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?'"

Who??

[Mr2001]

I've never heard of any of those video sites. Is this an actual problem affecting well-known sites, or just these no-names?

Re:

[slayermet420]

Yeah, never heard of any of these either. I seem to care pretty much none about this. Just enough to comment on it.

Re:Who??

[psaunders]

I care even less...in fact, I only came in here because the footer below the abstract said "7 of 9 comments". Ripped off, she's not even here.

Same problem for the Italian TV, no solution

[YA_Python_dev]

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!

Re:

[Hognoxious]

There is something crappier than RAI? You're joking, right? In truth, while Raiuno is really bad - like UK tv from the 70s, isn't RAI4 OK - sort of like BBC2?

Re:

[YA_Python_dev]

[this is a bit OT]

I don't know how familiar you are with the Italian TV, but trust me: the Mediaset channels are even worse than the already really bad RAI's. RAI4 doesn't exist, maybe you mean RAI3 [raitre.rai.it]? Yes they are the exception that proves the rule: they often have decent programs, sometime even great ones. This last category is also the category that get canceled faster if they dare to disturb the Catholic Church, some politician or the mafia.

If you want something better you must search outside of the R

Re:Same problem for the Italian TV, no solution

[Dogtanian]

In truth, while Raiuno is really bad - like UK tv from the 70s

I should point out that the 1970s is considered by many to be the "golden age" of UK television; and that UK television is in general far better than many other countries'. So whether your comment was a valid insult depends on the context you meant it from; was it that of a modern viewer from another country?

Re:

[Hognoxious]

Most of the stuff on Raiuno brings back dim, repressed memories of summertime/seaside special, and if that's the golden age of UK TV then god help us.

P.S. I don't see where you get the insult from, maybe you're just the type who finds "Eeeeh, my mother-in-law" jokes funny?

Re:

[Dogtanian]

Hmm... I'm just going by what I've heard and (as I implicitly acknowledged in my original post) going by what people apparently thought at the time; of course people wouldn't want that stuff nowadays. Actually, going by what you were saying, it sounds like you didn't like it back then either :-)

What I actually remember of 70s TV is negigible (I was only 4 when the 80s started). Having said that, there was a lot of stuff I remember liking in the very early 80s that in retrospect I realise was more commonly

Re:

[CastrTroy]

How much you want to bet that a good number of people did leave the channel on. If there's something on that I really want to see, maybe I would leave in on, in hopes that I would still be watching when it came back on. So, I leave it on the channel, pick up a book and start reading, or I leave the room and do something else. When the channel comes back on, I hear it, and can watch what I wanted to watch when the channel went off the air.

Re:

[lowrydr310]

I always wondered how "Nielsen Media Research" gets their TV viewership numbers in the USA. I can't seem to understand how telephone polls work - I can't speak for everyone, but I have too many other things I'd rather be doing than taking telephone surveys.

Re:

[Raenex]

Too lazy to even Google, but last I heard (years ago), they give you a device that monitors your viewing habits. I once received $4 in the mail (cash!) with an offer to participate in the program. I didn't do it, but the cash in the mail was surprising.

Re:

[mrmeval]

That has happened before. I think there was some sort of psychological experiment of some sort, people just left the tv on channel hoping the show would resume.

I assume in their case the numbers didn't change.

Re:Who??

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

I've never heard of any of those video sites. Is this an actual problem affecting well-known sites, or just these no-names?

I don't think it matters. With yoogle poised to do "revenue sharing" for videos hosted on their systems, the described abuse seems likely to become more popular. Both directly for profit and indirectly as "clumsy" joe-jobs to deprive the 'competition' from receiving valid income.

I believe the fundamental question about building an advertising based economy on untrustable numbers is indeed key. This attack is the equivalent of someone figuring out how to plant a remote-controlled tv remote-control in every Nielson living room and using it to fool Nielson's tracking into thinking the families where all watching certain shows - ones for which the producers had paid the remote-control controller a fee. If that were to happen, billions of dollars of tv advertisment revenue would be at risk.

The internet makes such an otherwise impossible attack relatively easy. I suspect the only long-term solution is to not base the economy on advertising. Find another way, my personal favorite being something along the lines of "global co-op comissioned work with release to the public domain." In other words, pay for actual creative work done, not unreliable statistics about eyeballs and promotion.

Re:

[Dogtanian]

I don't think it matters. With yoogle poised to do "revenue sharing" for videos hosted on their systems, the described abuse seems likely to become more popular.

With less well-known companies, perhaps, but not with Gootube. Any short-term gains would be easily outweighed by the damage to the company's reputation. I don't think they can afford to mix-and-match Good Google/Bad Google, even if it were theoretically possible.

Re:Who??

[QuickFox]

I don't think they can afford to mix-and-match Good Google/Bad Google

Unfortunately they can. They actively promote and encourage domain squatting [google.com].

Re:

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

With less well-known companies, perhaps, but not with Gootube. Any short-term gains would be easily outweighed by the damage to the company's reputation.

I think you missed my point. It is not that google would do it, it is that individual users of google would do it in order to defraud google. How can google possibly distinguish between 50,000 virus infected systems downloading a video clip and 50,000 real people downloading a video clip?

RE: Effect of traffic fraud in advertising economy

[bedelman]

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:

Re:

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

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?

I don't think its terribly hard. In a nutshell, it would be a modern form of patronage. A creator offers a description of the work he would like to produce along with an asking price. People who are interested in seeing that work completed pay into an escrow fund as they see fit. When the balance in the fund reaches the asking price, the creator gets to work and and collects the escrowed funds on release of his work. If the balance never reaches the asking price, he can lower his asking price or the m

Re:Who??

[tinkertim]

I've never heard of any of those video sites. Is this an actual problem affecting well-known sites, or just these no-names?

Many web sites will gladly sell you a place to put one of your banners. They will charge you a fee that is justified by the amount of visitors who will see your banner, further justified by estimating how many of those visitors would be likely to click on your banner and why.

For sites that depend on selling advertisement space to monetize, traffic scores calculated by third party sites like Amazon make or break your ability to get prime bucks for prime space on your web sites.

Comapnies who need to show an instant boom in traffic sometimes employ the use of spyware that can be signaled from a remote connection to begin "surfing" a given site from the visitor's IP address proporting to be the user's default browser type. Instantly, millions of people start surfing the target site completely unaware they're even doing it. Its a booming business, building and renting these networks.

You may not have heard of any of these sites, but I'm sure you'd pay top dollar to advertise there once you saw their traffic scores. Its a new cottage industry that thrives on Windows / IE users.

Re:Who??

[owlnation]

How do you build an advertising economy when the number can't be trusted?

Find a way to get someone to post an article on your noname site on Slashdot -> get loads of visits.

No, I've never heard of the sites either.

Re:

[Bearhouse]

There's a lot of alternative video sites springing up that don't have the same constraints, (copyright...) as the big guys.
You'll find (sometimes) full-length, high-quality stuff.

Equally, a host of specialised search engines such as allug.org have sprung up to search such sites.

More info here http://tinyurl.com/2fva6c [tinyurl.com] (Wall Street Journal)

Until I read the WSJ article, I'd never heard of any of them either. Suppose they'll all get sued into oblivion now...

All ratings are cooked - so what?

[SL Baur]

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.

Re:

[LifesABeach]

Is there a web site that shows how to place a cam-corder in a car? Sometimes when you see a princess applying eye makeup, the lipsticked mouth opens and closes like a Grouper breathing. There is some other stuff that people do in their car; Looking down from an 18 wheeler, one can sometimes see things happening that authors never write about.

Simple

[iminplaya]

How do you build an advertising economy when the number can't be trusted?'

Use a different measurement system, and don't install spyware.

Re:

[jambarama]

Use a different measurement system sure, but what measurement system? You can pay by the number of clickthroughs, but if these sites are willing to build up fraudulent page views, fraudulent clickthroughs wouldn't surprise me either. The best system I can think of is to do a revenue sharing plan--tell a site they get X% commission for each sale referred from their site. It is a lot harder, more expensive, and more clearly illegal to fake a credit card purchase--so I can see this being effective, even if

Re:

[iminplaya]

Sorry I forgot the smiley. I meant nothing serious about it. Personally, I think seeing these advertising types squirm like this is hilarious. They will never be able to control the net the way they could with the older media, and that's the way I like it. All the old 19th century business models will fall apart and will be thrown aside once and for all. First it's the publishing, music, movie industries. Now we can toss the advertising industry into the same heap of trash along with them. Good riddance to

Re:

[maxwell demon]

Classical advertising also has no way to check how many people actually see the ad. Do you add a camera to each poster wall, counting people who actually look at that direction? Do you add microchips into magazines to see how many people open that specific page? What about those advertisements on cars?

And this obviously hasn't killed the traditional advertising business. So why should it be different with web advertising? You don't need exact, trusted numbers elsewhere, so you should not need them here eith

Re:

[iminplaya]

Do you add microchips into magazines to see how many people open that specific page?

Might be pretty feasible now. You might just have something there. But as far as I'm concerned, I'd just as soon see all the classic business models go away. A good shakeup is what's needed. To those trying to maintain the old ways, I say, "Let them eat cake!" They're in a panic, and it's very fun to watch. They strive so hard for a stable and predictable market, and I think it's great to see it slip through their hands. A l

This is how...

[Duncan3]

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.

Re:

[Dogtanian]

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.

That's ironic, because Googles ads are generally the ones I feel no need to block; they're not particularly intrusive. By contrast, the reason I switched to Google from Yahoo in the first place was specifically the annoying popup ads (mainly for X10).

Let's make this clear; Yahoo lost me permanently as a user (rare email use aside) *specifically* because of the annoying popups; and ones mainly aimed at one advertiser at that. Now, I'm probably not enough of an ad-clicker (either at Yahoo or Google) that t

the REALLY annoying ones

[v1]

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 no

Re:

[Hoi Polloi]

I'm just happy if the price the comparisons show actually matches what is on the store's website. More and more recently I've found that the price shown in the comparison listing has nothing to do with the actual price shown when you follow the link to the store. I don't know if this is fraud, laziness, a crappy system or a little of all 3.

It's a problem everywhere

[Evets]

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.

Re:

[lonecrow]

As an ad seller I was concerned about getting accurate numbers that I could confidently and ethically quote to clients.

I have opted to price my ads based on 'unique viewers' in a month regardless of page views etc. Its people my advertisers want to sell to so its people I should count.

I use Google Analytics (formally Urchin) and because it relies on javascript I avoid having to filter out spiders since they don't run the scripts. I would imagine that it is the same for these traffic inflating malwa

purchases are what matter

[timmarhy]

traffic numbers aren't a good way of guaging the effectivness of an add. i see lots of ads every day, 99.9999% of them i ignore.

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.

Re:

[timmarhy]

thats not strictly true. i've encountered advertising thats discrete, gave me the information i was looking for and was very handy. unfortunately thats a rare thing. all those dating and "your our millionth visitor you've won" ads need to fuck off.

possible idea

[dosboot]

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 publ

Dont under estimate the abusers

[DrYak]

when a pop-up opens you click the button to report it as forced

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" ?

Easy

[kjart]

How do you build an advertising economy when the number can't be trusted?

Just do what TV studios do - pretend that the numbers are real.

Re:

[laejoh]

Hey, the same strategy the RIAA and other IAA's are using!

Party over.

[ajs318]

'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?'

Short answer: You don't.

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.

Re:Party over.

[king-manic]

Advertising does create value for someone. You need to know whats out there and no one has prefect knowledge. Advertising provides a base point to get more info. Suppliers too. Like it or not A great product with little advertising (Linux/stewarts soda) will always be beat by a okay product with good advertising (Windows/coke). With marketing being equal then other factors comes into play (VHS vs Beta). So while the consumer gets nothing out of it the retailer/manufacturer has to play the game.

Re:

[Tony Hoyle]

On the internet perfect knowledge is (nearly) attainable - and that scares the advertisers silly.

Whereas before you had maybe 3 or 4 shops to try, all charging the same basically because they could, I can now go online and select from thousands of retailers.. find the cheapest/best price and buy online.

That's why often the web stores of major shops charge 25-50% less than the physical shops - because they can't get away with the local price cartels any more.

If a retailer rips *anyone* off anyone can find ou

Re:

[king-manic]

On the internet perfect knowledge is (nearly) attainable - and that scares the advertisers silly.


"Reasonable" knowlege was previous obtainable by non-specialist hobbiest before but it's getting harder. Perfect knowledge is not "nearly" attainable. While I know to check tomshardware and arstechnica about info on video cards, Joe Clueless would just type in "video card" into google and get inundated with junk sales sites. If I wanted to buy a good phone I dont' know where to check. I'd have to survey my frien

Re:

[NoMaster]

So, to play devils advocate with a term that was all the rage a few years ago, in order to create a "level playing field" advertising should either be socialised or outlawed?

(Yeah, I know about real 'level playing fields', opportunity, access, etc. I'm using the term in the same way it was presented to the public back then; the "let us do X because we don't think Y is fair!" sense...)

Yes, advertising does "create value". In theory, it does it by affording companies the opportunity to inform consumers of the

Re:

[ajs318]

I'd be in favour of banning advertising altogether ..... along with other shonky practises such as charging different amounts depending on method of payment and/or charging different amounts for online and in-person purchases.

Advertising increases the cost of the products that are advertised. It may or may not result in more purchases. If it does not result in more purchases, or the increased revenue from purchases fails to offset the advertising costs (and it's a very fine line between economy of sca

Re:

[sholden]

How is charging different prices shonky?

Different payment methods have different costs as does online and in-person transactions.

Checks and credit cards have the potential to bounce or be charged back. Cash has the potential to be stolen. Surely if something costs the supplier different amounts they can charge the customer different amounts without being branded "shonky"?

Coca Cola branded soda costs more than unbranded stuff at the supermarket because they cost the supermarket different amounts in to buy th

Re:

[ajs318]

A pound of my money is worth a pound whether it's a pound coin, five twenties, a hundred pennies or any of the other combinations of coins; and it's worth a pound whether it comes by cheque, cash or credit card, and whether I bring it to you in person or down a wire. If your bank is charging you different amounts to deal with it depending how it comes in, they're being shonky.

Coca Cola branded soda costs more than unbranded stuff at the supermarket because they cost the supermarket different amounts in to

Re:

[sholden]

Yes a pound of your money is worth a pound, however if you pay with cash the store has to spend X cents (where X is a very small number) on security /insurance against theft. If you pay with a credit card then the bank probably charges them a fee plus there's the risk of a charge back which amortizes to Y cents (again a very small number). If you pay with a check then there's the risk of it bouncing which again translates to some amortized cost of Z cents.

The store doesn't give a stuff how much you actuall

Re:

[inviolet]

Well said. 'tis a shame that Economics 101 and 201 are not required courses in school, and specifically tested in order to graduate. If they were, our laws (particularly our monetary and fiscal policies) would probably be vastly more rational.

Ditto for the laws of physics: as they are doing with economics, most people are faking their understanding of it.

Re:

[maxume]

Consumers don't suffer all that much from advertising. Take Procter and Gamble:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=PG&annual [yahoo.com]

They have operating expenses of $22 billion on revenues of $68 billion. Assuming they only spend money on advertising, it accounts for ~32% of their wholesale. Retail markup is usually bigger than that, and they aren't spending $22 billion on advertising, they spend somewhere less than $10 billion on advertising, which is ~14% of wholesale, but Tide isn't exactly expensive.

It's a bit o

Re:

[Wildclaw]

Good post, with believable numbers. I just wanted to ad my slightly more pessemistic view of advertising in general.

Important to remember is that the numbers you are using estimates the business cost for advertising, which is completly different from the society cost.

First of all, the 14% you estimated is larger than the real cost to society, because a part of it is simple money transfers. This is best seen in TV Ads where the majority of money goes to pay for the construction of tv shows and not to pay for

Re:

[maxume]

Percent of gross domestic product (GDP) offers some perspective. Ad spending is somewhere south of $1 trillion:

http://www.brandweek.com/bw/news/financial/article _display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001615315 [brandweek.com]

Global GDP is ~$60 trillion:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_ GDP_(PPP) [wikipedia.org]

So less than 2% of productive activity is devoted to advertising, worldwide, whereas in the US, something like 3% of GDP(assuming $400 billion advertising and $12 trillion GDP) is devoted to advertising. As you point out, so

Re:

[odigity]

Advertising is a tragedy.

Advertising's sole value is supposedly that it provides information to consumers, but in reality, it is the poorest form of information possible. Every advertiser has incentive to deceive as much as possible to promote their own products over those of their competitors. Every advertiser has incentive to use all known knowledge of the human mind to manipulate people into purchasing the product. Humans are not perfectly protected little balls of free will - they will respond to kno

Re:

[king-manic]

I agree that advertising provides nothing to the consumer but cost and junk mail. However it does provide something to the supplier and has a whole bunch of side effects beyond just suckign up money.

Re:

[Bastard of Subhumani]

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!

This is true, right after seeing LoTR I felt a huge desire to buy a dwarfish battleaxe & some mithril. And don't get me started about the product placement by Feänmù the bowwright - blatant or what?

Re:

[spamking]

We have now reached a saturation point: there is literally nowhere left for the advertising industry to plaster their garish advertisements.

Very true. About every 10th time I check my voicemail at work I get some freakin' advertisement about the features of our voicemail system.

The Emperor Has No Clothes

[Noxx]

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.

How?

[kestasjk]

How do you build an advertising economy when the number can't be trusted?

Micropayments right? Everyone wins (except discount viagra merchants and pornography websites).

How about a "rate the ad" system?

[Opportunist]

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.

Re:

[asc99c]

So we could have a popup ad, and when you close it, it can popup a questionnaire to check if it annoyed you!

Re:

[Mr. Shotgun]

Oh dear god! That is one of the most brilliant ideas I have ever heard of.

I really wish the was a way to give some feed back on some of the ads I've seen. Like the annoying flyover ads on some pages, or the ones with annoying sounds. One time I was visiting a web comic page and the banner ad had a fish flopping around. Well fish normally don't make much noise but this little bastard wouldn't shut up! He was just flopping around babbling his stupid head off. I got so annoyed with it I dug through the page s

Re:

[Opportunist]

That's exactly what I'm talking about.

Sure, annoying ads are a practice by advertisers. An annoying ad simply "sticks". Or so they say. You remember the ad. Some people might even remember the product, because it was SO annoying.

But the person hosting the page is now in a problem: You will NEVER EVER see an ad on his page again! The ad he ran was SO annoying that you deliberately went out of your way and took the burden of sifting through the source onto you because the ad was so obnoxious and intrusive tha

Re:

[hackstraw]

How about a way to "rate" ads. Was this ad helpful? Did it provide information you actually wanted?

Advertising is simply strange. Great ads from the consumers POV often have little to do with the effectiveness of the ad to generate revenue for the company. Back with the Suzuki lying car ads or whatever they were, they were percieved as great ads. Everybody loved them, but they simply didn't sell many cars.

Take the "greatest ad of all time". The Apple 1984 SuperBowl commercial. We still talk about it al

Another trick

[tmk]

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 [megaupload.com] integrates the Alexa toolbar, which is the source of the traffic data used for the Alexa rankings.

Re:

[David Off]

> The trick: The Megaupload toolbar [megaupload.com] integrates the Alexa toolbar, which is the source of the traffic data used for the Alexa rankings.

they also host p0rn which more mainstream sites won't touch.

fraudsters want this as a service

[DragonTHC]

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.

A video bubble ?

[mbone]

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 [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...

Money

[skinfitz]

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.

Re:

[zippthorne]

The problem is, very few people are going to buy Downy, or a pizza through a link from Homestar Runner even if they happen to be hungry or have clothes sticking to them while visiting the site and are presented with an ad for a company selling them at a good price.

If they even purchase these items online, it will likely be a completely separate transaction from their visit to HR, yet they may have decided to go with that company as a result of the ad at homestar runner.

So how would you determine the value o

You can't

[mike_sucks]

"So that's the puzzle: How do you build an advertising economy when the number can't be trusted?"

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. /Mike

Dear Advertizing Customers,

[mwa]

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.

Not everything has a solution - for a reason

[djupedal]

"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.

Don't pay for traffic, pay for time

[Allicorn]

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 [projectwonderful.com]. 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 co

Ads, the false counts and the impact

[pcause]

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 ra

little truth ...

[tomstdenis]

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

Re:

[0123456]

"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."

But few people will pay $20 a month (or whatever) for every web site they visit. It would have to be more like $0.001 per page, which is far more difficult to collect.

With micropayments you also run into the problem of having to continually ask the user whether or not they want to pay for a page. If your page that I want to visit includes a frame pointing to www.g

Re:

[tomstdenis]

I think that's part of the problem though. there are hundreds of relatively shotty websites. You have to use a dozen sites just to get what you want. Like I read slashdot and fark to get the wacky tech/other news. If there was one good site that did both I wouldn't need to pay $20/mo for two sites now would I?

And you don't need to CHARGE micropayments, you just account for them. E.g. I give you $20 and it's good for [say] 2000 page views. Sure each page only costs me a cent, but you're not actually do

Re:

[Zelos]

If most sites were pay-to-view on a subscription basis, how would sites like Fark or Slashdot exist? How many people are going to follow a link to a story if it requires a subscription?

Re:

[tomstdenis]

You offer some links as free and the rest as paying users only. Fark does that already in case you didn't notice.

Tom

Re:

[0123456]

"And you don't need to CHARGE micropayments, you just account for them. E.g. I give you $20 and it's good for [say] 2000 page views"

So every time I go to www.halfassedlittlesite.com I have to give them $20 up front to pay for viewing 2000 pages when all I really want to read is one page that was linked from some other site?

"Sure each page only costs me a cent"

'Only a cent'? How many people are going to pay one cent for every page they view? Including reloads and stepping back and forwards I probably view th

Re:

[0123456]

Oh, and don't forget the other big problem: you have to pay before you view the page, but you can't tell whether it's worth paying for until after you've viewed it.

Nor, of course, can you prevent people from saving the page and sending it to other people who don't pay. The whole idea of paying for sites in this way is just broken.

Re:

[tomstdenis]

Hello captain extremism! I'm Tom. please to meet you!

First off, if the site can't make it's case for getting you to pay them, why would you pay them? So no, you wouldn't give $20 to every random site you hit.

Do you, buy everything you see in a store? No? Didn't think so.

As for the price, well how about this, it's one cent [or whatever] to buy a page of content [e.g. a news article]. Reloads/etc being free since most users wouldn't reload the page 1000s of times anyways.

Whatever, point is not every sit

Re:

[0123456]

"First off, if the site can't make it's case for getting you to pay them, why would you pay them?"

So if someone links to a site from Slashdot, no-one's going to read it because the site will expect you to pay them $20 up front for 2000 page views that you're never going to use?

"Do you, buy everything you see in a store? No? Didn't think so."

Stores don't expect me to give them $2000 and then take my purchases out of that downpayment. And in a store, I don't have to buy things before I see them. Nor are there

Re:

[tomstdenis]

So if someone links to a site from Slashdot, no-one's going to read it because the site will expect you to pay them $20 up front for 2000 page views that you're never going to use?

I suggest you read up how AP and Reuters works. Do you pay $20 for each article in a printed newspaper?

Christ almighty you can't be this stupid. Honestly.

Tom

Re:

[Bastard of Subhumani]

I think that's part of the problem though. there are hundreds of relatively shotty websites.

I call bullet. Anyway, this isn't the place to discus them.

Who cares?

[KlausBreuer]

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.

But you DO care!

[crovira]

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

Sales

[bigattichouse]

It has to be measured in terms of clicks that become sales.

What ads on the web?

[Panther Silverelf]

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.

How is that different from anything else?

[argent]

How do you jusdge the value of advertising anywhere? You look at how it effects sales.

end of the world in 3... 2... 1....

[stevemulligan]

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.

Its not a bad thing for the advertising industry..

[fiendy]

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.

CPL/CPA

[VariableGHz]

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 adverti

Follow the money -

[bizitch]

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

Re:

[Zadaz]

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.