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by wu-ikkyu
2759 days ago
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>It's very easy to demonise Google and think they stand to benefit from this all, but in reality they are hurt by it as much as anyone else False if bot traffic > estimated bot traffic For others like FB and Twitter, it's a fact their active user counts are inflated by bots and that they are disincentivized to accurately account for it. |
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What you're talking about is a completely different scenario, where the publisher is also the ad network (FB, Twitter) so inflated user activity could be beneficial for them. That's also arguable as they provide excellent metrics and different pricing models (CPM, CPC, CPA) so if their numbers were as bad as you think more advertisers would just drop FAN.
In the case of 3ve, methbot and the like, the process for the fraudsters is different and has nothing to do with bots in social networks:
1. In online advertising, it's very difficult to know who is authorised to serve ads for a given domain. Some domains have hundreds of ad suppliers and they can change all the time. This is alleviated by ads.txt, an IAB initiative to list all your adtech partners in a machine-readable file on your web root.
2. Since it's hard to know what inventory a player in the middle of the chain really has access to. So you can make a deal with an ad player to serve ads on the new york times, but actually be delivering shit inventory. This happens a lot at a smaller scale with dodgy ad vendors that simply deliver lower quality inventory; and added to this, until recently there was no way of cryptographically signing bid requests on OpenRTB protocol (v3 adds this feature)
3. If you have access to lots of consumer IP addresses (3ve uses a large botnet) you can essentially create a hosts entry for publisher.com pointing to localhost, serve a site with fake content loaded with real ads, open a real browser to it and collect on the money from the partnerships and accounts you opened. The advertisers think they're buying real inventory and these users pass every check (browser, network...)
PS. I do understand the apprehension though, I spent 10 years in adtech and at times the ecosystem is a total clusterfuck, but it is slowly getting better.