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Company Claims 80% of Facebook Ad Clicks Are From Bots
pitchpipe writes "A start-up company, Limited Run, claims that 80% of its ad clicks on Facebook have been coming from bots and will be deleting their page. Their Facebook page reads: 'Hey everyone, we're going to be deleting our Facebook page in the next couple of weeks, but we wanted to explain why before we do ... We built our own analytic software. Here's what we found: on about 80% of the clicks Facebook was charging us for, JavaScript wasn't on ... The 80% of clicks we were paying for were from bots. That's correct. Bots were loading pages and driving up our advertising costs.'"
If you don't have javascript, you're a bot?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
It's rude.
Don't go there, porno image.
Ad rotator services and click-throughs are WORTHLESS.
The internet gives you the power to directly connect with people and most companies still only understand advertising through broadcasting which is like tossing thousands of coins waiting for one to land on its edge.
I hope they've learnt their lesson before someone actually punches their monkey.
No, but you also won't be clicking on the ads since they are no longer visible without Javascript.
Facebook is a TERRIBLE advertising platform. I've tried it, and had nothing but rubbish. In fact, I read an article about it not long after I tried it, saying that Facebook Advertising just doesn't work, and the only way they keep it up is by new people going 'Well, all these other people are advertising, I'm sure I can try that too'. Then they give it up as a bad job, but not before someone ELSE sees it and goes 'Hmm. FB Advertising'...
So, basically, I wasted $50, and learned that trying to appeal to the facebook crowd with something they have to pay for just doesn't work.
Schlock Mercenary.
It's easy to confirm. Disable Javascript on Facebook and the ads disappear. It's pretty unlikely most people are disabling Javascript then finding alternative means to click the ads anyway unless they're a bot.
Only Facebook would benefit.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Evidence, or STFU please.
dammit. too little too late. that'll be forever ingrained in my oh nvm. my brain has ARC
Can a mod delete that link please? This is most surely against TOS and may get people fired from work if using /. at work.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
And no surprise. Facebook is going to suffer a dramatic stock-price crash in the near future. Too bad all the sheep have already bough into the scam.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Unless your a porn posting AC?
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
This is most surely against TOS
You would be wrong:
Geeknet does not control the Content posted to the Geeknet Sites and, as such, does not guarantee the accuracy, integrity or quality of such Content. Under no circumstances will Geeknet be liable in any way for any Content, including, but not limited to, liability for any errors or omissions in any Content or for any loss or damage of any kind incurred as a result of the use of any Content posted, emailed or otherwise transmitted via Geeknet Sites.
That's correct. Bots were loading pages and driving up our advertising costs. So we tried contacting Facebook about this. Unfortunately, they wouldn't reply. Do we know who the bots belong too? No. Are we accusing Facebook of using bots to drive up advertising revenue. No. Is it strange? Yes. But let's move on, because who the bots belong to isn't provable.
If they'd publish their access log data from the bot hits, I bet someone out there can help track down the source.
Oops forgot this last part:
Each user, by using Geeknet Sites, may be exposed to Content that is offensive, indecent or objectionable. Each user must evaluate, and bear all risks associated with the use of any Content, including any reliance on the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of such Content.
LOL. I wasn't going to click until I read your comment.. i saw porno and clicked. you should have been more specific.. its gay porno... not my thing.
I have once clicked an ad from google in gmail. I think it was about 1U linux servers. It was pretty relevant at the time.
c++;
Facebook have been lying through the teeth for years.
It is all slowly coming out. Your time is limited, Facebook.
Users hate the site, users are leaving, the advertising platform is a laughable mess, you just wrecked your own friend (Zynga) in the app market changes, you overvalued your company and everyone is realizing how all these previous things are really so awful.
Won't miss it one bit.
Can a mod delete that link please?
No.. Homey don't censor... Learn how to tune out.
With some Facebook bots starting at $30 to $50 to build, of course people are doing that. Facebook has bigger problems than giving a crap about this company's complaints or requests. If our SEC wasn't a toothless corporate captive, the company would already have been halted for securities abuse.
Which is highly unlikely since most users don't turn off Javascript.
If you click on just one ad semi-annually, let it be MyCleanPC!
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
All you have to do is look at Amazon's Mechanical Turk to see the scam in operation. It works mostly like this:
1. Bot head writes a piece of automated software
2. Bot head hires gullible people on Mechanical Turk (or other job boards like craigs list) promising them thousands of dollars a month just to do semi-automated actions. But they don't get checks, they get Amazon gift cards to side-step tax reporting.
3. Bot head owns various sites that the ads run on, and is either paying people to plagarize content from other sites to contextualize high paying ads, or paying people to run their bot software to click on the ads.
It's not too different from high-speed algrorithmic trading in the stock market.
And only an idiot clicks on random image links when they are at work...
We use adwords from time to time and had similar experiences a few years back with the "content network".
We analyzed our stats and even went as far as manually browse access logs. The hits we got were crap just like the sites most of the referrals came from.
There is a huge sesspool of scum on the Internet funded by leeching off ad revenue wherever it exists.
If companies are not on top of it and not careful about how they are spending their advertising dollars this kind of fraud could easily eat into a sizable chunk of their budgets and they might not even know it.
Do your homework before you throw your money away.
Maybe the bots are genuinely interested in Mom's Old Fashioned Robot Oil.
I google for "whiplash" or "loans" and click on all the ads.
Because they are upset with facebook for this issue as well as a completly unrelated issue where they changed their company name, but facebook won't let them change the name of their page for less than 20 k in ad purchases.
Really. There are large costs associated with company name changes. That is not news. Anyone else starting a buisness would be advised to choose a name they really want before lanching, or pay the associated costs.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Well, if they're using NoScript they could have Facebook's scripts enabled but not this company's. That said, it's very unlikely that they'd be more than 1% or so.
Dilbert RSS feed
Advertising on the Internet is based on click-fraud. Where have you been for the last 10 years?
Who profits from BOTS pumping the FACEBOOK advertising system?
In practice it will be effectively impossible to identify the person-or-company who is *originally* responsible for this clickvertising pumping scheme.
But I know who I'd be betting on.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
and subsequent public trading of Facebook are both good ideas, and this company's shares are definitely not overvalued. . . . . .
...that the reason stupid Facebook games make you click your mouse so damned much is that they are "piggybacking" fake ad-clicks on everything that you do.
You must really be new here...
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I'm not sure what you are getting at. If a person opens a porn picture at work, in most cases they can be fired. Since this is not hosted a pr0n site, it will make it past many proxies and filters. All it will take is for someone to see their screen and report them, proxy/FW logs will do the rest.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
There's a pretty simple fix for that issue. Don't click on random links while at work. Geeknet doesn't give two fucks that you did something that stupid.
Each user, by using Geeknet Sites, may be exposed to Content that is offensive, indecent or objectionable. Each user must evaluate, and bear all risks associated with the use of any Content, including any reliance on the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of such Content.
Oh boy, don't you remember when goatse was rickrolled into slashdot 100 times every day?
However much truth there is in this story, there's one notable thing about Facebook's advertising. It's that they don't- or at least didn't the last time I looked into it (late 2011 IIRC)- provide any proper tracking or analytics service that you can easily integrate into your own website. Yes, they'd tell you how many clicks you got on your Facebook page, but so what?
IIRC apparently they'd had some analytics/tracking code available at one point but *supposedly* they were worried about the data it provided being misinterpreted, so they withdrew it. They were still providing it, but only to their large corporate customers. Hmm.
One could still use specialised third-party tracking solutions, but (e.g.) getting it to work properly with Google analytics proved more complicated than it might at first have appeared, involving faffing about with funnels and the like (which I still don't think I got working properly, as I was distracted by more important things shortly afterwards).
Given that this was around the time stories were starting to come out explaining how Facebook- which everyone had assumed would be the holy grail of targeted advertising- was in truth delivering very poor results for advertisers, a cynic might assume that it really wasn't in Facebook's interest to make keeping close tabs on the effectiveness of its advertising easy for customers. This might or might not have been the case, but I'm pretty sceptical.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
You misunderstand the clause. It's a disclaimer against users posting what could be legally ruled as libelous content. It has nothing to do with preventing morons from clicking porn links.
Sure you could, but you are part of a small minority of users. A far cry from the 80% they are seeing.
It's amazing that he's also modded as "informative" when he's actually quite the opposite since the TOS clearly states that they don't care and the user holds all liability in viewing any content posted to this site.
I believe you mean rickholed.
I've advertised on quite a few platforms (although have yet to try Facebook), and this is a common problem. In 2006, there were lawsuits against Yahoo and Google for click-fraud.. both were settled (I was included in the settlement for both.... got virtually nothing.. something like $20 refund for $100k in clicks.)
http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/10294.asp
Google does a pretty good job, which is probably a large reason why they control such a large portion of the online ad market. Yahoo, depending on their platform of the week, can be hit-or-miss. They usually do a good job, but there have been a few times when it is just terrible. When Yahoo announces a change to their search.. watch out. (Bing's ad performance has been pretty good over the past couple of years at least)
I've seen some ad platforms that just ignore the problem, and it's easy to spend several thousand dollars and not get a single customer from it on those platforms. If facebook does nothing to control the problem, I'm sure there will be another class action.. probably won't cost them much to settle it, but might destroy the trust they have with advertisers, their stock price, and business.
This is a story about Facebook. There's a -1 comment titled "WTF Apple?!?" (clearly offtopic) with a non-descript link to an anonymous image hosting site. Anyone who clicks on that link in a work environment deserves what they get. Seriously, you're probably not supposed to browse Slashdot at all, so at least show a minimum amount of caution. That link was more on topic under the moon flags story, as it has flagpoles.
How did you survive the days of goatse?
Image? I thought it was a virus, otherwise, I'd never have clicked it.
Learn to love Alaska
I have a better idea, don't browse websites that you don't need to be browsing while you're at work. Instead, try doing some work.
How dare you hold him accountable for his actions!
Which still means that 80% of the ad-clickers having javascript turned off for the target sites is a pretty safe indication that the vast majority of them are bots.
Rather than mod the post over-rated, I just want to point out how wrong it is that the parent has been modded up. Do people really it is appropriate to whine to 'the mods' (editors) to remove something you don't like from a website you are vouluntarily visiting. If you don't like the links that sometimes appear when you browse at -1 and fear for your job because of them, don't use slashdot, at least when you were at work. Take some time to learn how to use the website, and browse at +2 or +3 or something and you will never see links like that.
Whining to a higher authority to fix a minor/non-problem is not adult behavior.
Especially when the TOS says it's your own fault for clicking on shit you aren't supposed to click.
He's probably referring to your .sig. You responded to an AC who posted pr0n.
It is not against the slashdot TOS, but it is against the imageshack TOS. Report to imageshack, the link breaks, and all is well again.
Now that someone finally showed us that 80% of the clicks on Facebooks are from bots, I want to know if similar thing is happening in Google+
Specifically, has anyone ever try analysing the clicks they got on Google+ to see how much of that were from bots?
No, who own the bots is not important - what is important is that if both Google+ and FB been infested with clicker bots, then the commercial interests might as well pull out of all social media
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
If you experienced a day(s) of goatse, how did you survive indeed!?!!
Here's a great experiment for you in order to answer your own question.
1. Turn off Javascript
2. Go to facebook
3. Click an ad.
(Wee bit difficult without grabbing the JS source and manually getting the links, ain't it?)
Can a mod delete that link please? This is most surely against TOS and may get people fired from work if using /. at work.
Surely somebody who's been around long enough to have a six-digit UID would know that things don't get deleted around here.
Things _ -*DO*- _ got deleted in
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
the issue is how much does it cost facebook to change the name of the company in their database. If they say it costs them thousands of dollars to update a database entry do you believe them? What does it cost you to change an entry in your addressbook? Even if you are a highly paid trial lawyer on hourly rates it will only cost you a couple of dollars.
Scientology. You might recall they even ran a /. story about how they deleted a comment.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
Competitors of the company who's ads are clicked. People that have shorted said company's stock. Facebook itself (which it seems you're already acknowledging).
You're an annoyance. Please delete yourself.
Someone say porn? I feel misled.
This signature intentionally left blank.
There goes the stock price. Considering percentage of income, this would be like people finding out Tyson Chicken is made out of fish and soy beans instead of chicken.
At least not unless they are skillfully faking profiles.
Of course my crappy little page plays to a small niche audience just to advertise my blog.
F'book gave me $50 voucher to get to play with ads.I was actually quit impressed with the ad interface. You can chose to pay by result i.e. getting a "Like", rather than for clicks. Don't see how bots would give them any advantage if you chose that paying scheme.
I am really not a huge F'book fan, don't like their laxness with regards to privacy data at all. Don't have a profile other than this page. Nevertheless, I really don't see how this story has legs. Just pay for "Likes" and check on your followers' profiles (random sample will do). It will be hard to build diverse profiles that look real.
Also it doesn't make business sense. Ad revenue is their lifeblood. They really cannot afford to lose trust in the integrity of their ad delivery.
Just tried it and not true. I can see the ads fine. Clicks? Maybe not.
#6495ED - cornflower blue
Stretching exercises and a huge cork.
Yeah, slashdot bends over and takes it for the church of scientology. But they stand up for principles on porn.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Who is Anonymous Coward?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Awwwww, does someone need the waaahmbulance? And how exactly am I a "huge Apple dick rider"? I've criticized Apple on many occasions but your butthurt is pretty funny nonetheless.
The owners of the pages on which the ads are impressed are getting a cut of the action in some form,
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Any idea about who the bots are run by? You don't directly benefit from clicking ads, unless they're Facebook, and even if it is possible that they're inflating their ad clicks numbers for a variety of reasons that seems unlikely as it would hurt them more in the long run. Another possibility would be someone wanting to hurt the start-up in question, but they don't look threatening and you need pretty motivated enemies to actually bother to run a botnet against you. The last possibility I see is someone wanting to hurt Facebook by decreasing their global attractiveness. If other advertisers get similar figures that could be huge. That seems the most likely considering the kind of money in play. But who precisely? And if it's not this, what else ?
Or it could be someone wanting to hurt Facebook. If all the advertisers on Facebook get a similarly high number of bot clicks, that could be staggering. And if Facebook has had any knowledge of this and withdrew information from the advertisers, letting them assume they were getting similar clicks as on other advertising platforms, we might be in for some quality entertainment in the near future.
Would you shut the fuck up now? You've made half a dozen posts rambling on about how gay porn isn't against the 'official' rules, ignoring the main point that it's an annoyance and should be deleted. You're probably one of those assholes that also thinks the financial sector has done nothing wrong because everything was 'legal'.
Boofuckinghoo newfag. If OP had lurked moar, he wouldn't need the message beaten into his head quite so firmly.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
I doubt it occurred to him because it's unrealistic as an explanation for a click flood. Online advertising just isn't that effective.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Disabling Javascript doesn't eliminate FB ads. Try it. Turn off Javascript for all sites, clear cache, and load www.facebook.com.
I see ads, clickable ads that reach their destination. Looking at the page in the developer tools, there's no JS being executed (pause does nothing), and neither the Scripts nor the Resources tabs reveal anything resembling a script.
Further, all the ads link through the same base URI, what is likely a FB redirector script: https://www.facebook.com/ajax/emu/end.php. I've written ad software for websites that doesn't use a bit of JS, and it appears that FB is capable of doing the same.
Reenabling JS shows the ads have both the base URI AND a mousedown handler with function reference of a similar name: a.emuEvent1.fbEmuLink.image.fbEmuImage
Finally, advertisers and the agencies that put their ads on FB don't have to rely on FB for click metrics, it's normal practice to redirect through a third-party agency that counts ad clicks.
It's possible that this company didn't understand the incoming requests. I'd love to see their analysis of User-Agent signatures and client IP addresses.
O lord, bless this thy holy hand grenade, that with it thou mayest blow thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy.
Many many months of never clicking on links on slashdot, yes that means I never RTFA
If you were running Noscript and Facebook was white-listed, when you were on Facebook you'd be running JS, therefore you would not appear to not be running JS. Because you'd be running JS. Because Facebook was white-listed. What am I missing?
Only in some countries can you be fired for accidentally opening a nsfw link, since the people in those countries have themselves voted for decades for these kind of rules and refused to have proper legal unions to protect them from their employers, THOUGH COOKIES!
If a Slashdot editor starts removing posts other then by the moderation system, where will it end? My signature deals with sex. Is that bad too? I am willing to bet it is somewhere on this planet. Freedom is absolute, you either have it or you don't. And the moment you start making compromises, you loose it. The GNAA was horrible and racist as hell but to have them removed would be very bad for having an open discussion. Same with extremist posts from all sides.
As posted below, "Each user, by using Geeknet Sites, may be exposed to Content that is offensive, indecent or objectionable. Each user must evaluate, and bear all risks associated with the use of any Content, including any reliance on the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of such Content."
Slashdot is not hosting porn, you clicked a random link in a first post. How new to the internets are you anyway?
Do you also open email from Nigerian royalty?
This is Darwin in action, if nature hasn't given you the tools not to open doubtful links, then you got to adjust your environment to make this deficiency non-decremental (naked humans make houses to not freeze to death at night). Evolution, either adapt yourself or adapt your environment, the rest dies, or gets fired.
And if you think I am nasty? The parent poster wants a Politically Correct Slashdot. There, that should have him torn to shreds.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I have the sense to know that this site has had NSFW links posted without notice for ~10 years. And far from a 'little clique', I'm one of a representative sample of the 1.5 million or so users (ok, probably 1/10 that number due to dupes, sock puppets, etc.) who were using this site before you showed up. Are you infected with so much 'special snowflake syndrome' that you think we should change to meat your neo-puritan standards of what is and is not acceptable behaviour?
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
No, just that 80% of Facebook users fail the Turing test.
The remaining 20% ate the test.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Were there goatse links in Summaries? I wasn't aware of that ;-)
Write boring code, not shiny code!
What human clicks on an ad? I mean, seriously, even my less computer-savvy friends can usually spot an ad link and avoid them.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Without advertising ramping up the product cost, maybe we'd spend less when purchasing stuff. ...nah, it's the stuff that's advertised a lot that I've no interest in buying - hence why it's advertised.
Stretching exercises and a huge cork.
Should I be disturbed by the fact that I find this post hilarious?
I always considered goatse, tubgirl and lemonparty to be some kind of initiation rite. Once you learned NOT to click on any link presented (or to deal with the consequences) you were considered a member of the internet and not just a tourist anymore.
So someone posted a disguised porn link - welcome to the internet. There are very few instances were I would agree to deletion of a post or even link removal. Those would be commercial spam and maybe highly illegal crap I don't even want to think about. For everything else, ignore any AC links, always check a links destination with a mouse over (or by copying it, where js is active) before you click it, take a deep breath and scroll down.
This is a story about Facebook. There's a -1 comment titled "WTF Apple?!?" (clearly offtopic) with a non-descript link to an anonymous image hosting site. Anyone who clicks on that link in a work environment deserves what they get. Seriously, you're probably not supposed to browse Slashdot at all, so at least show a minimum amount of caution. That link was more on topic under the moon flags story, as it has flagpoles.
Flagpoles? I'm almost tempted to scroll up and click it out of sheer curiosity.
Amen!
There were far too many no js clicks (at least 20 times as usual). This made them suspicious so they took a much closer look and beefed up their logging. This detailed logging showed them the bot rate. The js rate was just what triggered the investigation
I mention it not to claim any specialness, but to claim a better understanding of the social norms of this website.
And tricking someone about a NSFW link is a tactic that came up about 10 seconds after the first NSFW link was ever posted.
Have fun tilting at windmills. Slashdot is what it is, and you seem to refuse to understand that. I'm done explaining.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
LOL. I wasn't going to click until I read your comment.. i saw porno and clicked. you should have been more specific.. its gay porno... not my thing.
He's boning the invisible woman
no, it means you're a moron if you click unknown random links on ANY web page at work
if you're really that thick maybe your employer is looking for an excuse to fire you
now hold on there. sure you can't hate your IT department THAT much?
first upheld principle of pr0n... you do not talk about pr0n (woops)
second principle of pr0n... it makes the internet go, so don't diss it
third principle of pr0n... there's nothing wrong with watching goatse.cx, as long as it doesn't have any fat chicks
you're just pissy cos you were stupid enough to click the link... now you're trying to blame your stupidity on everyone else
so i guess some of your work colleagues saw the pr0n on your screen, and now they all think you're a fag?
dude, this is slashdot, the home of ex-IT, now jobless bums. browsing slashdot IS work.
Can a mod delete that link please? This is most surely against TOS and may get people fired from work if using /. at work.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
In the normal way of things, these things get swiftly down-modded to oblivion.
If geeknet starts deleting slashdot posts, thousands of people (including myself) would post that link all over the site in protest against censorship.
It used to be when a post was deleted we'd have massive discussions about why legally it was necessary, and mitigate the problem. I'm believe a few posts are deleted without such discussion nowadays, but only for legal issues.
Look, its a random link in the top post, by an AC. Why would you even click that?
yap
...slashdot bends over and takes it for the church of scientology...
Well that was about money... the most powerful thing on the whole planet.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Just to confirm: you're saying that for your wife's business, Facebook ads are 8 times more effective than Google ads.
Gack! Sorry, I got the ratio reversed. They are eight times less effective. Thanks for catching this.
I've seen something similar regarding ads for an iPhone/iPad app, a sci/biz/hex rpn calculator. Google ads are about 10x more effective than FB ads. The google ads are also about 1/3 to 1/4 the cost.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Firstly, it's probably true, but it is not supported by the article in the least. Only being able to verify 20% of the clicks does not mean that the other 80% were bots. A lack of information does not support an implication of fraud. Using Javascript as a basis of for fraudulent clicks has been displayed here many times over not be enough. In fact, where is this determination of Javascript enabled being done? If it was done on their website (not their Facebook site) I would have had Javascript enabled on Facebook, but once visiting the site for the first time (as if by magic - or an installed extension facsimile) Javascript would have been disabled, throwing that statistic out the window. The focus should have been on the ad revenue demands and related blackmail-like actions of Facebook until more facts on fraud could be found.
No, facebook isn't saying that it will cost facebook thousands of dollars to update a field. Its saying they require the purchase of thousands of dollars in advertising before they will change it. That I beleive. Is it fair? I'm not sure, but if you want to be on facebook, you have to play by their rules.
The amount of money it costs a buisness to perform an action is not always related to how much they charge, econ 101.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
by using lynx, or course.
Actually yes there once was, sort of. I can't find the story for the life of me but it was something about some artist's website or something, he had pics of a man shoving his finger into his urethra and a man being fisted on the page that was linked from the summary, and there was no warning whatsoever. I think we tagged it "goatseinsummary" to try to warn people.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
You had me at "A start-up company [called] Limited Run"
$ echo "ceci n'est pas une pipe" | sed -Ee 's/(eci n|pas )//g'