[osrec]

I don't disagree with your comment, however, I am often surprised by the short-termism demonstrated by executives. It may not be Google's strategy, but I am sure they are well aware of it happening, and in that sense it feels like a lie of omission. Apologies if I sound cynical, but I would guess that a company that has been running an ad platform for the past 17 years clearly knows the difference between authentic and fake traffic.

[remline]

It is a certainty that some traffic is fake.. In this case it is doubleclick on websites and (from the commission numbers) probably over other ad networks, so Google has one connection's header and a few ms to triage the traffic. But the anomalies there are probably not so different than if I setup an open proxy and invite real people to use it.

Being cynical makes sense, but then it is actually more likely that Google has been generating fake traffic on fb than fake traffic for itself and vice versa. FB spent years being irrelevant to much of the market while getting a lot of money from less savvy advertisers for bot networks. I don't think the short-term revenue was worth it to them and I would be surprised if their exec bonuses weren't mostly hurt by missing targets and losing big advertisers.