It seems like pay-per-click and similar models should just be discontinued, they don't work since they can be exploited. An independently verifiable metric needs to be used (if the price for the ad should be traffic or interaction based) - or something completely different. Fixed prices?

There's a large circular economy with ad buyers, marketing/PR firms, ad-tech, and ad networks going on where a large amount of fraud is overlooked/ignored because everyone's jobs and ad budgets depend on ignoring it.

Sounds a bit like the "systemic failures" that brought down the housing market in 2008.

It's always been a surprise to me how much money is flowing from ads and how any business can be so reliant on it, since this makes it sound like it's fundamentally flawed. One would think the jig would eventually be up.

It'll be interesting to see what happens when the jig is finally up, since there's so much stuff we're used to getting for free that is currently financed by all of this: email, maps and GPS navigation, staying in contact with college friends, ...

Honestly I think we'll be fine. If the services are worth something then people will be willing to pay for them. Newspapers, magazines, email, satellite radio, navigation systems etc. all existed (and were very profitable) well before online advertising became what it is now. We might even be better off that way.

FOSS and paid services will rise and shine.

For navigation to a known address, OSMAnd works great. Google Maps is better at search, particularly for commercial destinations, and has a slicker interface. For everything else, particularly navigation off road (on trails or otherwise) OSM excels. OSM has much more detail than Google Maps for things like parks and trails, frequently even having the locations of water fountains (this has saved my ass a few times.)

I guess my point is the alternatives to Google Maps aren't perfect but they have a lot more to offer than many people assume. When I drove across Canada, from Ottawa to Anchorage, OSM never let me down. It's a viable alternative.

Sometimes it's just priced in. If partner A has a 10% fraud rate and partner B has a 5% rate but partner A is 10% cheaper than partner B, while you'll probably complain to partner A it's still the sensible choice.

It's not just clickfraud. Attribution is a hard problem that leaves a lot of space to bullshit people. A/B tests require degree-level understanding of statistics to conduct properly, which isn't common in companies, particularly when correctness doesn't matter if the test is just used to confirm preconceptions or justify budgets. Etc.

> Sometimes it's just priced in.

Agreed. The real losers are the genuine content creators, as the adcash isn’t flowing to them. They can’t just average it out.

Yep. Got banned from Google ad mob because the ads I bought using other Google services gave me traffic that was deemed to be fraud.

Of course there’s no way to contact and tell Google that Google gave me fraud traffic and got me banned from Google.

Don't worry. Some rando at Google is bound to see this message or the next one!

It's hard to get the numbers, though. I mean, I guess we could ask....

Well, at my last employer we had our own systems analyzing traffic, we had integrations with third parties (DoubleVerify being the biggest) to detect fraud, our clients often had their own third party integrations to detect fraud and would complain if we hadn't found it but they did at too high a rate, etc.

Honestly after the ad images/video, all the fraud detection javascript from the advertiser, the publisher, the advertiser's system of choice, the publisher's system of choice all doing "trust but verify" with each other is the largest contributor to how big ads are.

Every been to a big break and motor store and they asked for your zip code? That is because they have someone in the back office to wants to see if the ads - dead tree paper - they spent to your zip code worked. It isn't hard to work the numbers from there, but it is tedious and requires some statistics.

Heh, I always find it funny when I buy a non-recurring thing, but keep seeing ads for it.

Best was when I kept seeing ads for a thing I was selling. I visited some big box sites about it to copy the specs on it.

The vacuum problem... the issue is that it's kinda hit or miss to come up with items that are related to the vacuum and to do it over a time period.

I think if ads were smarter, you'd get ads for your vacuum's filter a few months after buying it and maybe replacement pieces just after warranty, but what do I know?

Maybe some Toyota ads after owning a Mercedes for >5 years?

No actually. Post codes are a recent thing here, and are mostly not hierachical. Also the standard reaction would be wondering why they need any info to process an instore purchase.

ZIP code is also used for credit card verification.

Only at gas pumps.

And that strategy still doesn't account for word of mouth.

actually it does. That is why you need a full time statistician on staff (likely a department), they spend a lot of effort finding and accounting for confounding factors.

Amazing that we have an industry whose biggest component is keeping out fraud in the industry. Imagine pitching that to a VC.

Are they all like this, in that they're easy to exploit and there are high occurrences of fraud?

I wonder what would be reliable ways to spend money for advertising, then? I'm new to this, but I was thinking about spending some money for some online marketing until reading this.

All the metrics for advertisement sales have been gamed for as long as I know of (at least 20 years); this goes for paper, online, television, and radio. Smart advertisers know what's going on, and they take the 'gaming' into account.

I've been waiting so long for it to be a bubble that pops, web ads just can't be worth that much when they are so bad.

I see some "captive" ads now, and I can imagine those are worth so much more - for example instagram play-between ads. No wonder the open web is dying.

Conversion tracking is the much loathed "spying/stalking" of ads.