[moron4hire]

I feel like the best strategy to combat this would be to create lightweight virtualization and automation tools that could be easily deployed by anyone, thereby destroying any company that comes up with these stupid strategies. Just burn the whole system down to the ground, salt the earth, and leave it to be a weird blip in internet history.

EDIT: I'm a guy who builds thing and occasionally takes a chance at trying to promote those things. I've been on the receiving end of a fair amount of ad-fraud. The tech press is full of stories of people who say they just "put a few ads out" and then took off with their products. It's almost a meme. But it's a filthy lie. It's a lie that you can navigate the ad-tech industry without making it your full-time job. It's a lie that the ad-tech industry is a good way to get attention for your projects. It's a lie that the ad-tech industry is interested in doing anything about fraud. I've dealt with Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon, and in each case at least half of the money I've spent has evaporated away to ad fraud. And then, when you bring it up on HN, you get the replies, "lol, that's just the cost of doing business." No. No no no no no.

The Amazon one was particularly bad, because it lead to me getting a ton of fake followers on Twitter, killing my ranking in their timeline view, requiring me to spend about as much as a total working week on block/unblocking people to kick them out of my followers list, just to get back to a good state. For $50 of advertising, I had to spend around $2000 of my time to fix the issue and got nothing real out of it.

[ryacko]

Someone would have to pay a kernel developer to modify LineageOS (or a similar project) to be oriented towards multiple concurrent instances of the same app, spoofing device IDs, identifying when an app needs attention, etc.

But people tend towards short sightedness and selfishness, so no one is going to spend a few thousand dollars for a product that would take months to produce.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

> multiple concurrent instances of the same app, spoofing device IDs, identifying when an app needs attention, etc.

The first 2 are legitimately useful features in general, and for that matter I believe spoofing the device ID was already possible via xprivacy. But consider: Being able to have multiple instances of the same exact app, with different data storage, and in an ideal world the ability to run multiple of them at the same time, would be cool ... but also useful. As an obvious example, consider that mobile browsers don't support multiple profiles like desktop browsers do; this would make that work.

[newguy1234]

Trust me, people have been trying to cheat the system with stuff like what you are saying. The advertising companies know how to detect that stuff quickly and ban the abusers.

[moron4hire]

That's what I'm saying, the ad exchanges say they know how to detect the cheats, but they don't actually do a good job of it. And it's not really in their interest to do so. They get paid equally for ad-fraud as they do for legitimate impressions. The person actually advertise the product or service gets shafted. But as long as there is a long tail of people like me when I first got started who don't understand the issue of ad fraud (and the complicit people who sing the praises of advertising to boost the idea that it's a good path), the ad exchange will keep raking in money, just like the people committing the fraud.

It's easy to look at this as "Farmers vs. Google AdWords" or whatever other ad exchange we might consider. But Google is just a middle-man. And as long as the system works for some definition of "works", they can capitalize on asymmetric information about the ad industry to bleed money out of small actors.

With online advertising, it's exceptionally easy to end up in a situation where everyone gets paid except you.

[newguy1234]

Oh yeah, I get you. Yeah, that is something the ad network has to deal with. Really crazy to think how much online ad dollars are spent as well. I think most of google's revenue is directly from advertising.

[cat199]

> The advertising companies know how to detect that stuff quickly and ban the abusers.

this assumes it is in their best interest to do so..

An 'acceptable level' of ad fraud could conceivably require a bigger spend on the part of the customer to reach the same audience, and therefore bigger revenues/profits to the ad network