AppLovin will be caught in up in an ad fraud scandal within two years. I can't share the data but we've stopped spending any money through them due to obvious fraud. Previously we were spending ~20k/day with them.
To be fair, unity isn't clean either. For over a month in Q1 of this year they had a whole lot of ads where the "x" button to close was actually covered by the ad, so ~50% of ads were being clicked when a user wanted to close them.
Isn't it standard practice to give the X button on ads a near-impossible-to-tap hitbox?
I'm amazed there's still so much money in mobile ads, as the games/apps that use them have become so obnoxious that I've got no desire to go near them any more.
It's moved on from 'annoying by somewhat honest' ads, to completely fake gameplay footage, and ads for real-money gambling in games that kids may be playing.
And the model of having thousands of short-lived/unprofitable games pushing ever more players towards the same few aggressively-monetised megahits doesn't seem like it should be sustainable.
> ads for real-money gambling in games that kids may be playing.
Exactly. The target demogrphic for these ads are kids with an Apple Pay account linked to their parents, who can be goaded into clicking on loud shiny ads.
Definitely not standard practice. There will always be bad actors, fraud, spam, etc, when so much money is involved. But most buy side systems are advanced enough to recognize bad actors and not spend money on them. So for any site/app that wants longevity in their revenue they will not implement shady tactics and they’ll earn high cpms.
Brands with real budget employ teams of people to avoid serving on the inventory you’re discussing. Nike blocks like 99% of available inventory.
Is it legally fraud of a ad SDK uses these kinda of tricks? I encounter these kinds of tricks in many of the games my daughter plays on the iPad and hate it immensely, but it seems everybody gets away with it ...
Are there any laws that should prevent these kinds of dark patterns?
There are virtually no good games on Apple Arcade. Had it for a year, nothing but goofy cell-shaded 6 year old child's games with maybe three or four titles like Jetpack Joyride or Crossy Road to piggy back off. I can't imagine how an adult can enjoy what's in the Apple Arcade and I really gave it the benefit of the doubt.
Especially because I only typically let them use it on the Apple TV and not a phone or iPad. They get to use a physical controller (DS4) and we can talk about their game as they play. So it’s less mindless and we can keep an eye on what they’re exposed to in game.
I would imagine that if something is deemed fraud, it's the ad-space buyer that is deemed the victim, as they're paying for clicks that aren't genuine interest, and not the user/viewer.
IANAL etc, but I thought it would be good to add the distinction.
It's not a dark pattern, because it doesn't really benefit anyone. Just destroys the signal by drowning it in noise so advertising becomes just a little bit dumber.
It benefits the app creator, and whoever is behind the ad serving to the detriment of the person doing the advertising. They get charged each time someone clicks that add.
> They get charged each time someone clicks that add.
Well, no. Not really. The client wants to buy an actionable contact with a real person at the end of the deal. The app creator can try selling counterfeit goods, but this trick only works once and the next time the client will demand payment on the basis of something other than clicks. (And this process has already happened many years ago; nobody charges per click in 2022.)
OP didn't directly say such dark patterns are fraudulent. They said AppLovin was committing fraudulent activity and then that Unity uses dark patterns.
Strange thing, I tried it on my FireTV to block youtube ads, but it didn't work. I wouldn't be surprised if the FireTV monkies around with user settings. The other explanation could be that youtube uses the same hostname for videos and ads, so the DNS blocking can't distinguish.
I used a pi-hole, but wanted it to work outside my home as well. NextDNS uses many of the same blocklists, and I happily pay $20/year for it. Also has apps for devices that roam from the house.
They try to make it super easy: https://pi-hole.net/ and I have no recollection of encountering any issues.
OTOH I am a software engineer working with Linux and network related stuff.
The issues comes later when some pages may break. When that happens you need to stop bashing your computer and add some URLs to the Pi-hole whitelist (or skip those parts of the web...). In my experience there has been few issues. Some enterprisey stuff my wife needed for work depended on some oracle tracking URLs that were blocked if I remember correctly.
Hard to definitely label it as a fraud, because from my experience mobile advertising SDKs tend to have a lot of bugs in their presentation layer, and not all of them may benefit ad provider.
This X being unavailable can be just incompetence. Esp on Android with all those slightly different screen sizes.
Recently i tried to run an app on an iphone mini but their layout was crap and both buttons on the first screen of the initial setup were on top of each other. Couldn't click either :)
I've seen many ads where the first "X" button that appears is fake, placed there to make you question yourself: "Well, the X is very small, it appears I fat-fingered it". It then becomes "real" after you switch out of whatever the ad opened and back to the app hosting the ad. It works on the second try, and that confirms your belief that it must have been your fault.
Well I've also seen my wife playing a F2P game and sometimes the ads either crashed the app completely or locked up with her unable to click on either the ad or close. When they worked the close button was available.
I'm not rich enough to play free to play games so I have no personal experience.
If you are spending thousands per day you should be backing out real time ROI/LTV which eliminates nearly all potential fraud.
The performance ad market moved from pay per impression to pay per click and then finally to pay per conversion years ago. Pay per conversion is the foundation of Facebook's lookalike audiences and Google's long-tail search campaign tools. When I see problematic campaigns these days it's usually because the media buyer hasn't set up their funnels/KPIs correctly.
The system is 100% deep learning, but most our our spend going to app lovin was in a new product that isn’t use deep learning yet unfortunately. You’re correct though :) we bid to roas/cpa and the affected campaigns were bidding to cpc!
That makes sense. I wouldn't call that ad fraud. That's the ML system optimizing for what you've said you want. If you bid for cpc you're going to get a lot of cheap clicks, but they're going to be nearly worthless. That would be the case on any large ad network, especially since mediation is so mature.
To be fair, unity isn't clean either. For over a month in Q1 of this year they had a whole lot of ads where the "x" button to close was actually covered by the ad, so ~50% of ads were being clicked when a user wanted to close them.