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Traffic Fraud Inflates Video Site Popularity
Dotnaught writes "A new study by spyware researcher Ben Edelman finds that spyware-driven traffic inflation is common, particularly at video sites. The study identifies Bolt.com, GrindTV.com, Broadcaster.com, Away.com, RooTV.com, and Diet.com as the beneficiaries of spyware-driven traffic. 'Our measurement systems are inaccurate for the amount of trust we'd like to put into them,' Edelman said. 'So that's the puzzle: How do you build an advertising economy when the number can't be trusted?'"
I've never heard of any of those video sites. Is this an actual problem affecting well-known sites, or just these no-names?
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
I go the third (I hope so).
Damn. I was hoping I'd get bonus points for not knowing anything about these guys. I need to try harder to earn my "living under a rock" badge.
How do you build an advertising economy when the number can't be trusted?'
Use a different measurement system, and don't install spyware.
What?
How do you build an advertising economy when the number can't be trusted?
There's a sucker born every minute. Customers and advertisers both. Google proves it every day. Even the price comparison sites are becoming bogus.
Widget online: $3
Shipping & "handling": $25
Markup for the ad we had to buy to get you here: $47
On sale at the local mall: $2
Now that Google is taking over the entire ad space, it's one simple entry in the ad blocking software to eliminate most ads. Get Adblock properly configured and you'll rarely if ever see an ad.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
This problem has been around since the begining of web stats in general. There was a time not long ago when people didn't differentiate between hits and page views or visits. 100,000 hits on a given site could mean anywhere between 1,000 and 50,000 page views.
Some people intentionally inflate their stats, others end up inflating them unintentionally. Drudge reports an absurd amount of page views in their advertising page, but if you stay on the home page for any length of time you see the page auto-refreshing. Does that count? If you are selling CPM advertising, it probably does. If you are buying it, you hope it doesn't.
In the end, advertisers either are doing brand advertising or conversion advertising. If they are doing conversion advertising it's simple - identify potentially good advertising locations and figure out the comparitive ROI with a trial run. If you are doing brand advertising, you can base your dollars on alexa or nielsen or some other marketshare stat vendor, or you can simply research the site niches yourself to determine the extent of their advertising power within the community.
Advertising has been wrought with snake oil vendors since the beginning. Nothing has changed and nothing ever will. Like anything else - if a deal is too good to be true, it probably is. And just because a deal is priced in congruency with the rest of the market doesn't mean that you can accept it at face value. PR firms don't just exist to put out a public image, they exist because they are supposed to understand the advertising marketplace better than most people would ever care to.
purchases are all that matter. if i ever find an easy way to link purchases directly to advertisments i'm selling the idea to google and retiring.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Nothing to do with advertising can be trusted. That's the whole point - it's bullshit intended to manipulate you into giving your money away - how do you establish trust in that kind of parasitic activity? You just don't. You open your eyes to the reality and filter out the bullshit.
Maybe we could create a simple way for people to report forced traffic from their browsers? I'm thinking of having a button on the toolbar and when a pop-up opens you click the button to report it as forced (and have the button simultaneously close the window naturally). If you recieve widespread reports for a certain site then there is a degree of certainty that this site is really getting forced traffic (and not just malicous people playing with the button). With this information you can compile a public list of sties that get forced traffic.
Just do what TV studios do - pretend that the numbers are real.
Get the ugly MF ads out of my face and I'll look you up if I need you.
Slashdot capitalist says: Oh wah wah, then everything will cost more
I say: Tell the management to take a paycut.
Advertisers are parasites that manage to hook into both ends of the food chain. They suck producers dry under the false pretence of bringing consumers to them; and they suck consumers dry by inflating the prices of goods (to pay for the adverts that they are ignoring).
We have now reached a saturation point: there is literally nowhere left for the advertising industry to plaster their garish advertisements. Everywhere you look, there's a f***ing advertising hoarding. Then they got clever and used "time-domain multiplexing" -- revolving hoardings that can fit three posters into the space of one! People wander round in clothes made in third-world sweatshops, that boldly display the manufacturer's name; yet they actually paid good money to do that. (Unless they bought the better-quality counterfeits, and the real manufacturer still gets the benefit of advertising either way.) The only watchable TV channels -- unless you've got Sky Plus -- are from the BBC. And don't think you can get away from it in the cinema. First they advertised before the movie. Then they advertised the tie-in merchandise for weeks after the movie. Nowadays the whole movie is one long advert!
When the advertising industry is dead, there'll be one MOTHER of a queue to dance on its grave.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Please refrain from tugging at the bottom cards, or the entire advertising house might collapse. It's safer to just assume everything is fine. Pay no attention to that marketing exec behind the curtain.
You can go about your business, move along...move along.
Study everything, you'll find something you can use - Jason Bourne
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
When an ad is annoying (like all those in-your-face popups), at best they serve to get the ire of the user, get him to install popup blockers and other means of not having to deal with an ad.
How about a way to "rate" ads. Was this ad helpful? Did it provide information you actually wanted (I know, I know, but those things DO exist. But then, I also believe in the yeti)? Was it intrusive? Or downright nasty and obnoxious?
I'm pretty sure the advertising industry (the industry doing advertising, that is, not necessarily the industry that makes the ads) would be very interested in that information.
And as a nice side effect you get an immediate feedback about popup-abuse. Because they would most certainly be tagged "obnoxious", no matter how good the ad itself may be.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Have a look at megaupload.com. I had never heard of it, but it is on place 14 of the Alexa top sites, before Ebay and blogger.com.
The trick: The Megaupload toolbar integrates the Alexa toolbar, which is the source of the traffic data used for the Alexa rankings.
I've already been approached by someone (previously convicted of fraud) who wanted to start a website business and inflate the traffic numbers with bots so he could sell the company on IPO. He's done it before with non-Internet companies. I refused to help him with the Linux-based bot software. It's an actual product. It's purpose is only to create artificially high visits.
It's fraud. It's against the computer fraud and abuse act.
They're using their grammar skills there.
FYI we have the same problem in Italy for the number of TV programs viewers.
There is a corporation, Auditel, which is in teory indipendent but in practice is owned for the 66% by the two biggest TV networks (RAI, the crappy public TV, and Mediaset the crappier Berlusconi's TV).
Their numbers are used for the prices of the ads and the result is that they always greatly overestimate the number of watchers. An infamous case was when, due to a technical problem, the transmission of a big channel was interrupted for 30 minutes and according to Auditel millions of people (a big percentage of the Italian population) continued to watch it anyway, without any interruption and without changing channel!
There's a hidden treasure in Python 3.x: __prepare__()
After the sale of YouTube, video oriented sites are popping up everywhere, and many of them seem to be oriented around a similar exit strategy, so this doesn't surprise me. (Disclosure - I am with AmericaFree.TV and I look at a lot of video sites, but the 6 mentioned were all new to me.)
It is my feeling that this is a weakness of the entire statistically based advertising and ranking model, which looks at the actions of computers and tries to infer the intent of their owners. Using spyware to bring people to your site will piss them off, and they likely won't stick around, but if all you want to do is to artifically inflate your traffic statistics so that you can do a quick sale, what do you care ? This is beginning to remind me of the dot-com days...
Seems to me the simple solution is to track the money made from ads rather than the hits. If this happens there will be no incentive to fake hits.
"So that's the puzzle: How do you build an advertising economy when the number can't be trusted?"
/Mike
You can't. So give up, stop bombarding us with ads for useless things we don't need, go outside and get some sunshine. Do something useful for humanity instead of dragging us all down.
-- "So, what's the deal with Auntie Gerschwitz et all?"
It sucks when your vendors lie to you and cheat you.
Welcome to being a consumer. It's kind of like being one of your customers.
"How do you build an advertising economy when the number can't be trusted?"
You don't - You don't even try. You clear your pointy little head, take the hint and work on another model...simple.
How do you build an advertising economy when the number can't be trusted?
One organization attempting to answer this question is the advertising service Project Wonderful. In their model, you buy slots of time when your ad will be displayed on a given site via a continuous, rolling auction. Traffic, cost per click, cost per impression - all those traditional metrics are pretty much removed from the equation. The value of an hours-worth of impressions on a given site is decided dynamically and re-evaluated continuously by the folks buying the ads.
Whether it'll be truly successful or not, who knows. Their mechanism does seem to address some of the significant failings of the traditional online advertising model though.
OMG!!! Ponies!!!
And they after, script kiddies all over the world install on their zombie-nets a new function that send bogus report against concurrent companies.
Ever heard of the word "joe-job" ?
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
First, we all hate ads, but they pay the bills. Just about every web site being introduced builds their business plan on generating ad revenue. Of course, few can actually get enough ad revenue to build a real sustainable business without VC money, but hey, its the 90's again!
All of the new start up video sites are doing this. Bolt, Heavy and the sites from Purevideo are or were all in the top 10 in terms of streams"viewers". They use this to try to get advertising and better rates. They use this to raise venture capital and increase their valuation. If these numbers are fraudulent and if we can't trust ANY of the ad reporting numbers things will get tough for a wide range of small web companies and startups.
Advertisers may not be technically savvy or very quick, but they will and are catching on to this kind of traffic inflation, click fraud and other abuses. What they will do is simply reduce the rates that they will pay EVERYONE because they'll assume that there is fraud everywhere. This is less likely to impact Google, becuase of the auction system, but for the banners and many other ads, including direct sales, this could seriously impact companies.
The ads that bother me the most are those irritating long or tall shockwave flash animated ads. "punch the monkey and win a prize" or some other such nonsense. Nothing like a crosshairs bouncing around on your screen to distract you from the article you came to read. Those get blocked in my hosts file. In my case, the advertisers are losing out... if they had not made such an obnoxious annoying animated ad, I would not have bothered to host it out and they would have gotten their "impressions". But now I will never see that ad again. I wonder if they realize how their methods are actually lowering the number of impressions they get?
/. look like crap until I am safe back at home. I don't know how anyone puts up with that.
What's truly annoying is when I have to use someone else's box for something on the web and get innundated with animated ads that I have not seen for months. Makes sites like
I can only assume the advertisers realize some of their targets are like me and they are losing out with the ads, but yet they persist, so as the law of marketing goes, there must be enough suckers out there that put up with the ads to make it worth their while.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Not everything is paid for by ads. Why people just assume everything on the net should be free is beyond me.
Suppose slashdot was running into cash problems. If the service was actually of any value people would pay to support it. If subscribers don't meet the budget they'd have to scale back or fold.
Point is. You don't need advertising revenue to run a website. you need to provide a service people want to spend money on. Just LIKE ANY OTHER BUSINESS.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Oooh, I want to advertise on the net, and have trouble finding really popular websites!
Yes, I know. Many sites live off adverts, and yes, we can block most advertisements.
But I have a deep hatred of adverts. I really loathe being treated like an idiot, which is exactly what these ads are doing. They're the primary reason that I do not own a TV, don't listen to radio, always keep 'AdBlock Plus' up to date.
Ads can die for all I care.
Free PC version of ChipWits at http://www.breueronline.de/klaus/chipwits/
It has to be measured in terms of clicks that become sales.
meh
I see ads so seldom anymore. Adblock is my friend. I have even blocked the Google text ads. If I want to get information on some product I will never use an advertisement to find out about it, I'll research it myself. And if/when intrusive ads appear in computer or console games, that will be the day I stop playing that game. Advertising and Marketing are a pox on humanity that needs to be completely removed from any medium that consumers have to pay for, i.e. games, payed internet access, etc.
The real problem with ads is that, unless you're in the market for some specific kind of product at some specific time, the ads are noise that's "in your face" and preventing you from seeing something you ARE interested in.
Google and podcast ads are slightly better in that respect than attention-hogging, scarce-commodity-(my time)-hogging ads which detract from content.
They're easily SKIPPABLE but being persistent, they can be be individually replayed WHEN YOU WANT THEM and stay segregated and "out of your face" UNTIL YOU WANT THEM.
And you DO want them. But on YOUR terms.
Otherwise how would you find out about anything that's new, in any domain?
Not everybody cares that 'so-and-so' got a new 'schmijick' out.
Heck YOU don't care that 'so-and-so' got a new 'schmijick' out unless you're shopping around for that 'schmijick', or its functional equivalent, at that very moment.
Advertising is the only way that the 'schmijick' makers of the world have a way of reaching out to tell you about it.
And if they don't advertise, you will never know about their 'schmijick' and they'll go broke.
The problem is that they're used to competing for a "scarce resource": access to your attention.
The Google and podcast media model broke that and that why Google is Google.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I'm Ben, the author of the article referenced in the original post.
Jah-Wren, your second paragraph exactly captures my view of the significance of this problem. If money flows with ads, and if ads follow measured traffic, then there's a striking incentive to inflate measured traffic. So advertisers, ad networks, and legit publishers have to be on the lookout -- lest cheaters reduce payments to legit web sites.
As to your third paragraph, proposing paying for "actual creative work done" rather than for ads: That's a lofty principle. But I think it's hard to implement in practice. Who would do the paying? Who would decide how much creative work had been done? One possibility is to ask a government (or many governments) to contribute, but that clearly raises problems of its own. Sticking to private sector solutions, payment for creative work is essentially bound to follow monetization of that creative work -- and with high transaction costs for readers/viewers paying for material, ads seem like the most plausible approach in the short run.
How do you jusdge the value of advertising anywhere? You look at how it effects sales.
How do you build an advertising economy when the number can't be trusted?
Magazine and newspaper advertising was always easy to guage; how big was the circulation? Of course, someone could inflate the numbers by buying up large blocks of the periodicals in question, but the cost of actually printing them was prohibitive.
Then came radio and later TV. How did they get their numbers and could they be trusted? They surveyed people in the respective markets. Only some research has shown that these numbers, too, were fairly bogus.
The fact is that there is a lot more to making sales than how many people saw your ad. If your ad makes your product look like crap or annoys your target customers, you're not going to sell many. An example is a local bar advertising in the Illinois Times. They advertised their Friday "all you can eat walleye" for $7.50. Problem is, everybody else sells the same meal for $5.00. I only saw their ad for a few weeks. Clearly, putting the price of their expensive meal in the ad was a mistake.
You choose a medium to advertise in that suits your business - local business, local newspaper, radio, TV. Sell sporting goods? It won't do you much good to advertise in the Ladies Home Journal.
But the fact that you can't accurately guage the number of eyeballs a web page gets is no different from radio or TV. Nielson or no, there's no way to tell how many people are listening to the radio show you're advertising on. Sales go up? Must be working. Flat? Maybe nobody's listening or your ad sucks. Sales go down? Your ad sucks!
This isn't rocket science, folks. It's not science at all, it's an art.
That said, WTF do they mean by an "advertising economy?" A whole economy based on nothing but advertising? Huh?
Are the Golgafrinchans in charge of our economy? And here I thought it was the Vogons...
-mcgrew
Is that it just works.
Want a good one? There are people who do exactly know what are the "Google sponsored links" and that click first on these. Why? It usually means business, which is sometimes exactly what people are after. There are lots of small business who use online ads as their only way of advertising and that's the only way they bring in people to their website... And they manage to survive (and, no, I'm not talking about v14gr4 spammers) for they do actually sell things some people want. I've got nothing against that. On the contrary, I find this kind of advertizing way less dumb than the one shown on TV.
Here the issue is that bots may be doing fraudulent page views / video views... But there's a way to measure it: if the "conversion rate" is obviously way lower than that of another site, you may have a first hint that there may be an army of bots bending the rules.
If on some campains you've got a very low return while on others you've got better returns, for two sites supposedly targetting the same audience, you know something fishy is going on.
In the end online marketing is about money... So just follow the money.
I block lots of adds but I don't block Google AdWords for I find them unintrusive and sometimes they may propose something I might be interested in.
Regarding bots there are ways to screw them and to screw them very bad. Google, when doing a regular search is sometimes displaying special pages stating something like "We're sorry but we think you may be a bot, please solve the captcha below to prove you're an human"... This is very hard to solve for a bot (and it appears randomly). Sure, a motivated frauder may try to work around that random captcha but in the end computers aren't passing the Turing test and this gives a huge advantage to the good guys, not to the frauders.
The fact is that most fraudsters are, today, royally screwed by such anti-bots measure and will be even more screwed tomorrow. The tide ain't turning in favor of the fraudsters.
In the end advertisment leads to real transactions and this is something no amount of bots can fake (and fake sales, using stolen money, doesn't count, as these fake sales are invalidated at one point or another).
Follow the money.
Anyone with a windows box and a firewall log knows that spyware has been around clicking on advertising links since before Google was around. But nobody said boo. Now the cat is out of the bag and we're in big big trouble.
Unless you're looking to merge or acquire those businesses. Its a good thing for those looking to tout numbers and market share, and those looking to be bought out. Just look at youtube, photobucket etc.
Reality is not as important as hype in this arena, I'm sure keeping accurate statistics aren't either in terms of potentially hitting it big with a stock-heavy (only) buyout.
The realization is only dawning now (or at least should be, but apparently still hasn't) in the specific case of the internet, because the statistical tracking that is enabled by the technology (and subsequently exposed as inaccurate) is that much more immediately visible to would-be advertisers. Let's not leave them thinking that it is a technology-specific problem, though. These people need it made clear to them that advertising economies have never been trustworthy.
It's all a soft game of give and take. The advertiser decides using whatever heuristics how much they are willing to pay to place their advertisement. No matter how much they work to justify their chosen number, at the end of the day it is just that, an arbitrarily chosen number that they expect will provide an appropriate return. The consumer decides using whatever heuristics how much they are willing to spend to pay for a product or service, and how much they are willing to put up with advertising in their face during their daily activities. They too can work to justify their chosen amounts, but at the end of the day they are just that, arbitrarily chosen numbers that they expect will provide an appropriate return. For anyone to convince themselves that anything more is going on here, or that anything other than final sales data can be "trusted" (eg advertising audience stats), is seriously kidding themselves.
I never heard of these either, but why are they only now questioning web stats? The Nielsen ratings are cooked too. I got a diary in sweeps once and I didn't watch half of what I wrote into it, mostly put in shows that I thought deserved good ratings. Raise your hand if you've ever filled out a Nielsen diary honestly.
This is why advertisers have stopped relying so heavily on CPM advertising over the last few years. CPL (Cost Per Lead) and CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) advertising offer more "value" to the advertiser because they only per per performance. Networks like Commission Junction, ClickBooth, Performics and now even Google do this type of advertising because the advertisers line up at the door for it. Popular sites like gambling sites pay huge amounts of money to hook new customers (think ~$350). So, if the advertisers have a problem with it -- they can just sign up with a CPL/CPA network and say good riddance to CPM and PPC advertising for good.
Works are released to the public domain or a license extremely close to it and act as advertisements for the creator's next project. Thus enabling him to collect significant amounts of money if his work is exceptionally popular. The subscription model - automatically pay $10/month for regularly scheduled productions would probably work well, just as it does now for premium channels like HBO where people subscribe specifically for a series like The Sopranos.
You are correct that overhead for financial transactions is a problem - paypal takes way too large of a cut to make one million $5 deposits feasible. But, as far as I can tell, there is nothing about the financial system that requires that sort of overhead - it is primarily a result of paypal mimicing the credit card model which wasn't designed for small transactions. It ought to be possible for paypal, or some other service provider to escrow a couple of million single digit deposits with very little overhead.
I think the only reason that the advertising model will continue to be popular is inertia, the infrastructure is already in place and the flaws have not been exploited enough to force people to seek alternatives.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
In other news fraudsters scam people out of money.
Isn't this easily solved?
The beneficiaries of the fraud are most likely the cause of the fraud
Stop rewarding them / cut them off - i.e. add a section to the contract that stops payment to companies who engage in this kind of scam
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano