How to Defraud Display Advertisers with Zeus
spider.ioAdvertisers are actually more aware of this than the author writes, I think he's just being politically correct. They're also aware of how inneficient offline media (TV, billboards) are.
I think this is just another case of "no one ever got fired for buying IBM", e.g. "no one ever got fired for advertising on TV or buying Google Ads or doing what the agency told them to do".
Solving this problem is not yet, unfortunately, a priority for advertisers. I wonder for how long.
When he says "unsuspecting advertisers", I don't think he means it in the sense of "unaware", as this problem has been broadly covered in the trade press over the past year. It's more that they have trouble doing anything about it.
The problem is that cleansing the display ad supply chain is complex, and some suppliers (notably "supply side platforms", or SSPs) are complicit in the fraud, knowingly signing up and profiting from publishers who pay for this fraudulent traffic. The article cited as footnote #1 gives some detail there.
Buyers have limited options to combat the problem. Spider.io does absolutely oustanding work, but they're a small company and can't deliver at scale. Larger, more widely adopted suppliers have solutions that (arguably) aren't work paying for.
Because display is a tonnage game and ad rates are so cheap (well under $1/thousand impressions wholesale), you can just bake the cost of fraud (and viewability, and other issues) into the cost of your buying. Assuming you can reliably measure your ad ROI, which only a fraction of advertisers can do.
Outstanding comment. Spider.io is solving a problem that doesn't exist. In the purest white hat view of the world combating ad fraud is richly complex technical challenge and a huge untapped vein of potential revenue. Unfortunately it's the former and not the latter. Ad fraud is a mild foot fungus on the world of online display and no actors are incentivized to fight it.
When you're selling an advertising medium, virtually all advertisers will ask how can they "measure ROI". What really seems to me is that most of this is just talk. (http://kariobrien.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/marketing_roi_...)
I'd argue that fraud is a big problem because it affects ROI.
Especially, it affects 40% of mobile ads, which means that you just wasted 40% of your campaign's budget.
It's estimated to be between 2% and 19% on online ads, with those 2% being acknowledged by Google, who is probably one of the few providers that actually does something to prevent it.
I think this is a challenging topic. There's an economical problem in plain view. Why are advertisers ignoring it? Lack of alternatives?
It would be interesting to try and build a signature of the malware invisible windows. When loading an IE browser are there any signs that the page is not visible... would something like https://github.com/Valve/fingerprintjs uniquely detect the hidden IE windows?
[EDIT] another thing that could be helpful in building a signature is: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1060008/is-there-a-way-to...
but how does the browser interpret a hidden window like the one shown? maybe it even sends out that the page is in view... and even if not... how long until the malware coerce it to say so?
and you are the only one here in the right track. the ad ecosystem IS moving to a bill per viewability model. though for the wrong reasons (drive advertiser expending down, like they did artificially with paying for click instead of display)
It seems to me that defrauding online advertisers has been a global sport since advertising started polluting the web.
If only this could get so massively out of hands that advertisers gave up altogether on polluting the web and wasting internet bandwidth and computer resources. Then maybe google would become a search engine again and provide relevant search results, at the very least the internet would be less a global surveillance tool it has become people don't care enough or are too clueless.
Google is an advertising company. They would go out of business with the rest of their competition. It would be fantastic if the worlds brightest engineers worked on something who's goal was not to drive impressions and clickthrough. But solving the worlds real problems doesn't pay as well.
Very interesting read. Is it even possible to solve the problem if the publisher itself is fraudulent? Since they are the layer of communication and they will provide parameters to run your code, there is only so much you can do. It seems like once of those problems in which the damage is limited to a small percentage and the advertisers are kind of OK with it deploying too many resources to find a solution.