Internet Ads, Part II: How Internet Ad Servers Screw Companies

In a previous post I described why Internet ad servers are evil from the perspective of the end user: they are all too frequently vectors for spam, malware and invading user privacy.

Now the other side of the coin: Internet ad serving companies intentionally screw the customers whose ads they are paid to show to users. According to an article from Bloomberg:

[In l]ate [2013 Ron Amram, a marketing exec for Heineken,] and a half-dozen or so colleagues gathered in a New York conference room for a presentation on the performance of the online ads. They were stunned. Digital’s return on investment was around 2 to 1, a $2 increase in revenue for every $1 of ad spending, compared with at least 6 to 1 for TV. The most startling finding: Only 20 percent of the campaign’s “ad impressions”—ads that appear on a computer or smartphone screen—were even seen by actual people.

“The room basically stopped,” Amram recalls. The team was concerned about their jobs; someone asked, “Can they do that? Is it legal?” But mostly it was disbelief and outrage. “It was like we’d been throwing our money to the mob,” Amram says. “As an advertiser we were paying for eyeballs and thought that we were buying views. But in the digital world, you’re just paying for the ad to be served, and there’s no guarantee who will see it, or whether a human will see it at all.”

These ad serving companies pull all kinds of dirty tricks to make it look like ads are being seen by human beings. They'll bring up an ad in a popup behind real content and count that as a click. They hire botnets that take over computers, bring up virtual browsers that don't appear on the screens of unsuspecting users and "click" links to their ads, which get counted as real hits even though they're never seen.

Then there are the click-bait links that appear on so many websites: stories about Scarlett Johansson or Kim Kardashian or those idiotic "One Weird Weight Loss Trick" headlines. When people accidentally on purpose click those links the companies whose ads appear with those bogus stories get charged for a page view, even though real users will never look at those ads.

However, not all Internet ads are fraudulent: ads hosted by the content providers' web servers directly are usually honest. As with everything on the Net, it's shady third parties who commit most of the fraud.