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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.