[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.