I find the whole soft white underbelly of internet advertising interesting in that pollutes the entire advertising pool. Even ads that are "legitimate" are lost in a sea of click bait and click fraud and morass that is covered in the article.
It makes me wonder about companies that get a large part of their income from advertising (Google...). Once the ad market descends into a cesspool that no legitmate company will dip their toe into, can companies that depend on advertising revenue survive on the self-serving, artificial, and mostly automated, ad market?
I quite like the idea of a self-serving, artificial and mostly automated ad market. Maybe making it wholly automated would be an improvement..
Like: a browser plugin that would randomly click ads in a different browser profile, maybe through an IP-masking proxy, without ever displaying them or the pages they load to the user (hey, maybe without ever traversing the last mile from the proxy to the user's computer.)
In this way, and assuming the clicks can be made indistinguishable from actual for-real user clicks (maybe a tall order if a proxies are involved?), the whole ad market automation circle could complete while still retaining a usable web. The online ad economy spins off to become a self-sustaining fully automated exchange bubble, visible to the external world only at its interface to participants' billing systems and analytics.
Publishers and ad networks win because clicks, network infrastructure providers win because traffic is lucrative and content providers can flourish, users win big time because they have all the benefits of an ad-supported free-beer web with none of the down side (actually seeing and being tracked by ads, that is.)
So long as the advertisers (or, more specifically, the campaign managers' bosses) don't catch on, what could go wrong?
In this way, and assuming the clicks can be made indistinguishable from actual for-real user clicks (maybe a tall order if a proxies are involved?)
Unless your automated system actually spends money then it will always be distinguishable from the real thing. Advertisers, no matter how wealthy they might be, cannot afford to pay for a "fully automated exchange bubble" that gives them zero returns.
I never realized how bad fraud can be until I swapped out my old Google Adsense code for new. For awhile Adsense reported $200 a month in estimated earnings which was more than the $20 or so I usually get. Then after Google finally corrected for fraudulent clicks I actually got paid my normal $10-$20. Eventually the estimated earnings start to account for fraud so I no longer see $200 projections. That means a majority of the actual clicks were determined to be fraud. Either that or Google is shaving clicks. I lean more towards to first scenario.
So Google already detects and refunds advertisers for fraud.
I think cost per click will simply keep declining as the erosion of value caused by that cesspoolishness is priced in. It will never go to zero though because somewhere in there is a core of real influence on real buyers of goods and services.
I'm not worried about Google. I'm worried about user experience on the web as advertisers and publishers try to compensate ever more aggressively for the growing ineffectiveness of their business model (or is it greed?)
Average user experience on media sites is in rapid decline right now. If there isn't a whole page ad you need to click away, you can be sure there will be a popup for some customer experience survey or something else that acts like what we used to call a modal dialog box.
If I were in the business of defacing websites, I would like to replace all of those by an old Windows 3.1 modal dialog saying:
These things mimic biological systems. Fraudsters are disease and as you have noted threaten to kill the host they rely on. But the whole reason Google has survived is because they have built an immune system (ad fraud team) and antibodies (fraud detection systems) that keep it moving along. Over the years there have been plenty of ad exchanges that succumbed to the disease and died.
That's not to say Google will survive in perpetuity. Disease has a way of iterating and evolving. But big G won't go down without a fight.
Nonsense. Google has "survived" because they benefit massively from ad fraud just like the fraud in the article. Always have.
I actually flew out to New York and showed Douglas de Jager this specific trick back in June, and he said that it's not their problem, and until media buyers agree, he's probably right.
It makes me wonder about companies that get a large part of their income from advertising (Google...). Once the ad market descends into a cesspool that no legitmate company will dip their toe into, can companies that depend on advertising revenue survive on the self-serving, artificial, and mostly automated, ad market?