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Comment by samspenc | Hacker News Reader

Curious to hear from folks who actually work in the online ad industry: I've repeatedly heard the author's claim (and other similar claims) repeated in multiple forums and chats about online advertising, i.e., 70% of ad impressions are bogus and driven by bots. I'm curious to know whether this is an actual problem and if so how the ad industry is handling this.

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> Curious to hear from folks who actually work in the online ad industry

Two points:

a) Online ads are a shit sandwich for the advertisers from the points of view of quality and features. They only tolerate it because TV and print ads are dying as a medium.

b) Statistics and probability theory are used to filter the shit and connect online advertising to real-world metrics. It's a cost of doing business but it's a problem easily solvable by classical mathematics.

Spam impressions/clicks are real and it is why fast/accurate spam classification is one of core competency of ad networks. It is also the reason why advertisers are rapidly moving to more conversion driven goals rather than optimizing for clicks.

... core competency of ad networks

What happens if they are not really all that competent? Or at least not that competent all the time.

Do the ad networks make more or less money as a result of their incompetency?

Then advertisers will move to more proven big names, like Google and FB which have proven records on spam detection, so less revenues on others. Keep in mind that ad networks' profit is bound by advertiser budget and the only thing that advertisers care about is ROI, not # of clicks or impressions. If you don't make advertiser happy, they're always ready to move the budget to other networks.

Click fraud is very real, but the big players ploughing money into digital ad spend are not idiots. There is a huge shift towards conversion/action driven advertising. Advertisers can see how much of an effect a particular ad channel had on the final conversion e.g purchase of a shoe/add to cart. Just talking about click/ad fraud without talking about counter measures/best practices is just click-baity usually.

Dumb question. Where do fake clicks come from and how are they different from nonconverting clicks

No not a dumb question at all. Hard to give an exhaustive list. One example is say you are a Facebook/Insta influencer who is promoting a link to a product. You might have an incentive to inflate the engagement rate with that link. Just engagement will be likes/clicks on the post/link. By tracking conversions you can try to mitigate this type of behavior to an extent.

I know someone who worked in the ad bot industry. It’s real. Fake clicks, fake impressions, and all that. He eventually got out and went into adtech to build detection methods. Probably better career move for him.

Who pays for fake click bots?

Not sure how prominent this is, but if a business buys some online ads then their competitors have an incentive to see those ads rendered useless by quickly depleting their budget on bogus clicks.

Publisher fraud is an ongoing problem in the cheap end of the market.

Is that publishers misreporting clicks or paying bots to generate clicks

Artificially generating clicks or views. Every ad tends to carry it's own JS click/render callbacks, so generally not relying on publishers own numbers.

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