Ad Fraud Economics with Craig Silverman
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
Advertising fraud steals billions of dollars every year.
BuzzFeed reporter Craig Silverman reports on advertising fraud and its impact on the Internet. In one investigation, Craig uncovered a mobile advertising fraud scheme in which four people stole millions of dollars (perhaps as much as $75 million or even $750 million) by serving advertisements to automated users on mobile apps.
The scheme worked as follows:
- A shell company called “We Purchase Apps” would buy legitimate apps from app developers
- The new owners of the legitimate app would record the behavior of the users on those apps
- The recorded behavior was used to train models of fake users who could replicate that behavior
- The fake user models were spun up to use the apps, where they would view ads that would automatically be served to them
- The owners of the apps would earn the money generated by displaying ads in these apps
This scheme was easy to pull off. It did not require much sophistication in terms of engineering or business skills. If a group of four people can generate tens of millions of dollars, how much ill-gotten capital is being generated by large corporations that are deeply involved in the advertising market?
Craig’s article went viral, and he has followed it up with other pieces about ad networks, fraud investigations by Google, and the potential for mobile apps to be used for large scale surveillance of Americans by the Chinese.
Craig is the most dedicated reporter covering advertising fraud today. His work is invaluable because he is asking difficult questions about the economics of our Internet. As we discuss in the episode, there is currently no effective automated means of detecting a bot from a human on the internet.
We have also discussed this in detail on previous episodes about ad fraud, the advertising industry, advertising analytics, and the techniques of ad fraud.
Ad fraud is not the fault of any one party. It is an emergent result of the way that our Internet is set up. It is as hard to imagine a world without advertising fraud as it is to imagine a world without email spam.
Transcript
Transcript provided by We Edit Podcasts. Software Engineering Daily listeners can go to weeditpodcasts.com/sed to get 20% off the first two months of audio editing and transcription services. Thanks to We Edit Podcasts for partnering with SE Daily. Please click here to view this show’s transcript.
Sponsors
Triplebyte is a company that connects engineers with top tech companies. We’re running an experiment and our hypothesis is that Software Engineering Daily listeners will do well above average on the quiz. Go to triplebyte.com/sedaily.
Digital Ocean is the easiest cloud platform to run and scale your application. Try it out today and get a free $100 credit–go to do.co/sedaily. Digital Ocean is a complete cloud platform to help developers and teams save time when running and scaling their applications.
Get ready to build content-rich websites and professional web applications with Wix Code. Store and manage unlimited data with built-in databases, create dynamic pages, make custom forms and take full control of your site’s functionality with Wix Code APIs and JavaScript. Plus, now you can get 10-percent off your Premium plan. Go to Wix.com/SED.
GoCD is a continuous delivery tool created by ThoughtWorks. It’s great to see the continued progress on GoCD with the new Kubernetes integrations–and you can check it out for yourself at gocd.org/sedaily.