Ad-clicking bots predicted to rip US$7.2 billion from Mad Men Botnets will inflict a massive US$7.2 billion in damages against online advertisers this year according to research by ad security company White Ops. Last year the industry was said to have lost US$5 billion, close to the $6.3 billion White Ops predicted in December 2014, thanks to the scourge of botnets that hugely inflate …
Add a few zeros.
Nothing personal, just business. A few billions are not significant. A few tens or hundreds of billions are. Once that happens the mad men will have to reconsider the "personalization mantras" and the industry will have to reconsider the ad-funded model altogether. The end result will be some rebalancing. While there is no guarantee that the new models will be better, it is difficult to imagine how they will get any worse. Just ask any small publisher when was the last time they have seen any money from their adwords account. I have long given up on mine.
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Typically, the ad server sends you an email saying "blah suspicious activity blah" and doesn't pay you for traffic.
There's no proof involved. And usually the ad comes from a bot - which is entertaining, because it means the entire process of serving, viewing, monetising, and then not paying for monetised traffic is automated.
...are the little advertising execs being shown how their worthless product is massively, hilariously overvalued, leading to the worst kind of vacuous garbage being enabled by the empty, borderline fraudulent revenue it generates, and is in fact nothing but an eyesore to everyone else, and a well known security risk to those of us in the know?
Well, cry me a fucking river.
As AC above points out, Bill Hicks had it right, and bring on the correction.
Steven R
Maybe, just maybe, if ads weren't so intrusive - autostart video and pop-ups that lock the page while simultaneously spewing out http requests to the far corners of the globe are the most annoying for me - then this sort of retaliation wouldn't be happening. I'd love to find out who creates these bots; I'd buy them all the beer they could drink.
Mr Kaminsky should have stuck to playing the cello with ELO. Because this isn't fraud at all. If advertisers are losing money because they've pissed people off so much, whose fault is that? Suck it up, marketeers. This is long overdue.
AFAICT, the click fraud *isn't* due mainly by pissed-off users retaliating out of principle, though.
It's primarily the result of people deliberately inflating their clicks (via click fraud) for financial gain or other business-related reasons that benefit themselves, pure and simple. Doubt they much care either way whether or not end users had been inconvenienced by those ads in any way.
(Users running ad-blocking software as a result of their irritation at them might cause ads to get shown less, but that's a separate issue).
Seems like there are a couple of ways out of this for advertisers.
1. Don't pay per click, pay per purchase like amazon affiliates. That's a great model for amazon, very difficult to defraud. It doesn't work so well for Coke or car makers though, no-one is going to immediately buy a coke or a car online having clicked through an ad.
2. Require more interaction from ad viewers. Want to read this article? Ok but first you're going to have to not just watch this advert but click on the car in it. The CAPTCHA to view ads solution that AC was so pleased about doesn't seem so appealing when you realise that it could only work if that advert will cover up the content until it is satisfied that you're human.
3. Technology arms race. More intrusive monitoring by ad networks who will only register the click if they have successfully tracked you across several sites and are content that you are spending plausible amounts of time on each page and your mouse pointer is moving in a sufficiently human way.
4. Corrupt journalism. Don't pay to have your ad run alongside some real content, pay to have your press releases published as if they were news (no, I didn't have any particular tech website in mind #innocentface). Similarly pay YouTube "stars" for product placement, etc.
None of these seem like particularly good news for the customer. The first is the least bad, it does at least reward adverts which offer something you might actually want at the time you want it.
so a company asks an ad broker to put its ad up, and will pay them everytime it gets a click.
Then a bot comes and clicks it loads
How does the bot herder see any of the cash that the company now has to stump up to the ad agency?
unless theyre in league together?
Or has the bot herder set up the site showing the ads and hence the ad agent pays him for getting the ad seen? in which case it should be easily detectable.
Here is one way (they don't make money from the advertiser or ad network, but...)
Competitor is running an ad campaign.
Company hires clickbot net to:
1. Cost competitor money.
2. Cause competitor to be kicked off ad network for click fraud.
Beer icon because beer.
I was meandering along here to ask much the same question.
All this talk of "costing" and "defrauding" - who is making the money?
Is it the web sites which are making locations on the page available to advertisers? If so, web sites with suspiciously high click rates and/or detected high bot activity should be at least "grey listed" and not have their accounts settled without further investigation.
Is it the advert resellers who are bumping up their hit rate so they can charge the product advertiser (and for a win/win then refuse to pay the web site because of "suspicious activity")? Be interesting if the ad brokers didn't charge their clients or refunded money if they detected "bot" clicks.
Is it the botnet herders who are being paid by the above plus for the "revenge clicks" to cost competitors money?
Who is being defrauded?
The ad resellers?
The product owners who pay the ad brokers?
If the people making the money can be clearly identified then they surely should be the ones being targeted. Nothing really in this article to say where the money goes eventually.
Still, the original concept of "pay per click" is a real temptation.
You will pay me every time someone clicks on an advert on my website? Oh, really? Hmmm....and me with scripting experience and access to a few servers and PCs? Sounds too good to be true.....
After that it is click scripts all the way down.
Edit: I suspect that it much like SPAM - nobody likes it but people are consistently making money from it and the cost of policing it falls on the people who are NOT making money from it (or losing money from it). So no real incentive to stop it.
Ads themselves are a legitimate form of fraud, they choose a stupid way to count, identify and track viewers (click and cookies? C'mon!), and of course someone smarted then them understood they could easily be exploited by some simple bots. They deserved it.
Has anyone else noticed a rise in "news sites" that apparently scrape the wire services and randomly substitute sort-of-synonyms to make a posted "story"?
They have a very Eliza feel to them, and once or twice I've even seen disclaimers that note "this was automatically generated from other sources" or words to that effect.
They're not many, I see about 2-3 a month on Google News. I don't have an example right now.
They look like they're trying to defraud those sub-sites that do those "top 10 instances of busty nekkid wimmens" iframes.
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