[thewebcount]

This seems like a huge problem with online ad supported services in general. I wonder if this sort of thing happens on Apple Music and other for-pay-only services since you'd have to pay to have an account for your bot?

But this is more troubling than it seemed at first to me. Couldn't something like this also happen: So I could put my song on Spotify (or YouTube or any other ad-supported service) and some business can come along and set up a bot to open Spotify and play my tune and several others. Spotify will also play ads and probably show ads on the page during playback because it's not a paid-for account. Now Spotify determines that this stream was sent to a bot. They remove the play counts from my tracks and any others played. Do they return the ad revenue from those ad impressions? If not, what's stopping Spotify from just making up numbers, charging the advertisers and discounting my revenue without there really being a bot stream? How can any of these ad-supported businesses be held accountable? This seems insane.

I'm not saying they're actually doing the above. I assume they are not, but it makes me wonder about how you would even know? It could even happen accidentally due to some error in their software. That seems less than ideal.

[majormajor]

I haven't worked in the adtech space in years, but third party counts were a thing from the advertiser side for basically this reason. Nobody trusted the network to say "yep, we showed your ad this many times, pay up."

I'm not sure how fraud detection works there, though. Maybe there's third party counting that includes third party fraud checks? Back then, at least, the incentive to spot fraud wasn't high - advertisers didn't want to admit to their stakeholders that they were wasting their money any more than the adtech network wanted to admit it to the advertiser.

Your scenario is also interesting from the publisher side - especially on non-web properties where a musician doesn't even have the ability to embed their own JS in their song to collect their own counts or use someone else's playcount counting library...