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Comment by vosper | Hacker News Reader

All of this, plus the vast amounts of bot traffic that no one wants to look too closely at, because everyone except the advertiser is making money off of it...

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Bot traffic is accounted for in the price advertisers pay for ads. Advertisers don't run unprofitable ads.

Advertisers do run unprofitable ads and marketing campaigns all the times.

And they are fine with that too. That's the case of VC-backed startups: they accept a negative ROI to get the chance to start making money one day.

Then you have the less consciuous ones, which might be big brands who want to experiment a bit with new media/ad formats.

In any case, if you think about it, the real losers are...the honest publishers. Because the money on the table is not increased by fraud, it's just shared in a way that takes something away from good publishers to bad/fake ones.

I agree honest publishers are at a definite disadvantage. Advertisers aren't because the roi calculation they come up with judges their campaigns based on its performance, which incorporates good and bad clicks over time.

Nobody has perfect attribution and direct sales ads are a minority. Traffic quality is big deal.

It balances out over time. If bots were eliminated tomorrow, marketers would bid more for the impressions because they would suddenly become more effective, thus justifying more spend.

Attribution tends to be terrible on display ads. Platforms proudly cookie bomb impressions and if you're not really careful, you end up falsely attributing sales.

I'd guess most of the big brands doing advertising look at it more from a brand building standpoint than a direct performance standpoint. You certainly can't compare it apples-to-apples against something like search advertising.

You say that. But the more sophisticated players can avoid the bots with much better efficacy than that less sophisticated players and those players get adversely selected at an egregious rate.

"Bot traffic is accounted for in the price advertisers pay for ads. Advertisers don't run unprofitable ads"

Ha ha, sure they do.

Brand advertisers, in particular.

You know that 1-inc by 1-inc 'video' ad playing in the corner of your screen, that vaguely has a car, but it's designed for TV and you really don't get to see 'what the product is' until the end of the spot, but by then, you've already scrolled past it?

That is 100% a waste of money for the advertiser.

There are tons of large companies with 'ad spend' and they just spend a lot of it without really knowing how effective it is.

Obviously, a lot of it it is, but many campaigns are a ridiculous waste.

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