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Comment by jnty | Hacker News Reader

Not sure I fully buy the argument that the industry is actually genuinely losing that $6bn. If I buy plates in bulk but find that 25% are usually broken in shipping, I will tend to pay 25% less for each shipment on the assumption that this will happen - the supplier might even have already priced this in.

Online advertising is a much more fluid market and very metrics-focused - I find it hard to believe that most smart companies haven't priced this into their bidding. There's not some sort of intrinsic value per click or impression - it should purely be based on the expected propensity of it leading to a conversion. Fake clicks and impressions are just a factor which reduces this and therefore it should automatically be taken into account.

In fact, I'm surprised it's not the suppliers of inventory, like YouTube, who are complaining that this is erroding their value. If advertisers are getting caught out by this then they're not being very smart.

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I think you're right. It's not "the end of digital advertising". It's just another factor among many that lead to lower PPC prices.

When GM left Facebook because they claimed Facebook ads don't work, it was a huge story. But when GM returned to Facebook less than a year later, that didn't get as much publicity.

25% is an average => some small advertisers likely close to 100% broken in a way which is not immediately visible to them.

That's what I thought but the fraudulent ad views are probably not distributed evenly. You can't just assume that 25% of views on your ads are fraudulent. There's a lot of uncertainty here.

As long as it's not a hugely noisy in the way it changes within each exchange/source of inventory, you should be able to account for it. Don't forget plenty of other "legitimate" changes happen every day to affect the value of placements too - usage patterns, page layouts, tastes and fashions etc. They can be just as nefarious but all need to be accounted for - fraud is just another factor.

There's a big difference if 25% of your plates are accidentally broken in shipping vs being smashed with a hammer in the warehouse.

I imagine the supplier would probably care (and maybe the police too) but as long as I'm paying 25% less it's not really my problem.

Your 'big difference' is _intent_, a flighty, volatile emotion that no rational person will ever care to account for.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_rea

The whole point of my post is that this kind of thinking is bullshit. Saying "the courts do it" doesn't contradict that, it's just an appeal to history or authority.

If I break the plates, you might be able to get restitution from me. You can't get that from a bumpy road. Also, you might be able to avoid broken plates in the first place by threatening me with jail time. You can't threaten a road into being less rough. The intention of a person completely changes the threat profile and mitigation strategy, that's why it's a big deal.

Only if you can predict intent. Which you can't.

Exactly, lets not judge people on their bad results, but their good intentions.

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