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posted by cmn32480 on Saturday July 25 2015, @06:41AM   Printer-friendly
from the 'bout-damn-time! dept.

Tech big wigs including Facebook and Yahoo! have forged a giant blacklist to block fake web traffic contributing to advertising fraud, said Google ad man Vegard Johnsen.

The Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) pilot program will nix bot traffic using a blacklist which could cut a significant portion of web traffic; Google's DoubleClick blacklist alone blocked some 8.9 per cent of traffic.

"The newly shared blacklist identifies web robots that are being run in data centres but that avoid detection by the IAB/ABC International Spiders and Bots List," Johnsen said.

"By pooling our collective efforts and working with industry bodies, we can create strong defenses against those looking to take advantage of our ecosystem.

"We look forward to working with the TAG Anti-fraud working group to turn this pilot program into an industry-wide tool."

Johnsen added that some publishers will do anything to inflate clicks including running tools in data centres that generate fake ad impressions.

...

Not all fake clicks were malicious; one legitimate unnamed organisation had generated a whopping 65 per cent as detected by DoubleClick of automated data centre clicks by merely probing ads and ad landing pages across the internet.


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Saturday July 25 2015, @06:51AM

    by fido_dogstoyevsky (131) <axehandleNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Saturday July 25 2015, @06:51AM (#213436)

    "...chief executive Mike Zaneis declared the pilot would tackle fake advertising..."

    There's another kind of advertising?

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by maxwell demon on Saturday July 25 2015, @10:18AM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Saturday July 25 2015, @10:18AM (#213456) Journal

    Of course. They may tell you lies, but those lies are real: You can see or hear them, you can be deceived by them, or you can see through them, Usually also the products you are lied about are real. And in almost all cases, the possibility to waste your money on whatever the ad is about is real.

    Those fake ads are nothing like that. They don't show up. They don't tell you lies. They don't advertise a product. They just cost the ad network money.

    Or in short: Those fake ads are great for the user (unless they also transport malware, of course), but bad for the ad networks. That's why they are fake: They pretend to serve annoyance to the users, but fail to actually do so.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Saturday July 25 2015, @02:50PM

    by Thexalon (636) on Saturday July 25 2015, @02:50PM (#213489)

    There's another kind of advertising?

    Yes, there is. For example, when a small business owner hangs a shingle or paints the side of the truck with the name of the business and a quick statement of what they do, that's probably not fake at all and is definitely advertising. Ditto for putting basic business information in the yellow pages (I know, it's so 1983, but they still exist). The only reason an advert saying "Bob's Plumbing: We fix clogged drains!" would be fake is if Bob isn't involved in the business, it's not a plumbing company, or doesn't fix clogged drains. And that kind of advertising is a useful activity, because when somebody has a clogged drain they can't figure out how to fix themselves, it would help to know that Bob's Plumbing exists to at least get a competitive quote.

    The problem is when a simple message like that gets surrounded by nonsense, emotional appeals, and exaggeration.

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