“Bogus Web Traffic Continues to Plague the Ad Business” is a WSJ article saying that “The ANA said that in the 2015 study advertisers found between 3% to 37% of their ad impressions were created by bots compared to the prior study where the bot traffic ranged from 2% to 22%.” and “Companies could lose more than $7 billion globally this year to ad fraud, the ANA and White Ops estimate.”
I’m wondering if this is another trend that leads to dominance by Facebook. Due to the fact that Facebook users must be authenticated, are Facebook ads less vulnerable to click fraud?
I think this is just part of the cost of Internet advertising; like newspapers that never get read, TV ads that only get seen by the dog and radio ads that only aliens hear…
Bob
With Facebook apparently the problem is accidental ad clicks as you thumb through your feed on your phone. Not fraud, but still wasted money for advertisers.
It’s not. Facebook has its own click fraud problem, one that is actually more insidious. There are businesses that sell likes and followers, they operate mostly human-powered click farms. They make their money from people who buy likes, Facebook makes money from the clicks and likes that these people and sometimes bots give to random pages. Facebook has a perverse incentive to keep the like farmers in business — not only do they boost clickthroughs, but they also boost registered and active user statistics.
Following Michael’s comment, I found this argument against Facebook ads fairly persuasive — basically, click-farms have some crazy incentives to like lots of pages but then never engage with them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag