator strongly recommends against running online ads, especially in the beginning.
The internet has so much fraud, bad actors and toxicity, yet it makes so much money.
How does a bot farm make money off this?
Sometimes I am wondering the low acquisition rate still pay off
This type of fraud is almost as old as web ads themselves.
How does that work for an app that's just some game ?
So, a CAPTCHA!
1. Dev publishes app with Google Admob integration to the Play Store.
2. Buys Google Ads to drive traffic to the app.
3. Google Admob bans his account for invalid traffic.
https://www.reddit.com/r/admob/comments/1vzg3fu/i_paid_googl...
Funny part to me was Google was the only network bidding on these bots while others must have detected something and stayed out.
We submitted a second appeal taking full responsibility plus providing a long list of corrective action we took in house plus a full triage of what happened.
They again rejected our second appeal with no feedback.
If a person does that, then that's dumb. But a company? Don't you have like a legal department or similar telling you to not ever confess to something you did in fact not do?
Last week on YouTube I was logged out of YouTube and on my work computer got an ad that appeared to offer access to underage girls, the pic was creepy as hell. Google took their money but if I posted that image in a video I bet I would be banned….
https://bsky.app/profile/atomic14.bsky.social/post/3mnc7ws2h...
Perfectly fine according to google.
And in smaller websites it's mostly Malware and health-related scams.
The reason you don't see these on every website is purely because the website owner decides to block some of those.
Governing Law; Venue.
All claims arising out of or relating to the AdSense
Terms or the Services will be governed by California
law, excluding California's conflict of laws rules,
and will be litigated exclusively in the federal or
state courts of Santa Clara County, California, USA,
and you and Google consent to personal jurisdiction
in those courts.
Better ways to spend your money, like funding competitors.
My feeling is that this is systemic, and basically it's the very business model. I remember the first account explaining how the initial budget should be a few thousand dollars, so that "the AI could target effectively". It did target effectively - our wallet.
After running Google Ads for a couple of years, our current exclusion list has over 4000 networks just in the US.
And it's absolutely not the case that google can't detect ad fraud - in fact they are VERY good at detecting it when they want to.
Today the fraud is perhaps more obvious. YT has served me the same 20 min ad 200+ times over the last few weeks. I let the entire thing play 10 times and 50 times didn't press skip for the first minute (or the view doesn't count) It's so annoying Ive reduced video watching by 80-90%
The idea they have someone pay for this in the hope I will buy the product?
Or do people really intentionally run campaigns like that?
Isn't that what you see on free to view TV. The same ads over and over.
This is the opposite of resourcefulness - unless the videos were a distraction, not a real goal of yours.
PS Genuine question: where is the fraud in a 20 minute ad?
Steve Balmer explaining his take on how local governments of the US work was a hilarious ad offering on my non-adblocked device the other day - I’m struggling to see vectors for fraud.
What’s the name for this sort of marketing?
I really like the interface you’ve built for completing the puzzles. Very clean - it’s very nice to not be bombarded at every screen.
Guerrilla marketing.
From time to time, Google ads sales reps call me and are trying to convince me to increase the ads spend. I complain about bots, and none of them had any suggestion on what I can do to appeal it etc. I mean I can appeal on some specific instance, once - but there's no process to communicate back to Google the cases where I'm 99% certain about bots on regular basis.
And these bots get increasingly more sophisticated. They used to just click on ads. Then they started installing the app. Then running the app once and do nothing in it. Then they started tapping on the app screen & actually try to go through some initial app steps. When they do it in a spiky way, it's easy to detect them. But when they do it through some distributed device farms, below noise, it's very hard.
But that's not in the article and I don't get it: what's in it for these bot networks, how do they get paid?
Another theory is since lots free games have where you can earn in-game currency for viewing ads, the bot farms might be abusing this method.
With a small budget, in 15 years I never managed to get any positive ROI on any online platform I tried advertising on.
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/marketing/comments/4smisl/facebook_...
The world itself would almost certainly be a much better place without large scale/centralized advertising. I think the argument about it providing product discovery for hidden gems is nonsense. In reality it's mostly just crap, artificial demand creation, and behemoths trying to maintain brand image.
Same for Google reviews.
I’m a software engineer, and the way I find new tools is usually YouTube, GitHub, and HN. Even those channels are manipulated now with bots to inflate numbers to reach more
I’ve found that younger users tend to instinctively swipe away from flashy interstitial ads on tiktok/reels, but are far more likely to be engaged by a talking head influencer reading the same script.
When you advertise via parasocial word-of-mouth, you don’t even need to link your app in the post, as users are likely to take the time/effort to search for your app on the app store.
Unfortunately, the ad platforms/exchanges don’t really profit from these types of brand/influencer collabs.
I see ads for some local pizza places, as they've learned that can work for a delivery business, but most restaurants have no ads. They don't know of anything that works.
The farm doesn't gain anything, the only thing it does is waste the advertisers money?
What's the play for the farm operator?
Search for "datadog" and the first result is a sponsored link for Datadog. I click that and datadog had to pay google. scroll a bit down and there's the "real" natural link.
Fugazi!
In that context: suggest a fairer way.
Now, it may just be you don’t like advertising in this context - a valid take. But a different one!
Google does not give you a detailed breakdown of where all the ad was shown within Google's services. They do give a breakdown of the 3rd party websites and apps where the ads ran and they are all terrible shorts drama and html5 games websites for me - some of them even had the same UI with different URLs! Shame.
Ideally I would like my app's ad to be placed in the Play Store only, but Google doesn't allow this control conviniently.
Next I am going to try using in-app actions for conversion instead of install, but I doubt it will be helpful at all.
I decided to stop burning money on these ad systems. I'm not sure if they work for anyone at this point, I'm guessing this is more of everybody being convinced they might work and trying to get them to work, rather than ads actually resulting in conversions.
Well, I guess this might be different if you are an online casino or something similar.
When I set a reasonable cost (0.1£) I got either nothing or generic keywords (which I added as a test). I'm pretty sure no one is actually bidding on these niche keywords as there are no ads shown on them ever.
Google simply decides not to sell unless you pay an exorbitant amount.
I set the related gaming subreddits.
After one month only ~38 new wishes, the other hundreds of clicks was for nowhere.
I don't disagree that these findings may be useful for other users, who can now look more at suspicious bot behaviour - but all of that money empowers Evil. Let's not let Google off the hook. Remember why they went against ublock origin. They want people to use of ads, so you ultimately contribute to evil harassment via such pester-ads that further sustain Google's de-facto monopoly. This is bad from A to Z.
Well, the answer is that many people owe their paycheck to not letting their employers or shareholders know that digital marketing is a solved problem.
But if you need stronger marketing than that, there will always be willing affiliates.
From there on I decided to never buy any ads.
Google itself forces advertisers into fraud-friendly products like PMAX. Then, when you detect the fraud, the hapless account rep says "ummm... maybe try using IP exclusion lists?" (Like one of the comments below). Google, with all the data it collects on people who click the ads, wants you to catch sophisticated fraud networks by manually building up IP blocklists. Yeah right.
And the victim of this entire ecosystem is your clever YC startup.
As a mobile reddit user, I’ve noticed that the app treats ads differently than regular posts. They are more sensitive to taps than regular posts and I frequently accidentally trigger ad videos playing by scrolling past them but I never accidentally trigger regular videos.
He was probably busy clicking ads...
That was the beginning of 4, 45 mins sales calls, with full Powerpoint decks and on the spot commitments from us to reach, spend, etc. At the end of each call the rep would promise us that the account issue is escalated and will be fixed before we launch the campaign and would set the time for the next call.
3 weeks in, the account issue is still not fixed and frankly I cannot trust anything they say about their metrics, impressions, CTR or anything else.
I don’t understand the reddit ad clicks though. How does the bot farm profit? Is there some way to earn money hosting reddit ads?
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.
Web scraping (for LLM inference / training) I guess has transformed "residential proxies" into a giant industry.
They get paid for adverts to bots don’t they? Unrelated?
Tends to be how it goes once you reach a certain size.
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?
If you're just getting started I think the best thing you can do by a mile is just attend conferences/events where your ICP is and try to bootstrap PLG with it.
Step 1 is to understand who those people are for your product, and figure out which information sources they trust. As implied above, almost nobody trusts online ads.
search ads have negative ROI.
Facebook/Instagram & linkedIn work to a certain extent.
I've reported a few to Advertising Standards in the UK, but they're not really interested in combatting Facebook/Amazon fraud.
What's hilarious is having reported an ad to Facebook, they show you that ad more because you didn't longer looking at it. Mad.
SMBs can find an audience that would otherwise be impossible to reach. The thing that is advertised is so diverse it's hard to generalize, however the main thing I've noticed is SMBs live and die by the quality of their ad creatives.
For big businesses which make up the other 50% of Meta ads revenue: They are very effective in circumstances where your main offering is operational and the long term value of a customer is very large. For example it would be a very good place to advertise health insurance and TV subscriptions (which is a significant amount of the big business spend). Here I am more certain. If you didn't invent your product, and it is a beneficiary of the zeitgeist promoted by social media itself (beauty-focused, soft core brain rot), and your thing is basically fungible, you will thrive.
famous saying 'i'd cut my ad budget in 1/2 if i knew which 1/2 to cut'
'attribution' is the holy grail of hard thing in marketing.
so they know for sure the channel spend is iffy.
but it's hard to measure, esp. for brand and indirect campaigns.
so as a 'starting point' - it's a very 'noisy channel problem'.
the next wild idea is that ads come from a marketing budget which has $X to spend, and they have to spend it.
this is where the ROI stuff is wildy upside down.
large companies with 'market power' have a lot of surplus. they put that towards relatively lucreative marketing. the $ must be spent.
the cmo makes a budget, allocates, the managers follow the campaign, front line staffers spend. they try to get the best results they can.
there is often an unbelievable lack of true roi concern in all of that.
sometimes it's very aggressive, aka for some keywords, for sure.
but a remarkable amount of $ is spent in very unnacountable way, over what are 'grey' channels anyhow.
the marketing ops person is going home at 5pm and does not care one bit about bots. they were paid to spend it, they did. Facebook is paid to 'show a chart of view' ... they did that. 'everyone is happy'.
im not saying the whole system works that way, but much of it does.
the wild part is - there is so much 'dumb big money' in ads, it makes the whole thing very inneficient.
companies like P&G have 'distribution monopolies' on so many packaged goods, they have to keep up brand awareness.
It's why so many commercials are for commodity products like home stuff - the market is huge, the market channels are locked, they pay $$$ for ads for 'toothpaste' - the least novel and least productive kind of thing imaginable.
so 'Colgate' costs $5 at the store, it costs 50 cents to manufacture - that $4.50 gross margin is stuffed into a system of relative inneficiency up and down the economy. much of it in 'nearly useless ads'.
it's a deep market inefficiency people dont want to recognized because people assume private capital is inherently efficient and that a dollar spent = GDP = value and that's it.
our lives could materially be improved if we banned ads for a lot of things - feels like 'socialism' but really it'd just be about a kind of 'regulated market efficiency'.
It's bullshit all the way down. The most valuable bullshit is the numbers that you can sell to someone else who is looking for bullshit. They're not lying; they are merely reporting what they are being told, and you can't fault them for trusting their ad networks / investees / LPs / LPs / pension plans.
I went through the CPI basket[1] and vaguely looked for categories "life's necessities" and came up with "Food and beverages", "Shelter", "Fuels and utilities", "Transportation", "Medical care", "Education and communication". Those categories alone make up 85.3% of the basket, and I didn't even bother going into detailed categories to look for other essentials. "Televisions" on the other hand makes up 0.1%. I'm sure there's more non-essentials on there, but 85% of the CPI basket being non-essentials seems... pretty reasonable? If anything, it's weighted more towards essentials than typical consumer spending patterns.
I get my app is probably bad but you'd expect at least one comment out of 100 "clicks" to say something.
Unless you somehow insult their favourite entertainment franchise / political party / deity / etc., or praise one of the same that they don't like. That will get you piles of responses, though not in a way useful to your app!
What doesn’t work is the nonsense people try to teach about how to optimize it.
It’s what got me into programming in first place, since most strategies can be automated, but there are still companies paying money to people to manage their ad spend.
Ad business is the best business: you pay for something no one can reliably verify or measure. But you still pay because there is something somewhere with some correlational relationship with an uplift in some of your metrics and you’re afraid to turn it off. So you just keep paying.
If you login to the admin side of any ad business (Reddit Ads, X Ads, LinkedIn Ads etc) you are faced with a severely broken product: broken buttons, obviously wrong metrics, and other glaring bugs.
But somehow you still trust that people who cannot pull the CRUD side of the product off, are going to serve your ad accurately to the targeted audience and give you reports.
There are definitely industries and situations where ads are difficult to make perform, things like a single business working against aggregator heavy environment or markets where growth is more important than profit, but overall there's reason for hundreds billions spent on online ads, this when most business can track ROI results.
One of the bigger issues I see is even 'experts' hand over control to the ad platforms to optimise their spend. For better results often you need to manipulate the systems to work in your favour, which platforms try to limit but you do what you can.
One change I feel we need is for regulation around controls and data on ad platforms to stop this ever increasing 'give us your money and trust us' type behaviour.
So who is this shit working on? These companies must have detailed profiles on “people who do what we tell them” as a whole class of people. Scary.
It is not to protect the children.
I think the only sane way tu run a Google Ads campaign is to:
- only enable Google Search ads (i.e. disable all third-party publishers -- this may be a bit extreme but it's good if you're advertisting a niche product that people are actually searching for)
- only use "exact match" keywords ("broad match" is so broad that Google will show your ads in completely unrelevant SERPs)
- disable AI Max
- disable all automations
- reject any of their "optimization" tips
- set a max CPC even if they say it's bad for you
In other words, reject everything they suggest you to do. Maybe I'm wrong, or maybe this only works for my use case, but that's how I've been using Google Ads succesfully without wasting money.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's not fraud, more like a cheap ass dystopia. It's some how worse than HP and MS combined.
> ..unless the videos were a distraction, not a real goal of yours.
You are not wrong but all work and no play... I will seek entertainment elsewhere. My apologies in advance HN :-)
Also, all else being equal, earning potential of paid or subscription apps on Android is usually an order of magnitude less than on iOS, due to the self-selection effect of people who buy $1200 phones tend to have more disposable income than someone who buys the median Android phone which costs much less. So, trying to sell a paid casual game, especially on Android, is not going to pay the bills the way an ad-supported free app would. Sadly.
I always recommend focusing on Sales first, and coming up with a steady, repeatable way to move people from "being aware of your product" to "deal won". With people. Manually.
Only then, when you have a sales funnel that's economically viable, you can start paying to bring more people into it through PPC.
As qingcharles commented, PPC is a fast easy way for big players and fraudsters to fleece you. There is a lot of domain knowledge to build on the path to effective PPC advertising. Here is one piece of practical advice: every ad network has an "opted-in by default" gotcha. Your job is to discover it before you give them a dollar. Sometimes it looks like "relax my targeting criteria for broader reach" that will bring in irrelevant visitors. Sometimes it is "also run my ads on partner sites/off network", those sites will have extreme fraud. Sometimes it looks like "automatically pick the right landing page URL to promote, so I don't have to think for myself" which will drive paid conversions to your Contact Us form.
Making PPC ads work is an enormous skill and some small business deciding to throw their keywords into Google Ad Manager is a sure fire way to lose your shirt. It is very, very, very hard to make a profit off PPC.
(For anyone unfamiliar with how the PMAX scam works: PMAX will send more ad traffic to sites that perform well for an advertiser. So scammers who own a network of fraudulent sites will fill out that advertisers' forms, register a great conversion rate, and get a lot of ad traffic directed to their network of bot sites. When you spot the fraud, Google will say: "um, maybe put their IPs on the ad blocklist?" like its 1998 and the most sophisticated click fraudsters are the ones who can click their mouse the fastest. Enshittification Endgame.)
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"
I always ignore all numbers on the dashboard. All I care about is how much I paid, and how much revenue went up in following weeks.
I never could quite get that number positive.
I don't think it even registers for them that they're ads (even though I have informed them multiple times).
Same for sponsored items in Amazon search results. As an adblock user it's really jarring to see their experience of the web compared to my own.
Except then they just don't run your ads unless you're willing to pay silly amounts like $3 per click for bot traffic.
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).
Buying ads is always a scam.
"This company is known for this kind of fraud" even though it isn't. But the paper says it is.
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)
Until last year I used Instagram and most of the ads I got were actually relevant. Zero scams, mostly local businesses. If I'd been visiting pages about home decoration I'd get local furniture shops and so forth. Google ads were - and are - the opposite for me, totally irrelevant and frequently scammy.
Which emotions does this bring up? For me its hate. fostering hate is what these places mastered. The data is clear - it skyrockets engagement and time-spent. The question is if we want this as a society? I mean, they dont even tax any of the "earnings" aka "mental-health-money"
Flashlights that can do this exist. I don't know if they're being advertised on Meta platforms.
More modern, and also capable of improvised cooking are handheld searchlights from Acebeam and Imalent with many large LEDs, cooling fans, and even bigger Li-ion batteries. There are third-party videos of these and the older halogen type cooking eggs and setting fire to paper on Youtube.
What you're describing from the ads obviously violates the laws of physics. An alkaline AA would have a hard time cooking an egg on a dead short.
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 was never going to give any of the woo-woo secret health nonsense hucksters any money, though.
Now I know them and I’m fucking annoyed that they exist. My “propensity to buy” has not improved.
You can save yourself the trouble of repeating more century old marketing truisms that aren’t. We’ve heard it all before, and it isn’t insight.
Look, I run UBlock Origin myself. But that's because there's zero other way to look at any Web content without going insane with videos and other garbage popping all over the place, and even when sites have memberships, I use too many distinct ones anyway, and the memberships may not remove the ads and junk.
But when it comes to sites like YouTube that let me choose between "ads" and "non-ads" experiences... I guess I'm just saying I see a ton of ROI on the $16.
If you really want it, you can vpn through certain countries they don’t show ads at all.
And you could advertise related products, or unrelated products. So many options there.
Similar problems with mandating that they track what’s considered a competitor.
I'm talking about the actual search results. They already do that part.
> Similar problems with mandating that they track what’s considered a competitor.
Well I said fair not mandatory, but they make enough money off these ads that they could handle it being mandatory.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaymcgregor/2017/02/20/reddit-i...
Here on YC News, even a minor comment a few lines long might get at least one or two upvotes (or downvotes). I'll get a reply about 50% of the time.
On Reddit there are posts with apparent huge volumes of "user interaction": thousands of comments, thousands of upvotes per top comment, etc... but if I comment on one of those posts... nothing. Zero up or down votes, zero replies, just... silence.
I'm learning to recognise these posts now, and they're the majority of the "front page" volume. The only posts where I'll get any interaction now is the really niche ones like the hobbyist ones or "owners of specific gadgets" and the like.
You don't get any up votes because nobody ever saw those comments to begin with.
I have heard that shadow banning is more commonly used on Reddit than here, which just makes the problem worse: banning humans but allowing bots through.
PS: someone showed that around the time GPT 4 was released the use of em-dash on Reddit increased from 5% to 20% of comments: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1kfg9b8/oc...
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.
It also tells me how primitive Google Ads are, when they keep showing me an ad I reported.
The frustrating thing is, this is very easy for AI to detect. Just feed the image into any AI and it will tell you it is deceptive.
Why wouldn't they? They still get paid for it, and if you could block an ad by reporting it, you'd just report every ad until there were no ads.
It ranks based on likelihood of what you’re search for - and yes, that’s different!
Some industries have standardized affiliate marketing which you don't have to think about. For example booking.com for hotels or Amazon for retail. They take a percentage of each sale they make for you and that's it. You don't pay them anything except for confirmed sales.
If you chose black hole paid advertising, then at a minimum you should give out different voucher codes on each channel you advertise on, which give customers a 10 or 15% discount. And give voucher codes to friends, family, colleagues and contacts that they can give to anybody they like. That's the only way to find out where the real customers are and where to target your ads.
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...
and where it is more efficient its where there is better attribution models aka direct sales.
note: there are certain kinds of products that are 100% 'click driven sales'. they zero brand awareness, they want to sell you that 'fleece hoodie' on the spot. those guys have their funnel math down solid.
but startups and other companies ... not the same.
well funded startups burn $ thinking it's productive - and hugely: buying fake customers, or, spending $2 to get $1 in revenue to either pad the books, show investors, make themselves feel good or 'strategic'. FYI 'strategic' is often rational. those are big pools of money.
but usually campaigns are mixed and attribution is hard, even for smaller companies.
the tighter the budget, the more 'direct purchase', the more 'nominally efficient' it is.
also note - most ad $ is big companies who ironically spend a smaller share of their revenue on ads <- this is the power of scale.
It's more like 25% of their budget.
https://www.statista.com/topics/7725/cpg-industry-advertisin...
I'm highlighting that the gross on commodity consumer goods is huge - and that it just pays for mounds of white collar bureaucracy, including advertising, and yes 25 points is about right.
Consider that companies pay more for advertising than COGS.
That should tell us something about 'productivity'
FB/Goog revenues could be cut by 60% and the good may very well flow just the same, aka they are not just capturing surplus but facilitate aggressive inefficient competition.
A western nation will post the $5.00 to the GDP when much of it is inefficient make-work.
This is why 'Pricing Parity' has to be used even to begin to compare relative wealth etc.
Toothpaste manufacturers can probably get away without advertising on FB/Goog, but I'm not sure that would work for other products or brands. It's not make-work to tell people about your product or service, although in markets with limited players you could see how a marketing arms race would drive prices up.
aside, re: 'socialism', Moscow has no ads, and I have to admit it certainly helps with aesthetics.
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.
Once the word gets around, even small non-techy businesses will pick up on it.
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.
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.
Google is fine attracting bots when it makes money for itself, but it can clearly detect that bot traffic when it has to pay out. There is likely huge amounts of money in total that Google has collected money from in ad buys but that they could also detect as bots. I would think class action lawyers would be all over this given the total amount of money involved.
If it's small claims court the company has to pay a lawyer hourly to attend as their representative, while you just have to show up and pay the small court fee.
If it's big claims court, well, you always have the option to represent yourself, and then you'll probably lose, but at least you won't have spent much money.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-google-bothered-to-ap_b_2...
If I were the author if that article I would rest easy knowing that Google blew 5 figures on lawyers to recover $800 and enhance my journalism.
It's not that they're not trying, it's just a very hard problem.
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.
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.
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?
Nah, you're participating by watching. You'd have 100% of my respect and 100% moral high ground with your stance just by avoiding youtube.com.
Sure there is innovation but nobody new ever enters the market.
Google and Facebook are in the business of 'economic rent' of people's attention.
25% of sales price going to Google might leave 5% for manufacturer and possibly even more for the Ad channel. Aka 'Google is where most of your profits are absorbed'.
You're not competing against product competitors - you're competing for attention of individuals, which is very narrow, through a very small number of pathways wherein there are quasi monopolists.
Your 'competitors' are actually 'value chain competitors' - Google and Meta - in this case, who require you to pay extraordinary amounts to access their captured audience.
Google is a massively 'high margin' business, which is an indication of their market power in the value chain, and they could be much more profitable if they wanted to be.
Whatever you make - you are bidding against McDonalds, Mondelez and Proctor & Gamble, not your just your competitor.
To realize this power, do a little 'thought experiment' and imagine of the 'ad layer' of the system would commoditized and extremely efficient, due to heavy competition and/or 'good' regulation (or socialization). Say for example, people were served ads with perfect efficiency, and accounting for some kind of community/regulatory guidance - which meant that 'local services and companies' were guaranteed a tranche of time, along with public services and community things - like School events, local street plays, art houses.
This could probably achieved for a fraction of the cost in the system now, and it would mean 1) the profits parked at G and Meta would be distributed to other layers of the value chain - aka the advertiser/maker, manufacturers, parts suppliers, and also to consumers. 2) likewise a system that defies the 'race to the bottom' competition of advertising (imagine very simple, relatively cheap and authentic ads) and 3) the hidden surplus of the benefit of community awareness, issue awareness, which is invisible on the GDP because 'money does not change hands'.
Another way to put it, is that the 25% spend on Ads is mostly spent on 'economic rent' not really on the cost and effort associated with that activity, in addition to that system being extremely optimized for certain outcomes (profits for private enterprise) and not others (aka 'financialization' of social and community aspects).
All of the extra money, time and effort people have to invest in fighting with each other over very limited attention, through captured attention, is inefficient 'make work'. It's the 'private economy' version of the government paying people to dig holes and fill them.
In almost all areas where there is heavy economic rent, there are inefficiencies; Advertising and Real Estate are huge ones there, there are a few others.
Obviously, Google and Meta do 'real things' - they're not fake businesses, but the massive profits are an indication of the oligarchic power and it's definitely sub optimal.
Edit:
AI can be a great help here, ask it:
- How to prepare your case for your country.
- Where to file and how much it going to cost.
- Help you find weaknesses in your case and what you can do to fix those.
- Rewrite your text in proper legalese (I do recommend to prepare the your arguments yourself to avoid over generalization from an LLM).
Of course you need to verify because of hallucinations but showing up is half the battle here. Big (tech) corps + internal bureaucracy makes it quite expensive for fight these cases. Especially if there are many different countries.
EDIT: Ah, missed the follow up link at the end. No, he did not get any money.
Google appealed to a superior court (sending their lawyers this time) and the award was modified to $0.
So he didn't actually win, the online meme that "small claims are the one weird trick to beat the mega corps" doesn't usually hold up to scrutiny. I doubt throwing ChatGPT into the mix would have helped against their in-house counsel.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-google-bothered-to-ap_b_2...
What's more, they're a publicly traded company. That means their primary product is no longer what they sell. Their primary product is stock dividends. That is their primary business now. Whether you're buying a service or a product from Google, you're no longer their true customer.
They treat such customers like they don't matter because they don't. And until they stop being in such a position of dominance, or someone magically transforms the whole of American business culture it won't change.
Who is their true customer then?
Whilst I don't doubt that Google invest heavily in fraud prevention, they're not actually succeeding.
“Nice app you got there. It would be a shame if your account got banned.”
So what happens is that the savvy media teams figure out what works through meticulous trial and error, and constantly monitor Googles weird changes to the levers you are given to operate the "console."
Obviously it all depends*. But I just wanted to chime in that it's not all totally useless, and "nobody clicks on ads". Us (tech-adjacent people), are less likely to be prone to it, but still get swindled through other sort of ads as well. It works more effectively for people not in our group. And keep in mind, we're in extreme tiny minority.
Took the rep two weeks to actually find out what happened.
It's just how the whole company operates at this point.
We had a similar situation arise once (big marketing agency in EU), up to that day I've never had heard anyone screaming so loud at someone than my boss to whatever poor soul was assigned to us by Google.
Or would they benefit by seeming like a fantastic place to wine, dine, splurge on things you can spend money on, and also make a few wagers on fun betting games while you are at it ?
The advertising market is a place that used to be dominated by the big advertisers meeting with the big networks (upfronts), but now is dominated by large platforms that only marginally care about the biggest users because the tail is so long
ROI tracking is a whole subspecialty of adtech if you want to parse out one medium or campaign's spend from all the other spend have running -- imagine you spend $10m / month on media, you have ROI and you have spend across platforms and nobody except you is incentivized to figure out what ad spend should be credited for which response. That's real ROI tracking and it is quite hard
Perverse incentives will only change when regulators are made to care.
That leaves Google with very few chances to fuck up before they're financially wiped out, and this is a ruling you can have issued in a small claims court.
Otherwise, I'm not sure why just being able to imagine a knock out David vs. Goliath win against Google has any value whatsoever as a viable legal strategy.
If you really want to know, you need to consult a lawyer, not ask here.
You read my wording wrong - you wouldn't force the judge, the judge forces Google.
What else did you think the Friedman doctrine meant?