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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.
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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.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Saturday July 25 2015, @02:50PM
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.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.