My favorite story:<p>1. Dev publishes app with Google Admob integration to the Play Store.<p>2. Buys Google Ads to drive traffic to the app.<p>3. Google Admob bans his account for invalid traffic.<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/admob/comments/1vzg3fu/i_paid_google_to_ban_me/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/admob/comments/1vzg3fu/i_paid_googl...</a>
Same thing happened to us. We were large enough to have an admob rep who reached out to the IVT team for help. After our first appeal was rejected, our rep negotiated a second appeal attempt but he said “This time make sure you take full responsibility for the IVT getting through.<p>Funny part to me was Google was the only network bidding on these bots while others must have detected something and stayed out.<p>We submitted a second appeal taking full responsibility plus providing a long list of corrective action we took in house plus a full triage of what happened.<p>They again rejected our second appeal with no feedback.
I keep hearing this same story over and over. It's starting to sound like that's just Google's business model.
I keep hearing it too. The bit I don't yet understand is, wouldn't it be in Google's interest to not do this? They ban on both sides of the market for seemingly no reason. Wouldn't maximizing all legitimate participation be much better? Also seems a lot more possible to do now with AI to check all campaigns, landing pages, etc.
I imagine it's a side-effect of another fraud prevention effort. In my experience ad fraud on a google search ad is at least 17% of traffic, and potentially a lot more.<p>Whilst I don't doubt that Google invest heavily in fraud prevention, they're not actually succeeding.
Who benefits from the fraud, though?
Spam website owners pay for these bots, they get compensated for the conversions. In an ideal world, google’s ad prices and fraud detection would render this ineffective.
Google is fleecing other megacorps.
Without the fraud prevention, it would be 99.9998%. Pushing it to 17% is impressive, even if not sufficient
Google is an overwhelming market leader vertically and horizontally. Not only do they not have to compete with their competition. They don't have to compete for their competition's business partners. They don't have to compete at all.<p>What's more, they're a publicly traded company. That means their primary product is no longer what they sell. Their primary product is stock dividends. That is their primary business now. Whether you're buying a service or a product from Google, <i>you're no longer their true customer</i>.<p>They treat such customers like they don't matter because they <i>don't</i>. And until they stop being in such a position of dominance, or someone magically transforms the whole of American business culture it won't change.
> What's more, they're a publicly traded company. That means their primary product is no longer what they sell. Their primary product is stock dividends. That is their primary business now. Whether you're buying a service or a product from Google, you're no longer their true customer.<p>Who is their true customer then?
When you want to keep your house warm, you ordinarily should not burn the rafters. However, when the house is about to collapse anyway, it is cheaper to dismantle the roof and to burn the rafters than to buy firewood.
Do not attribute malice (or even intention) to which can be explained by Google-level incompetence.
<i>Hypothetically</i> you would have already paid for the ads before your account gets suspended/banned then <i>hypothetically</i> Google just keep sending you automated replies denying your requests for support until you give up or lawyer up. And when you consider the shear scale Google's adtech networks run at, this would add up fast and generate revenue over costs. <i>Hypothetically</i>
I really don't get it. Ads are supposed to be Google's biggest revenue thing but the entire process is just so infuriating at times. Their ads dashboard/tool for running ads is one of the worst pieces of software i have used period. My theory is they just dont care about individual experience as long as businesses see value in it. Nobody is going to not run ads because the platform is from hell. They still need to run ads and thus suffering is okay.
I know a company that spends >15M per year on Google ads, and Google blocked one campaign on a Friday night claiming it was fraud, in the middle of a hot sales season.<p>Took the rep two weeks to actually find out what happened.<p>It's just how the whole company operates at this point.
But in large, it works. We only hear from people for whom it doesn’t work.
I think Google's business model in large part is having a super complicated ad console that very few, if anyone, actually knows how to most efficiently operate.<p>So what happens is that the savvy media teams figure out what works through meticulous trial and error, and constantly monitor Googles weird changes to the levers you are given to operate the "console."
For a good chunk of businesses, ROI tracking is really not that hard. It gets harder as your business becomes larger, or oriented more towards B2B, or in specialized niches, or online only businesses. I know first hand small/medium businesses (whom I've helped myself in the past) that basically survive on traffic coming from ads.<p>Obviously it all depends*. But I just wanted to chime in that it's not all totally useless, and "nobody clicks on ads". Us (tech-adjacent people), are less likely to be prone to it, but still get swindled through other sort of ads as well. It works more effectively for people not in our group. And keep in mind, we're in extreme tiny minority.
Yes and no. ROI tracking is not hard if you want to run 1 campaign on Google and nothing else.<p>ROI tracking is a whole subspecialty of adtech if you want to parse out one medium or campaign's spend from all the other spend have running -- imagine you spend $10m / month on media, you have ROI and you have spend across platforms and nobody except you is incentivized to figure out what ad spend should be credited for which response. That's real ROI tracking and it is quite hard
Google makes a ton of money. It has to come from somewhere… so yes definitely agree that even though it’s hard to imagine for some people in the HN bubble, ads seem to be working for most people.
Ads seem to be working for most people or are people in protection racket where they have to pay to fend off the mobster from plastering the front of their store with roadblocks and directions to a competitor?
They are working meaning people keep buying them. This has nothing to do with ROAS. This developer gave Google $220 of revenue.
$220 is irrelevant to Google. The bot farms spend more. Hence, the small honest customer is not worth supporting when the large malicious customer will generate orders of magnitude more revenue. Viewed through the profit incentive, the end result makes perfect sense.<p>Perverse incentives will only change when regulators are made to care.
That seems in the interest of the savvy media teams, but surely Google would be better off having a market that encourages all healthy competition?
Would the casinos benefit from a careful presentation of the mathematical odds of all the games and how to best position your wagers ?<p>Or would they benefit by seeming like a fantastic place to wine, dine, splurge on things you can spend money on, and also make a few wagers on fun betting games while you are at it ?<p>The advertising market is a place that used to be dominated by the big advertisers meeting with the big networks (upfronts), but now is dominated by large platforms that only marginally care about the biggest users because the tail is so long
In fairness to Google, it’s not like they didn’t warn us. The service is called “Ad Mob”, after all.<p>“Nice app you got there. It would be a shame if your account got banned.”
Why would you ever ever ever on record "take full responsibility" for something you did not actually do?<p>If a person does that, then that's dumb. But a company? Don't you have like a legal department or similar telling you to not ever confess to something you did in fact not do?
Seems about right, in the sense that these advertising companies are just fine dealing with scammers / taking their money … but there are corners of the same company that also have reasons to not allow that behavior and it becomes a circle where Google users and etc are banned for Google encouraged activity.<p>Last week on YouTube I was logged out of YouTube and on my work computer got an ad that appeared to offer access to underage girls, the pic was creepy as hell. Google took their money but if I posted that image in a video I bet I would be banned….
Lawsuit time!
I would suspect that entities affected don't have money for a lawsuit.
Are most Americans not able to fight an international tech conglomerate at the drop of a hat?
Even a failed lawsuit has the potential to cost the company a lot more money than it costs you.<p>If it's small claims court the company has to pay a lawyer hourly to attend as their representative, while you just have to show up and pay the small court fee.<p>If it's big claims court, well, you always have the option to represent yourself, and then you'll probably lose, but at least you won't have spent much money.
This is what class actions are literally for. Yes, I know it sucks that the only people who make money are the lawyers, but it can result in some behavioral change.<p>Google is fine attracting bots when it makes money for itself, but it can clearly detect that bot traffic when it has to pay out. There is likely huge amounts of money in total that Google has collected money from in ad buys but that they could also detect as bots. I would think class action lawyers would be all over this given the total amount of money involved.
It doesn't have to be a class action. In fact it's worse for the defending company if they get 500 separate lawsuits than one class action.
How much compensation do you get from a class action? $5? That is only a win for a lawyers. The problem is lack of regulatory action and law enforcement. We all pay taxes for these bodies to protect us and more often than not they collude with corporations and do nothing.
Unless, of course, the terms of service require mandatory binding arbitration and bar you from the recourse of the legal system entirely.
Small claims court!
...which Google then wins on appeal, such as in the follow up from an example someone posted above of a "win" in small claims.<p><a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-google-bothered-to-ap_b_213176" rel="nofollow">https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-google-bothered-to-ap_b_2...</a>
Considering the government routinely both decides Google is violating the law but is unwilling to do things to change it, like split apart their ad monopoly, suing them is most likely futile.<p>Better ways to spend your money, like funding competitors.
Meanwhile, there's rampant ads for scams all over YouTube going on for years
Being outside of the US, most Google ads I see are some kind of finance scam, or scam-adjacent.<p>And in smaller websites it's mostly Malware and health-related scams.<p>The reason you don't see these on every website is purely because the website owner decides to block some of those.
That's double ironic because Google feeds off of ad-money
addiction, but here it also uses that traffic to ban
people from the evil Google empire (which is actually
pretty good, if everyone would be banned then Google
would collapse quickly. Without adMoney this adCompany
would be useless. It has nothing to do with the old
Google company before the adMoney inflow addiction).
We had a similar issue with Reddit, spent $500 and got a lot of clicks - none of them ever did anything else, not even by mistake. When we reported this behavior to Reddit, the rep who helped us set up the campaign just vanished. No answer. After a while, another rep came out and asked if we were interested in advertising on Reddit. Explained the situation and... poof! this other rep disappeared too.<p>My feeling is that this is systemic, and basically it's the very business model. I remember the first account explaining how the initial budget should be a few thousand dollars, so that "the AI could target effectively". It did target effectively - our wallet.
I've worked in different parts of the online ad industry for years. This is correct: fraud is a systemic and convenient part of the business model. The victims are the advertisers, who's in-house marketers don't know enough to detect/call out fraud.<p>Google itself forces advertisers into fraud-friendly products like PMAX. Then, when you detect the fraud, the hapless account rep says "ummm... maybe try using IP exclusion lists?" (Like one of the comments below). Google, with all the data it collects on people who click the ads, wants you to catch sophisticated fraud networks by manually building up IP blocklists. Yeah right.<p>And the victim of this entire ecosystem is your clever YC startup.
Has anyone ever had any success building a digital products business with pay-per-click ads? We're always tempted and dabble, and every bit of traffic seems accidental, completely disinterested or obviously a spammer clicking around trying to collect the "conversion".
It's literally the quickest way to burn money.<p>Making PPC ads work is an enormous skill and some small business deciding to throw their keywords into Google Ad Manager is a sure fire way to lose your shirt. It is <i>very, very, very</i> hard to make a profit off PPC.
I hope Reddit is not charging advertisers per ad video play.<p>As a mobile reddit user, I’ve noticed that the app treats ads differently than regular posts. They are more sensitive to taps than regular posts and I frequently accidentally trigger ad videos playing by scrolling past them but I never accidentally trigger regular videos.
That's assuming you can get your ad seen, plenty of times I've seen Reddit's own ads for advertising on Reddit and I'll never see my ads. So I'm bidding against Reddit on Reddit's own platform.
> When we reported this behavior to Reddit, the rep who helped us set up the campaign just vanished.<p>He was probably busy clicking ads...
Reddit is probably the worst of these ad platforms. We had a simple issue: we couldn't set the account that the ad was coming from to be the correct one (we have two Reddit accounts). That's it! So we sent a support email.<p>That was the beginning of 4, 45 mins sales calls, with full Powerpoint decks and on the spot commitments from us to reach, spend, etc. At the end of each call the rep would promise us that the account issue is escalated and will be fixed before we launch the campaign and would set the time for the next call.<p>3 weeks in, the account issue is still not fixed and frankly I cannot trust anything they say about their metrics, impressions, CTR or anything else.
Same here. Most of the bots didn't even load anything besides the html, no js execution, no clicks...
when I'm bored sometimes I look up what the current high price keywords are and then search for that and click those ads
Did you also give $100 to the guy at the bus station asking for fare to get home?
If you have their IP addresses in your dashboard, go to Google Ads > Admin > Account Settings > IP Exclusions. Then, add the entire network/data center range there (i.e. 123.4.5.*). In 99% of cases, these bot networks are not run from residential providers. You can confirm IPs at <a href="https://ipgeolocation.io/" rel="nofollow">https://ipgeolocation.io/</a><p>After running Google Ads for a couple of years, our current exclusion list has over 4000 networks just in the US.
This is one of the primary reasons why fraud actors purchase residential proxies in bulk now. Google "residential proxies for sale" for the tip of a huge grey/black market iceberg.<p>You know all those trojan infected smart TVs and home routers and such? That's one of the things they're doing.
Yep.<p>And the pay for these things is "access to 500+ TB Jellyfin-like movie services for free"<p>Of course, it's all pirated out of country. And the pay is being a residential proxy.<p>And piracy being the only way to actually own, I'm not imaging this will stop anytime soon.
Residential proxies are achieved in many, many ways. The most common is simply people installing software and leaving some checkbox checked, or agreeing to it unknowingly. In the same way that smart TV downloadable apps and games tend to include them.
Wait, so I can have free movies and subvert the adtech business model at the same time? What's the catch?
<i>Anyone</i> can buy traffic on the proxy, not just click fraud, but cc fraud et al as well. Caveat emptor, it’s really not worth it compared to setting up a 3 USD per month Hetzner proxy box yourself, if you’re looking to pirate movies.<p>For some more context: We run a business based on data scraping and metered residential proxies have never been cheaper. Countries that used to be 10 USD/GB just ten years ago are down to 1 USD.
Hetzner?! No, I would never use them if I wanted to host a pirate proxy myself. Very crude, trigger happy, operating in a country very cosy with all the police organisations.
> Caveat emptor, it’s really not worth it compared to setting up a 3 USD per month Hetzner proxy box yourself, if you’re looking to pirate movies.<p>How does that work? Wouldn’t Hetzner know who you are (because you pay them), meaning that if you’re caught pirating on it they could just know it was you and hand you over?<p>And don’t think Herzner wouldn’t hand you over. My only experience with them was during a job, when an external company complained about something on a single section of a massive website (everything was legitimate, we weren’t doing anything remotely shady) and Hetzner straight up took the whole website down and demanded a change. Shoot first, ask later. I wasn’t directly involved with managing the website, but the whole thing soured me on Hetzner.
This is the bread and butter for commercial VPN services. The VPN knows who you are (maybe, unless you pay crypto/cash), and the rights-holders know your VPN address (from joining/logging a BitTorrent swarm, for instance), but the better providers keep no logs, and I'm guessing there's too many individuals to target effectively.<p>I've received a nasty letter from the ISP over BitTorrent (someone's phone joined my wifi, torrenting without my knowledge), but using a VPN seems sufficient. I think the Hetzener suggestion is a VPS for running the software stack. You could alternatively self host on hardware in your home.
Exactly my thought. For, say, $50/month I can get a second ISP to my house, host the proxy (and only that) on that link, and enjoy free movies. It is cheaper than having 2-3 streaming service subscriptions.
These residential proxies are also used by scrapers. From scraping stores to scalp merchandise, to scrapers of data for AI training.
ehh, subvert is a stretch. But yes, you too can be a minor accessory to scams run by thieves to rob advertisers, with enriching the world's largest ad company as a side-effect. Not exactly a Robin Hood situation given that tons of the advertisers being robbed are just normal small developers trying to get their apps out there.
also why hyperscalers are paying folks to host gpu clusters in their homes. its to get at tgeir IP, it has nothing to do with space, cooling, etc.
No that makes no sense. They only need a tiny device to act as a proxy. It makes no sense to colocate the expensive GPUs
Yeah, the usual approach here is to offer a free VPN service, and then piggyback traffic over the user’s internet provider. Much, much more scalable and cheaper than offering to put GPUs at a user’s home.
Wow, that's genius. Basically, user gets a VPN but so does provider, in a sense.
You can offer them a free anything, really. It's a pretty convenient way to pay, that mostly doesn't affect the user at all (unless their connection is very slow), but generates value.
It makes sense when someone else is paying for the power. The AI capabilities of mobile cpus is for pushing cloud based AI to your device. You pay the power bill while retaining the same lack of privacy as cloud hosted AI.
Which hyperscalers are doing that? I've heard of one startup trying this, XFRA, currently in early pilot phases. But I'd be pretty surprised to hear that AWS or Google are paying people to host GPU clusters in their home.
>also why hyperscalers are paying folks to host gpu clusters in their homes<p>Source? There's definitely shady people paying people to host proxies, but hyperscalers doing it would be surprising.
My understanding of it so far is that it is at most, 50 or 100 houses as a test... It's a startup that <i>wants</i> to make it wide scale but hasn't got there yet.<p><a href="https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=span+residential+gpu+datacenter" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=span+resi...</a>
Calling them a "hyperscaler" is a stretch. By all accounts it's some renewables startup that's trying to pivot into AI because obviously AI = $$$, and calling themselves a "hyperscaler" in the process. Calling them a "hyperscaler" makes as much sense as some guy who runs a homelab in his basement as a "datacenter".<p><a href="https://www.span.io/blog/span-announces-xfra-a-distributed-data-center-solution-to-close-the-speed-to-power-gap-for-ai-compute-demand" rel="nofollow">https://www.span.io/blog/span-announces-xfra-a-distributed-d...</a>
Grey? There's multiple conferences that "ethically sourced" proxy providers feature at now (ex: extractsummit.io)<p>Web scraping (for LLM inference / training) I guess has transformed "residential proxies" into a giant industry.
Isn't this the sort of thing Google is supposed to be doing for us?
What incentive do they have to do that kind of work? They get paid anyway and they've basically got no competition
"They get paid anyway" yeah not really. Businesses have margins and marketing budgets. There's only so much you can spend on ads and if those ads don't convert, you go elsewhere, you literally have to. You spends less on Google ads and more or Meta or other channels (influencers, marketplaces, etc. etc.)<p>Google has to be careful, ads that convert less are less valuable (duh) and what happens is not "well the business will just buy more ads", but "well the business has a 35% gross margin and marketing expenses already account for 20% of gross profit, they can't just buy more ads"
I agree but that will eliminate a big cash cow for them.
Why would you expect the water company to check your water for poison?
Why can’t Google do this? Surely their data is better than yours.<p>They get paid for adverts to bots don’t they? Unrelated?
Nobody wants to admit just how bad the bot problem is, because it starts to dig into the fact that advertising isn't nearly as effective as advertisers let on
> advertising isn't nearly as effective as advertisers let on<p>Most marketers should know exactly how effective their ads are by measuring to the end of the funnel. This is standard for most business and while bots are a problem, if you're judging online advertising at the front end of the funnel that's to a large part on them for a bad setup and/or optimisation.
If the marketer is an employee or a consultant, is it in their interest to show that the ad-spend they are controlling is high ROI, or low ROI.<p>Maybe this is a cynical take, but, if they get to the bottom of things, and show their boss/client that the ad-spend is not returning so much, it seems it would portend bad things for the marketer.<p>I really don't know, and it seems like a very hard problem.<p>Maybe this is the time for that Upton Sinclair quote:
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it,"
Let the Google Ads account run dry, discover your Analytics never actually goes down. It was just donating to multibillionaires the whole time.
Taking a blind guess here because I have never worked at Google, but I would assume there is one organization that has the data, and another organization that can block IPs from clicking on the ads and consuming the spend. There is a byzantine process preventing that second org from getting the data along with a lack of motivation because it would decrease ad-spend, which is one of their key metrics. Org2 which deals with people clicking the ads is a bad place to work and no one who is actually good sticks around long enough to navigate the process and implement this, so the can gets perpetually kicked down the road.<p>Tends to be how it goes once you reach a certain size.
Google's AdSpam/fraud/bot-prevention team was, when I worked there, world class and fairly well funded, took their job seriously, and had access to <i>all</i> the data. It's an existential threat to the ad business, because if Google gets a reputation for being full of bots/spam, then the advertisers will bid lower per click/conversion to compensate, which means that legitimate website publishers will get paid less and go to other networks, which is a feedback loop that leads to the entire market collapsing (see also: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons</a>). It's absolutely worth refunding/zero-rating huge amounts of advertiser spend to avoid that situation, and they do.<p>It's not that they're not trying, it's just a very hard problem.
Fair, I retract my cynical conjecture
Just to be clear, this is different to the problem of Google ads that link to malware and fake banking websites and promotion of cryptocurrency scams isn't it?
Related in that some of the same organized groups tend to be carrying out every kind of attack at once, but operationally a different thing.<p>In the ad marketplace there are four participants: the advertiser, the user, the network (Google), and the publisher (also Google for AdWords, other websites for AdSense and so on, and effectively the channel owner for YouTube).<p>In the click spam or botnet case, the bad actor is the user, who is <i>usually</i> associated with a publisher trying to get extra money (although not always - there's reasons like auction manipulation where some advertisers run click bots too). In the bad-ads case, the bad actor is the advertiser.<p>At Google, each of those problems has their own well funded team, but they do also share some data to help catch rings of bad guys.
Problem 1: Buyers cannot tell if a product is good or bad, so they offer less money and good sellers may leave.<p>Suppose 50% of used laptops are good and worth $1,000, while 50% are bad and worth $400. Since you cannot tell which one you are buying, the average value is 0.5x1000 + 0.5x400 = $700, so you will not want to pay more than about $700.<p>But owners of good laptops may refuse to sell for $700, so more good laptops leave the market and the chance of buying a bad one increases. And the only guy selling for $700 is the lemons.<p>Problem 2: The theory assumes buyers already know how many bad products are in the market, but in real life they often do not.<p>Its obvious this market for lemons can’t be true
I don't understand what point you're making.<p>Your "point 1" is literally the argument of the paper. If that scenario arises, the market collapses and no further sales can be made. That's the whole problem. As someone who takes a percentage of every sale, you want to keep the lemon-sellers out even though in the short run they make you extra money.<p>Your "point 2", if it's meant to be a rebuttal, isn't much of one. Buyers don't need to <i>accurately</i> know exactly what fraction of sellers are fraudulent; if they <i>believe</i> that it's 50-50, the same thing happens, even if the true rate is 80-20 in favor of good sellers. Conversely, if buyers are overly optimistic about quality, the market can persist despite a level of fraud that's higher than should be tolerated. But in any case, things like reviews and external reporting should eventually give them good information.
it's also just flat-out unsexy from a product/MBA-brained perspective to push for something that will negatively impact metrics for your users. I ran into this when I was advocating for onboarding a third-party provider that would filter out automated/spambot email clicks thus decreasing the north star metrics our users had for engagement (even though it was truthier and would provide more accurate targeting and some of our most senior people had been advocating for for years)<p>the only reason I got the go-ahead for the effort was because one of our upstart competitors who was handily eating our lunch had implemented this years ago, started advertising based on it, literally pointed to the fact that we didn't do this yet, and then this was followed quickly by all of our other competitors implementing this, too. at this point we were well inducted into the illustrious halls of companies who stopped giving a shit about their core product with leadership blaming everyone but themselves for the fact that we were churning faster than we were net-new-ing<p>and even then it was a half-assed, resource-starved implementation that got dumped on regularly. have left the org since and couldn't be happier
also observe that Musk did the opposite, counting any attention whatsoever on a tweet as a view, such as a 1 pixel sliver appearing at the bottom of the viewport as you scroll, boosting numbers and all the Twitter posting addicts praised him for it when he did it
Alphabet has claimed to be fighting ad fraud for many many years.<p>That is not how an organization fighting ad fraud would structure itself.<p>Alphabet does not have an abundance of technical incompetence. But it does have the strongest of incentives to ensure ad budgets get spent quickly and no meaningful disincentives.<p>I mean what’s the OP going to do, go to Google’s competition?
Google is also competent enough to know that taking spam & fraud seriously is incentive-aligned in the medium term. See <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons</a>.
You mean, Instagram and TikTok, and now, ChatGPT? Absolutely. Depends on your product but Google ain't the only game in town.
I mean if you could show Google know they're charging people for ads they're knowingly showing to robots then a few €Billion of fines for fraud should be following.
Because doing this would reduce their profits.
Admitting in public how bad the bot and fraud problem would be, metaphorically speaking, shooting their primary revenue source in the dick.
Is there an open database of this?
There is <a href="https://knock-knock.net/" rel="nofollow">https://knock-knock.net/</a>, which is similar
Yeah if there's a DB that would be helpful - I'm not currently capturing the IP, but I'll see if I can add it in a future release.
+1
Couldn't you just give up on the main business and sell this list as a service?
Shouldnt this be Google's job? They seem to profit from this scam. Fake clicks and traffik.
That should be an RPZ feed!
Do you have that bot ASN list somewhere?<p>I am asking because I maintain botnet ASNs that are spamming/phishing/scamming our customers, and this would be a nice complementary category for it.<p>Most often I realized that a lot of those "growth" companies have rotating ASNs that they go through after each larger spamming campaign. I'd assume they do the same thing in the admob/adclick world.<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/cookiengineer/antispam" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/cookiengineer/antispam</a>
I suggest that Google should be doing that job for you.<p>It is absolutely ridiculous that you have been either victim shamed, blamed or simply neglected by Google into doing it yourself.<p>In a mall, you expect to see mall cops ... where are they?
Why Google can't detect it by themselves?
Why doesn't Google do this automatically? /s
[flagged]
I've been in go to market for the better part of 20 years now (anyone remember the DigitalOcean youtube ads of the 2012-2014 era?), paid online advertising has basically gone to shit, it started about 6 years ago, but over the past 3-4 years outside of linkedin it's effectively pointless, over 55% of Americans run ad blockers now and around 40% globally - on top of that, what you do get it mostly just... bots. In January I was helping a friend with some of his GTM efforts, we ran $10k over 3 weeks on meta, google, linkedin and X. On Meta, google and X the sub 1 second bounce rate was around 0.7% and hotjar+raw server logs registered zero activity on 99% of the inbound from those platforms, this was to a multitude of ICP specific landing pages with highly targeted ads AND relatively general targeting to the homepage. LinkedIn does still work, but it has gotten extremely expensive.
I always like to link an AdContrarian post <a href="https://adcontrarian.blogspot.com/2021/01/the-inescapable-logic-of-ad-fraud.html" rel="nofollow">https://adcontrarian.blogspot.com/2021/01/the-inescapable-lo...</a>
Good read. If you put mixpanel+hotjar or something like that in and actually drill down into what the networks are sending you the discrepancies are often stark. A couple years back I was working on a campaign for someone and over a month X reported it had sent ~$30k in traffic, but on our side the analysis platforms showed we'd only gotten around $2k of inbound (never mind the quality), we reported it to x and a few weeks later they came back and said there was a "bug" in the ads platform and refunded us the $30k but at the time I thought...if someone unsophisticated was running ads, they'd be out whatever they spent, to a degree their own fault for not being on top of it as ads platforms are somewhat notorious for this kinda thing but never the less, not ideal. I'm pretty sure the only useful places to advertise online these days are LinkedIn and Instagram.
This blog makes a good point: governments are already overworked dealing with pedos, terrorists and spies. Ad fraud is a victimless crime that voters don't care about so in all likelihood a low priority.
Does it matter from marketers perspective? I can measure incremental revenue/profit and decide based on that if the channel is worth it. I don't care if the rest of the money goes to the channel or is stolen.
So beyond LinkedIn, what sort of channels are you using now? Is it basically all about paying influencers?
Well... I've always believed that a good go to market should be extremely multi channel with paid being gravy anyway. I think DigitalOcean was successful because we did a combination of: Actually useful content marketing + being where your customer actually is (so attend&host event/conferences etc) + genuine community outreach and interest in what your customer base is all about (I spent time every day during DO on HN making sure if anyone had a problem it was solved) + for devtools (at least back in my day) I think supporting OSS meaningfully was also incredibly important. To a degree in DevTools, DevRel can basically be the same as paid influencers, I had Mikeal Rogers (rest in peace) working for me and his mission was "Do whatever you want as long as it's net positive to the nodejs community, have fun!" so I guess "paying influencers" can mean few diff things. With youtube a lot of people use sponsor blockers now too so paying someone to shill your shit in the middle of their video is probably not as effective as it once was, tho I doubt the sponsor blocks are as widespread as ad blockers.<p>If you're just getting started I think the best thing you can do by a mile is just attend conferences/events where your ICP is and try to bootstrap PLG with it.
This question is asked often, and the answer is always that it depends on who your audience is. Channels that work for one person might fail for you, and vice versa. Every product solves a different problem, which means different people who seek out information from different places.<p>Step 1 is to understand who those people are for your product, and figure out which information sources they trust. As implied above, almost nobody trusts online ads.
ads have gone so wild I'm afraid this post might be a targeted ad for LinkedIn
Even 6 years ago people were saying the market had gone to shit in the last 6 years
Google ads are a con. Meta ads are a con. If someone tells you you’re just not doing it right yet, they’re probably trying to sell you something.
We have a customer who's seeing ~30k in monthly revenue driven by their meta ads. So they can work. But they have a consult running the ads, and I assume they're doing filtering or something.
Are pretty much all ecommerce brands wasting their money on Meta ads? Seems hard to believe.
Meta ads are mostly obvious fraud afaict - unregistered lotteries, jet washes that don't need power, flashlights so powerful they'll fry an egg by shining at them, household goods developed by NASA, air-conditioning/heating that doesn't need outside air and plugs direct into a socket, ...<p>I've reported a few to Advertising Standards in the UK, but they're not really interested in combatting Facebook/Amazon fraud.<p>What's hilarious is having reported an ad to Facebook, they show you that ad more because you didn't longer looking at it. Mad.
I wonder if this depends a lot on location? Or a Facebook thing rather than Meta-wide, though I think they don't actually let you distinguish when running ads?<p>Until last year I used Instagram and most of the ads I got were actually relevant. Zero scams, mostly local businesses. If I'd been visiting pages about home decoration I'd get local furniture shops and so forth. Google ads were - and are - the opposite for me, totally irrelevant and frequently scammy.
> What's hilarious is having reported an ad to Facebook, they show you that ad more because you didn't longer looking at it. Mad.<p>Which emotions does this bring up? For me its hate.
fostering hate is what these places mastered.
The data is clear - it skyrockets engagement and time-spent.
The question is if we want this as a society? I mean, they dont even tax any of the "earnings" aka "mental-health-money"
> <i>flashlights so powerful they'll fry an egg by shining at them</i><p>Flashlights that can do this exist. I don't know if they're being advertised on Meta platforms.
The ones advertised on Meta platforms (and others like YouTube), at least the ones I've seen, claim to do so in a device that looks like it can't have more than a tiny battery and no cooling in there, or that they actualy show using standard AA batteries, or recharging inside an hour by solar energy, or other claim that thumbs its nose to the lawsof physics. But they must be real, after all that nice man left NASA to work on it and now the nasty commercial interests are trying to shut him down! I must buy one now while I still can!
The brand name that comes to mind is the Wicked Lasers Flashtorch, which uses a 65W halogen bulb that emits most of its energy as infrared, and a ~30 Watt-hour Li-ion battery. The old-fashioned light source is better suited to party tricks than illumination.<p>More modern, and also capable of improvised cooking are handheld searchlights from Acebeam and Imalent with many large LEDs, cooling fans, and even bigger Li-ion batteries. There are third-party videos of these and the older halogen type cooking eggs and setting fire to paper on Youtube.<p>What you're describing from the ads obviously violates the laws of physics. An alkaline AA would have a hard time cooking an egg on a dead short.
yes, they are wasting money, they know it, but caveats:<p>famous saying 'i'd cut my ad budget in 1/2 if i knew which 1/2 to cut'<p>'attribution' is the holy grail of hard thing in marketing.<p>so they know for sure the channel spend is iffy.<p>but it's hard to measure, esp. for brand and indirect campaigns.<p>so as a 'starting point' - it's a very 'noisy channel problem'.<p>the next wild idea is that ads come from a marketing budget which has $X to spend, and they have to spend it.<p>this is where the ROI stuff is wildy upside down.<p>large companies with 'market power' have a lot of surplus. they put that towards relatively lucreative marketing. the $ must be spent.<p>the cmo makes a budget, allocates, the managers follow the campaign, front line staffers spend. they try to get the best results they can.<p>there is often an unbelievable lack of true roi concern in all of that.<p>sometimes it's very aggressive, aka for some keywords, for sure.<p>but a remarkable amount of $ is spent in very unnacountable way, over what are 'grey' channels anyhow.<p>the marketing ops person is going home at 5pm and <i>does not care one bit</i> about bots. they were paid to spend it, they did. Facebook is paid to 'show a chart of view' ... they did that. 'everyone is happy'.<p>im not saying the whole system works that way, but much of it does.<p>the wild part is - there is so much 'dumb big money' in ads, it makes the whole thing very inneficient.<p>companies like P&G have 'distribution monopolies' on so many packaged goods, they have to keep up brand awareness.<p>It's why so many commercials are for commodity products like home stuff - the market is huge, the market channels are locked, they pay $$$ for ads for 'toothpaste' - the least novel and least productive kind of thing imaginable.<p>so 'Colgate' costs $5 at the store, it costs 50 cents to manufacture - that $4.50 gross margin is stuffed into a system of relative inneficiency up and down the economy. much of it in 'nearly useless ads'.<p>it's a deep market inefficiency people dont want to recognized because people assume private capital is inherently efficient and that a dollar spent = GDP = value and that's it.<p>our lives could materially be improved if we banned ads for a lot of things - feels like 'socialism' but really it'd just be about a kind of 'regulated market efficiency'.
So the gigantic incumbents with retail distribution being inefficient makes sense to me. What about the long tail of D2C brands that live on Meta ads? AFAIK, they live and die by their ROAS. I would have to believe that these companies just don't really exist to buy that Meta ads are a "con".
the roi is better at smaller corps that pay attention, but you would still be surprised.<p>and where it is more efficient its where there is better attribution models aka direct sales.<p>note: there are certain kinds of products that are 100% 'click driven sales'. they zero brand awareness, they want to sell you that 'fleece hoodie' on the spot. those guys have their funnel math down solid.<p>but startups and other companies ... not the same.<p>well funded startups burn $ thinking it's productive - and hugely: buying fake customers, or, spending $2 to get $1 in revenue to either pad the books, show investors, make themselves feel good or 'strategic'. FYI 'strategic' is often rational. those are big pools of money.<p>but usually campaigns are mixed and attribution is hard, even for smaller companies.<p>the tighter the budget, the more 'direct purchase', the more 'nominally efficient' it is.<p>also note - most ad $ is big companies who ironically spend a smaller share of their revenue on ads <- this is the power of scale.
"that $4.50 gross margin is stuffed into a system of relative inefficiency up and down the economy. much of it in 'nearly useless ads'." is easy to disprove because we know how much these companies spend on advertising (and marketing more broadly) and how much product they sell.<p>It's more like 25% of their budget.<p><a href="https://www.statista.com/topics/7725/cpg-industry-advertising-in-the-us/" rel="nofollow">https://www.statista.com/topics/7725/cpg-industry-advertisin...</a>
I didn't imply that all of their gross was going into ads.<p>I'm highlighting that the gross on commodity consumer goods is huge - and that it just pays for mounds of white collar bureaucracy, including advertising, and yes 25 points is about right.<p>Consider that companies pay more for advertising than COGS.<p>That should tell us something about 'productivity'<p>FB/Goog revenues could be cut by 60% and the good may very well flow just the same, aka they are not just capturing surplus but facilitate aggressive inefficient competition.<p>A western nation will post the $5.00 to the GDP when much of it is inefficient make-work.<p>This is why 'Pricing Parity' has to be used even to begin to compare relative wealth etc.
Toothpaste is a particularly high-margin product so it might not be the best example generally. COGS is generally the largest line item for CPG (or non-CPG products), and distribution isn't free either.<p>Toothpaste manufacturers can probably get away without advertising on FB/Goog, but I'm not sure that would work for other products or brands. It's not make-work to tell people about your product or service, although in markets with limited players you could see how a marketing arms race would drive prices up.
Funny thing about toothpaste. In my country it has basically been the same brands since WW2.<p>Sure there is innovation but nobody new ever enters the market.
It's 'make work' because it's a unnecessarily competitive system wherein prices will by definition be driven up to absorb all of the surpluses of any given business.<p>Google and Facebook are in the business of 'economic rent' of people's attention.<p>25% of sales price going to Google might leave 5% for manufacturer and possibly even more for the Ad channel. Aka 'Google is where most of your profits are absorbed'.<p>You're not competing against product competitors - you're competing for attention of individuals, which is very narrow, through a very small number of pathways wherein there are quasi monopolists.<p>Your 'competitors' are actually 'value chain competitors' - Google and Meta - in this case, who require you to pay extraordinary amounts to access their captured audience.<p>Google is a massively 'high margin' business, which is an indication of their market power in the value chain, and they could be much more profitable if they wanted to be.<p>Whatever you make - you are bidding against McDonalds, Mondelez and Proctor & Gamble, not your just your competitor.<p>To realize this power, do a little 'thought experiment' and imagine of the 'ad layer' of the system would commoditized and extremely efficient, due to heavy competition and/or 'good' regulation (or socialization). Say for example, people were served ads with perfect efficiency, and accounting for some kind of community/regulatory guidance - which meant that 'local services and companies' were guaranteed a tranche of time, along with public services and community things - like School events, local street plays, art houses.<p>This could probably achieved for a fraction of the cost in the system now, and it would mean 1) the profits parked at G and Meta would be distributed to other layers of the value chain - aka the advertiser/maker, manufacturers, parts suppliers, and also to consumers. 2) likewise a system that defies the 'race to the bottom' competition of advertising (imagine very simple, relatively cheap and authentic ads) and 3) the hidden surplus of the benefit of community awareness, issue awareness, which is invisible on the GDP because 'money does not change hands'.<p>Another way to put it, is that the 25% spend on Ads is mostly spent on 'economic rent' not really on the cost and effort associated with that activity, in addition to that system being extremely optimized for certain outcomes (profits for private enterprise) and not others (aka 'financialization' of social and community aspects).<p>All of the extra money, time and effort people have to invest in fighting with each other over very limited attention, through captured attention, is inefficient 'make work'. It's the 'private economy' version of the government paying people to dig holes and fill them.<p>In almost all areas where there is heavy economic rent, there are inefficiencies; Advertising and Real Estate are huge ones there, there are a few others.<p>Obviously, Google and Meta do 'real things' - they're not fake businesses, but the massive profits are an indication of the oligarchic power and it's definitely sub optimal.
Why's it hard to believe? Look around you at how belligerently foolish, irrational, inefficient, dysfunctional, and confidently wrong every large organization acts. Marketing departments confidently report that their marketing campaigns work, because to report otherwise would be to have their budget slashed to zero. Ad networks confidently report that the ads you buy are effective, because to report otherwise would destroy their companies. Ads are just a tax on the consumer which result in no improvement to any product whatsoever, a pure rent-seeking middleman, an intellectual landlord, a red queen's race, a dead weight on the economy, and, of course, a trillion-dollar industry, because we live in hell.
It's complicated.<p>SMBs can find an audience that would otherwise be impossible to reach. The thing that is advertised is so diverse it's hard to generalize, however the main thing I've noticed is SMBs live and die by the quality of their ad creatives.<p>For big businesses which make up the other 50% of Meta ads revenue: They are very effective in circumstances where your main offering is operational and the long term value of a customer is very large. For example it would be a very good place to advertise health insurance and TV subscriptions (which is a significant amount of the big business spend). Here I am more certain. If you didn't invent your product, and it is a beneficiary of the zeitgeist promoted by social media itself (beauty-focused, soft core brain rot), and your thing is basically fungible, you will thrive.
It works great if your goal is to pump up your install & conversion numbers so you can raise the next round of VC at 3x valuation. After a couple rounds of this, your VCs, in turn, can then use the valuation increase to tell their GPs that the value of their fund has increased by 10x. The GPs can use your reported valuation increase to report that they earned a 11.6% real return on the fund this year (13% nominal, using the reported CPI of 2.4%, which of course is nowhere near the actual increase in life's necessities but does show that you can get TVs cheap), and that therefore they beat their benchmark and should get their full bonus. Then the pension funds that invest in them can tell the state that everything is fine and of course every retiree will get everything due to them.<p>It's bullshit all the way down. The most valuable bullshit is the numbers that you can sell to someone else who is looking for bullshit. <i>They're</i> not lying; they are merely reporting what they are being told, and you can't fault them for trusting their ad networks / investees / LPs / LPs / pension plans.
>the reported CPI of 2.4%, which of course is nowhere near the actual increase in life's necessities but does show that you can get TVs cheap<p>I went through the CPI basket[1] and vaguely looked for categories "life's necessities" and came up with "Food and beverages", "Shelter", "Fuels and utilities", "Transportation", "Medical care", "Education and communication". Those categories alone make up 85.3% of the basket, and I didn't even bother going into detailed categories to look for other essentials. "Televisions" on the other hand makes up 0.1%. I'm sure there's more non-essentials on there, but 85% of the CPI basket being non-essentials seems... pretty reasonable? If anything, it's weighted more towards essentials than typical consumer spending patterns.
Probably the most succinct description of this phenomenon I've seen in a long time.
Add Reddit Ads to that, all the alleged clicks not one comment or conversion.<p>I get my app is probably bad but you'd expect at least one comment out of 100 "clicks" to say something.
I have a theory that there are far fewer genuine users on Reddit at this point than you'd expect.
The incentives to create fake engagement to satisfy their actual users who want discussion are quite clear. Doing this also gives reddit an advantage when monetizing their data. Scrape posts & comments for free, and you won't know which are LLM-generated and which at least have a human in the loop (but the human still may use an LLM, so this is where fingerprinting comes in). Perfect for incentivising the ai labs / other consumers of reddit data to pay up for an official feed.
Going back to its roots: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/v8xgq/watch_reddit_cofounder_steve_huffman_explain_how/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/v8xgq/watch...</a>
Reddit may be the most manipulated social media there is.
Yep, it's mostly bots, shills, and children and it's nothing new.<p><a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaymcgregor/2017/02/20/reddit-is-being-manipulated-by-big-financial-services-companies/" rel="nofollow">https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaymcgregor/2017/02/20/reddit-i...</a>
I'm fairly certain it's true.<p>Here on YC News, even a minor comment a few lines long might get at least one or two upvotes (or downvotes). I'll get a reply about 50% of the time.<p>On Reddit there are posts with <i>apparent</i> huge volumes of "user interaction": thousands of comments, thousands of upvotes per top comment, etc... but if I comment on one of those posts... nothing. Zero up or down votes, zero replies, just... silence.<p>I'm learning to recognise these posts now, and they're the majority of the "front page" volume. The only posts where I'll get <i>any</i> interaction now is the really niche ones like the hobbyist ones or "owners of specific gadgets" and the like.
Even with certified real humans who actively clicked rather than being counted one if the many ways these counts are padded accidentally (or not so accidentally), you might be expecting far too much of their attention span when expecting a full 1% to care enough to think long enough to respond before scrolling on. It is worse these days than it used to be, because many who might previously have bothered may instead assume they'd probably be taking to a bot.<p>Unless you somehow insult their favourite entertainment franchise / political party / deity / etc., or praise one of the same that they don't like. That will get you piles of responses, though not in a way useful to your app!
Spent a lot of money on meta ads and it worked well for a long time.<p>What doesn’t work is the nonsense people try to teach about how to optimize it.<p>It’s what got me into programming in first place, since most strategies can be automated, but there are still companies paying money to people to manage their ad spend.
Guess why we are getting “age verification” everywhere, lobbied by Meta.<p>It is not to protect the children.
Maybe I’ve just been unlucky for 14 years but ads almost never work (as much as you pay for them).<p>Ad business is the best business: you pay for something no one can reliably verify or measure. But you still pay because there is something somewhere with some correlational relationship with an uplift in some of your metrics and you’re afraid to turn it off. So you just keep paying.<p>If you login to the admin side of any ad business (Reddit Ads, X Ads, LinkedIn Ads etc) you are faced with a severely broken product: broken buttons, obviously wrong metrics, and other glaring bugs.<p>But somehow you still trust that people who cannot pull the CRUD side of the product off, are going to serve your ad accurately to the targeted audience and give you reports.
Effectiveness can vary a bunch but the majority of the time bad results are correlated to the setup quality.<p>There are definitely industries and situations where ads are difficult to make perform, things like a single business working against aggregator heavy environment or markets where growth is more important than profit, but overall there's reason for hundreds billions spent on online ads, this when most business can track ROI results.<p>One of the bigger issues I see is even 'experts' hand over control to the ad platforms to optimise their spend. For better results often you need to manipulate the systems to work in your favour, which platforms try to limit but you do what you can.<p>One change I feel we need is for regulation around controls and data on ad platforms to stop this ever increasing 'give us your money and trust us' type behaviour.
I always wonder who the hell is clicking these ads. I skip all you tube ads (thanks Adblock)… I never click banner ads on principle. I assume anything paying for my eyeball time is a scam.<p>So who is this shit working on? These companies must have detailed profiles on “people who do what we tell them” as a whole class of people. Scary.
My elderly parents regularly click the sponsored links in Google search results.<p>I don't think it even registers for them that they're ads (even though I have informed them multiple times).<p>Same for sponsored items in Amazon search results. As an adblock user it's really jarring to see their experience of the web compared to my own.
Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of actual end customers/humans (i.e. not bot farms or paid for actors) who click are not clicking on purpose. I've seen so many bad Android apps that have performance issues where content is still rendering and by the time you've tapped on where you go an add banner/link loaded up and registered you clicking on that. Zero purchase ever done but numerous 'ad clicks' generated
If one runs a small business, one has to pay Google/Meta; otherwise, their businesses will be bottom of the search. It is a tax now.
This is plain untrue and misinformed, there's an entire category of companies where the whole business model is to pump money into ads to push their own apps and games. They carefully make sure that cost to acquire one paying user is lower than the amount of money the paying user brings. They usually achieve this by aggressive conversion tactics in the app and overly optimized ads with hundreds of variants. There's a whole industry built around this.
Company I work for sees significant real, profitable traffic from them. I’m sure we’re losing some proportion to fraud, and we have a very experienced guy full-time on ad management, but money in vs money out is working very nicely for us.
Not limited to ads.
Eh, I think you're correct in most cases but they work relatively well for our property leasing office. There's a convergence of factors at work there though; small number of high priced products being offered to a relatively small number of people in a certain geo location.
this is the only correct response.
idk, i’ve spent six figures on meta ads in the last few months and gotten tons of real users for my app. how is that a con?
Ah yes, the "you're not spending enough" excuse, Reddit loves to use that one me.
How has been the return? 6 figs is a lot if your users aren't earning you that money back.
This was also my experience wasting $1500 on Google ads
The main problem with Google Ads is that Google tries to squeeze money out of you in all possible ways.<p>I think the only sane way tu run a Google Ads campaign is to:<p>- only enable Google Search ads (i.e. disable all third-party publishers -- this may be a bit extreme but it's good if you're advertisting a niche product that people are actually searching for)<p>- only use "exact match" keywords ("broad match" is so broad that Google will show your ads in completely unrelevant SERPs)<p>- disable AI Max<p>- disable all automations<p>- reject any of their "optimization" tips<p>- set a max CPC even if they say it's bad for you<p>In other words, reject everything they suggest you to do.
Maybe I'm wrong, or maybe this only works for my use case, but that's how I've been using Google Ads succesfully without wasting money.
Also: run experiments to find an "optimal" budget with the right size for your target audience. If you, e.g., set a too restrictive geographic rule, but also set a budget higher than what they manage to burn showing your ads at the area you defined, they will override the rules you set up to guarantee 100% of your money will be burnt.
> only enable Google Search ads<p>Except then they just don't run your ads unless you're willing to pay silly amounts like $3 per click for bot traffic.
What is the incentive for the bot owners? Why do the bots download and install the apps? It has some (very small) cost to them, and I don't understand the value for them.
The bot owner is also providing "ad space" to Google. Author pays Google to show the ad. Bot owner gets paid by Google to "display" that ad and for conversion. The bot themselves aren't getting paid for installing the application.<p>In a normal scenario, the provider of ad space would be a website or an application. Google would pay the owner of that space. On Youtube, that would be an ad served by Google paid to the channel owner.
I'm trying to confirm that I understand what you mean:<p>Bot farm is operated by a company that displays Google ads. This bot farm fakes traffic to the bot farm owner and simulates conversion Google wants to see. Google sees the high conversion and happily serves more ads to the bot farm owner. Bot farm owner is paid by Google for displaying the ads. The person paying for the ad gets screwed.
yes,<p>in short, people/entities with websites employ bots to click and interact with the Google Ads on their website to generate fake ad revenue.<p>and the person running the ad campaign is billed for those fake interactions.<p>I'm guessing app ads are heavily botted because they're more costly vs. a simple ad that lands you on a website (edit: I was wrong, see reply by OP: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49665323">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49665323</a>)
And I suppose Google has very little interest in stopping this, even though they should be able to detect it with their advanced “AI.”
Nailed it. It's a microcosm of the entire economy. Success percolates to the least scrupulous, at the expense of everyone else.
That's it. The scammers display ads. Two scams: one is mostly or entirely artificial traffic; a second is eg low quality ad slots disguised as higher quality. For the latter, think ads in videos shown off screen with programmatic interaction to make it appear as if the legit traffic saw and interacted with the ads.
That’s why you display ads only on the Google search webpages.<p>It’s been known for decades that third party website are just lost money.<p>And then, even Google own pages get clicked by bots but this time from competitors so you spend all your budget and they get cheap auctions.
I once did this by accident and without a bot farm. It was very lucrative.<p>What I did was create a game with an action button. Then I served ads right next to the action button. I didn’t realize people would miss click on the ads at a high rate, but they did. They fat fingered it, clicked the ad, I got paid.<p>I looked into it after a couple weeks because my click rate was crazy high.
One reason: It helps makes the bot accounts look more legit. It's why Facebook bot accounts like random legit pages.
This was my thought too. It's easy to pretend to click one ad in order to make that ad money. But it's also easy for Google to tell apart a huge number of accounts that all clicked that one ad and no others. However, if a huge number of accounts simply click a whole load of ads there's basically no way to tell that it was targeted at any particular ad + they can bot for multiple ads at once.
Have to do the install to get paid for the ad click, right?
Surprisingly, no. 29 of the 30 zero-time installs had no click at all; Google credited them to someone watching the video. The install isn't what gets the farm paid. It's what makes Google's bidding think that placement is working, so it sends it more of your ads.
likely they run an ad intelligence operation which requires them to click to see where the ads lead
upping the clickthrough rate on a low quality property to get paid for fake ad impressions?
Could be black-hat vulnerability scanners and so on.
I've suspected that google has been turning a blind eye to ad fraud for a few years now. In the early-mid 2010's, ad fraud wasn't nearly as common.<p>And it's absolutely not the case that google can't detect ad fraud - in fact they are VERY good at detecting it when they want to.
Your post led me to install your app and play through 10 puzzles. The post doesn’t even show the app!<p>What’s the name for this sort of marketing?<p>I really like the interface you’ve built for completing the puzzles. Very clean - it’s very nice to not be bombarded at every screen.
I'd say "Content marketing" [1]<p>1. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_marketing" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_marketing</a>
Thanks very much - really means a lot that you enjoyed it, we put a lot of effort into making it.
Knowing your audience, and captivating them at grassroot level or in an unexpected place, without making it feel scummy (sometimes)?<p>Guerrilla marketing.
The article summary says:how a bot farm gets paid"<p>But that's not in the article and I don't get it: what's in it for these bot networks, how do they get paid?
My guess is they own accounts which show the ads, so they get paid for showing ads. This is similar how those "get free money" apps work, they own Ad account and get paid when you view/click that ad.<p>Another theory is since lots free games have where you can earn in-game currency for viewing ads, the bot farms might be abusing this method.
exactly! the article fails to provide any non-obvious behavior of Google Ads
I host a page, put google ads on it, hire you to generate bot clicks on said ads. Google pays me, I pay you. Some poor sucker somewhere pays google.
this is unfortunately very common - I kept running very small ads regularly over many years (~10 years by now) and the % of bots has been steadily increasing, and Google doesn't really have any system to report those reliably to them. In fact, it's contrary to their incentives to investigate & fix these problems - unless they feel some pressure from competition...<p>From time to time, Google ads sales reps call me and are trying to convince me to increase the ads spend. I complain about bots, and none of them had any suggestion on what I can do to appeal it etc. I mean I can appeal on some specific instance, once - but there's no process to communicate back to Google the cases where I'm 99% certain about bots on regular basis.<p>And these bots get increasingly more sophisticated. They used to just click on ads. Then they started installing the app. Then running the app once and do nothing in it. Then they started tapping on the app screen & actually try to go through some initial app steps. When they do it in a spiky way, it's easy to detect them. But when they do it through some distributed device farms, below noise, it's very hard.
Reading all the comments, it seems quite bleak to advertise. How do indies and SMBs reach audience these days then?
The general problem of how to advertise a small business has never been solved.<p>I see ads for some local pizza places, as they've learned that can work for a delivery business, but most restaurants have no ads. They don't know of anything that works.
Word of mouth. Make things that work well, people want, and stand out - and they will spread by themselves. I block 100% of advertising on all platforms I use, yet somehow never have difficulty finding things when I <i>want</i> to find them. And that often includes stuff from very small providers. Search + reviews, and so on are a million times more useful than advertising. And getting a hundred or so early users/testers/etc to seed those reviews/etc is trivial in modern digital times.<p>The world itself would almost certainly be a much better place without large scale/centralized advertising. I think the argument about it providing product discovery for hidden gems is nonsense. In reality it's mostly just crap, artificial demand creation, and behemoths trying to maintain brand image.
But even reviews are fake now. 2 years ago I launched a service and added trust pilot to collect some reviews to help with SEO, then received many emails promising “verified” reviews for $x per review.<p>Same for Google reviews.<p>I’m a software engineer, and the way I find new tools is usually YouTube, GitHub, and HN. Even those channels are manipulated now with bots to inflate numbers to reach more
I'm retired now so I don't need to deal with this mess anymore. If I was starting something new I would probably target something I could market offline.
Yeah that will definitely be a growing problem, especially in the era of LLMs. Services where reviews can only be provided after purchase and it specifies if the product was returned (as Steam does) can help, but LLMs do seem set to make a complete mess of the digital world across many domains.
Usually brands collaborate with influencers on tiktok, instagram, facebook, youtube.<p>I’ve found that younger users tend to instinctively swipe away from flashy interstitial ads on tiktok/reels, but are far more likely to be engaged by a talking head influencer reading the same script.<p>When you advertise via parasocial word-of-mouth, you don’t even need to link your app in the post, as users are likely to take the time/effort to search for your app on the app store.<p>Unfortunately, the ad platforms/exchanges don’t really profit from these types of brand/influencer collabs.
Influencers sometimes have very niche / local audiences
The standard advice I've always read: Get active in the niche for your app/game, be it a subreddit, a discord, tiktok or whatever.
This will always remind me of the post I made 10 years ago, with Facebook ads being 100% robots...<p>With a small budget, in 15 years I never managed to get any positive ROI on any online platform I tried advertising on.<p>[0]: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/marketing/comments/4smisl/facebook_ads_100_fake_clicks/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/marketing/comments/4smisl/facebook_...</a>
Can someone explain to me why such farms exist? Who benefits, other than Google?<p>The farm doesn't gain anything, the only thing it does is waste the advertisers money?<p>What's the play for the farm operator?
We had the same experience with our google ads across multiple campaigns. Tried everything from increasing the tCPA and daily limits significantly, to creating campaigns in 1st world countries only. Around 80% of the installs just opened the app and closed it after few seconds without performing a single action, not even a tap!<p>Google does not give you a detailed breakdown of where all the ad was shown within Google's services. They do give a breakdown of the 3rd party websites and apps where the ads ran and they are all terrible shorts drama and html5 games websites for me - some of them even had the same UI with different URLs! Shame.<p>Ideally I would like my app's ad to be placed in the Play Store only, but Google doesn't allow this control conviniently.<p>Next I am going to try using in-app actions for conversion instead of install, but I doubt it will be helpful at all.
When you are talking to your VC, they are just "installs"
I spent ~1000 USD on Reddit for my game campaign for getting more wishes on Steam.<p>I set the related gaming subreddits.<p>After one month only ~38 new wishes, the other hundreds of clicks was for nowhere.
Google ads make absolutely no sense financially. Even for high value items. I recently bought some ads in hope very specific terms that see almost no search traffic will be cheaper (we're talking few hundred searches a month from whole of EU). Google wanted £1.5 per click through.<p>When I set a reasonable cost (0.1£) I got either nothing or generic keywords (which I added as a test). I'm pretty sure no one is actually bidding on these niche keywords as there are no ads shown on them ever.<p>Google simply decides not to sell unless you pay an exorbitant amount.
Every ad system I tried resulted in nearly 100% bot traffic to my site. Google and LinkedIn give you "tools" that will show you various numbers, but I implemented my own conversion tracking, because I didn't trust their numbers.<p>I decided to stop burning money on these ad systems. I'm not sure if they work for anyone at this point, I'm guessing this is more of everybody being convinced they might work and trying to get them to work, rather than ads actually resulting in conversions.<p>Well, I guess this might be different if you are an online casino or something similar.
Switch to a pay app and the problem goes away.
Doesnt title mean you need to spend 60% of budget on installations from bot to just cut the middleman?)
I'll never get over game dev people arguing that I should spend half my budget on marketing, which they mean ads.<p>The internet has so much fraud, bad actors and toxicity, yet it makes so much money.
Google's code of conduct used to be <i>Don't be evil</i>. It was there in Google's IPO prospectus, but dropped subsequently. pparently there have been lawsuits by former employees against Google over thie mott.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_be_evil" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_be_evil</a>
Sorry, I am new here, but who funds that bot farm? i don't get it
The bot farm is a profit center, not a cost center. A corrupt 'publisher' (someone who agrees to show ads on their site/in their app) is having the bots bring up their own site, view the ads and install OP's app, which takes, say, $3 from the advertiser and pays, say, $2 to the publisher.
Who does this benefit other than Google?<p>How does a bot farm make money off this?
I'm generally suspicious of the effectiveness of ads. It always amuses me when Ibbuy something, and then I start getting ads for the thing I already bought.
At this point you have to just factor bots into your marketing costs. You have to go by overall cost per acquisition not cost per click.
Did you dispute the charge with your card issuer? If you can document that 60% of installs were not human, you may have a decent chargeback case
Google display ads are completely unusable for me (not app ads). So much flagrant fraud. Like even the most simple of AI models could detect the fraud. Very disappointing.
Only? In think that's actually not too bad. Could be worse
Given this and the now saturated App market with accelerated with Agentic coding<p>Sometimes I am wondering the low acquisition rate still pay off
most people here bothered about why did 100 clicks show no activity.
I have built 10+ products, and played a little with meta/google/linkedin ads and SEO to know that it takes atleast 5000+ clicks for any meanignful pattern to appear. 1k-5k is a scratch, 5k-50k is a tiny traction, 50k-100k is a signal, 100k-1M means retirement.
60% is insane. paid traffic means nothing if you can't tell real users from bots.
How does the bot farm profit? Did I miss it in the article somehow?
I don't feels sorry for people shoving or paying to shove ads in peoples faces.
I too had similar experience. People were farming ads ... most of the conversions were a waste.
Ofc… nobody surf on internet anymore.
The app appears unavailable in France in Google Play is that expected ? My phone is a pixel.
Dont worry, bots are the new rich, just look at the trillion dollar AI companies.
Google cheats publishers also. all big companies are evil these days
Google promoting scams via ads 24 7 these days
That's a lot of telemetry for a puzzle game.
Did they like your app?
My story from Facebook ages ago. I was getting healthy organic traffic from Facebook. Thought maybe if I buy ads, I'll get even more? I bought ads and indeed traffic improved. Then I thought the organic traffic I had was enough so I stopped buying ads. Guess what happened? Organic traffic from Facebook tanked and never recovered.<p>From there on I decided to never buy any ads.
It doesn't really look worth the price.
Why do you make Google stronger by giving it money?<p>I don't disagree that these findings may be useful for other users,
who can now look more at suspicious bot behaviour - but all of that
money empowers Evil. Let's not let Google off the hook. Remember why
they went against ublock origin. They want people to use of ads, so
you ultimately contribute to evil harassment via such pester-ads that
further sustain Google's de-facto monopoly. This is bad from A to Z.
> the campaign’s goal is now “won a puzzle” instead of “opened the app”.<p>So, a CAPTCHA!
How much of Google's revenue is just scams?<p>Search for "datadog" and the first result is a sponsored link for Datadog. I click that and datadog had to pay google. scroll a bit down and there's the "real" natural link.<p>Fugazi!
I'm sure this is a basic question I should already understand, but, what is actually in it for the bot farm? They spend your money (annoying), but, does Google actually pay them somehow? I don't get what they are "farming"
This fucking click economy is for what, really?
Those are rookie numbers. The other 39% are just too good for you to catch.
40% less than you deserve.
80% of my web traffic is bots even mom and pop shops
probably needs to do tracking, and optimize through goal setting
Who would waste their time running a bot farm just to click ads? Almost sounds like Google are paying these farms
Digital marketing is a solved problem. You pay a commission on verified real sales to affiliates, and they can do what the hell they please to make those sales. If somebody like Google or Meta cannot promise X amount of sales for Y amount of ad money spent, then you are a fool to give them any money. They have all the algorithms and profiles on everybody, so it's their job to match your product to customers. Why should you have to tweak who will be targeted?<p>Well, the answer is that many people owe their paycheck to not letting their employers or shareholders know that digital marketing is a solved problem.
Honey says Hi.
You kind of said everything but nothing all at once. If not Google then where?
Depends on what you're selling. If you do it right, Google will give you plenty of organic customers who want to buy your product - no ads needed. You can market as much as you want on Meta also without having to pay for ads.<p>But if you need stronger marketing than that, there will always be willing affiliates.
Sorry, but anyone who worked in affiliate systems knows you gotta vet the quality of leads; affiliates do not send all "real leads."
> I’ll report back on the refund.<p>Good luck on that. I have sympathy for OP, but running ads is really hard. It's why most people set targets for things that happen in the app (OP updated to a target of winning a game, not just installing), and why companies have entire teams dedicated to monitoring Google/Meta/X ads. Trial runs are often thousands of dollars, and it's easy to evaporate money. I've made the same mistakes, and its why y-combinator strongly recommends against running online ads, especially in the beginning.
Thanks, and agreed. The in-app goal was the lesson, and I'd rather have learned it at $220 than at a trial-run budget. The part I found interesting is that Google's count wasn't wrong: there really were 21 installs. You only saw the problem by looking at which version of the app they installed. The YC advice is roughly where I've ended up too. And fair point on the refund, I'm not holding my breath, but I'll report back either way.
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Google Ads sells you the traffic and AdMob bans you for receiving it. The left hand bills you, the right hand punishes you, and neither talks.