[contravariant]

Depends what you call tracking. Just like a newspaper company knows how many copies they distribute a website would know how many copies they've sent over the line.

You might not trust them but I don't see why you'd think a newspaper would have a harder time claiming they've made more copies than they have.

[jefftk]

Sending out a newspaper is much more expensive than sending out a pageview. If a million bots visit my site everyday I can point at server logs showing very high numbers of pageviews, but you wouldn't want to use that to pay me!

Now, you could say don't do business with people who are trying to defraud you, but one of the more impressive things about the ad ecosystem is that it works without advertisers and publishers trusting each other. I can sell the space on my site and advertisers don't need to figure out how much to trust me in particular.

It's easy to have ad fraud that's plausibly deniable and maybe even not on purpose. Let's say you're a publisher and you want more people to come to your site. You look around and you find someone who says they run a newsletter and would be willing to include links to your stories for a small fee. When you multiply out the cost per visitor this looks like a pretty good deal; you say yes. This traffic turns out to be entirely bots, but you can't tell because we got rid of ad fraud detection.

[dmitriid]

> but one of the more impressive things about the ad ecosystem is that it works without advertisers and publishers trusting each other. I can sell the space on my site and advertisers don't need to figure out how much to trust me in particular.

For a person who worked in ads you are surprisingly oblivious to how both Facebook and Google defrauded advertisers and publishers.

- Facebook Lied About Video Metrics and It Killed Profitable Businesses https://www.ccn.com/facebook-lied-about-video-metrics/

- Google Hit With $268 Million Fine Over Unfair Ad Practices https://gizmodo.com/google-hit-with-268-million-fine-over-un...

Ad industry should burn in the fires of hell.

[klvino]

There was a second flaw in the premise between print publishers and websites. Some print publishers inflate circulation numbers when attempting to sell ad space in an attempt to make the ad space appear more valuable.

Similar double-selling of television ads take place as well. A network ad may run in the network feed and will appear in the network affidavit logs as having run. Local affiliates supercede network feeds all the time and in some of those cases they do so during a network ad pod and run station-sold ads. Consumer sees only one of the TV ads but both get reported as run.

Fraud in advertising isn't something new or isolated to the online medium.

[ghaff]

Ignore the headline which is completely unsupported by anything in the story but circulation numbers are audited, e.g. by an organization called BPA. https://www.photonics.com/Articles/The_Magazine_Industrys_Di...

Doesn't mean there isn't fraud but someone can't really make up circulation numbers out of whole cloth.

[contravariant]

Sure, but if anything that shows that newspaper companies can't be trusted to report accurate numbers if there is no oversight whatsoever.

All I'm saying is that the same logic holds for websites and that tracking people is a needlessly paranoid and harmful solution to the problem when it can be solved with trust, contracts and auditing.

[ghaff]

>it can be solved with trust, contracts and auditing

I actually agree with you. And large businesses in particular are both audited and do internal audits all the time. It's not that they and their employees are all untrustworthy but audits can both catch mistakes and send a signal that people are watching.

There are probably other mechanisms to do fraud detection. But, as your comment suggests, they may be more heavyweight and therefore might exclude most smaller sites.

[jefftk]

I don't see how audits work well in this situation. I wrote more about what ad fraud can look like in this comment [1] and I don't see how an audit would catch "as a publisher, one of our traffic sources is sending us bots instead of real visitors".

[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dFgfQTo4DRZG5t8Ap/can-ads-be...