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Reverse-engineering Google’s "Skip Button Guarantee"
- vgeek 3y agoGoogle has done the exact same thing with Google Search Partners for 15+ years. They never disclose who these search partners are, but are opted-in by default. Their performance is always around 5-10% of Google Search-- because they are random spam-search-type sites whose sole purpose is to serve ads.
- phendrenad2 3y agoGoogle is a 1.5 trillion dollar advertising company. There simply isn't enough content in the world to monetize to keep Google growing YoY. All companies reach this point. Some glide to a natural equilibrium point (McDonalds, Subway), some cook the books and implode spectacularly (Enron), some oversteer in the other direction and fall down in chunky movements (Meta).
- uejfiweun 3y agoYeah, Google's only hope is basically pouring money into AI in the hopes that they'll come up with another Google. Can't say it seems likely.
- christoph 3y agoThe internet feels like a desolate waste ground to me at the moment. I give up pretty quickly these days "surfing the web", as I just get fed up with the constant never ending search results filled with blogspam, news sites that constantly pester you with modal dialogs from the microsecond you land on them, every site begging you for money, your email address or moaning at you because you're running an adblocker. Or sites just plain not loading, because you forgot you're still connected to a VPN, or using Apples private relay. I occasionally like to look at the DailyMail but when it complains and blocks me for using an adblocker I just nope out. I've seen what that site looks like without serious adblocking and I'm astounded any sane person could ever endure that experience. It's bad enough with adblocking. The only places I really visit now are small forums, a few Reddits, HN obviously and not much else. As an example of just how broken and manipulative it all is. Open Google. Search for apples. It tells me it found 8,540,000,000 results (0.38 seconds). Wow. Big DATA! Click to page 10. Click to page 11. That's the last page for me now and it now says at the top: Page 11 of about 103 results (0.70 seconds). That seems pretty broken to me for the biggest search engine on the internet. Oh and forget trying to manipulate the query string like the good old days, it's now just a big old long list of encrypted garbage.
- eddythompson80 3y ago> It tells me it found 8,540,000,000 results (0.38 seconds). Lol, that takes me back to CS101 in college circa 2004. Our professor Loved Google at the time. When he was introducing binary search he opened google and did a search a showed us that top number. Then said “This is the POWER of binary search!!” Ngl, I was impressed at the time. It’s a funny memory.
- charcircuit 3y ago>That seems pretty broken to me for the biggest search engine on the internet. Not really. There isn't much value to be gained in ranking and sorting a bigger top N of the 8.5 billion results. It is better to encourage people to refine their queries to something less general.
- eddythompson80 3y ago
- tiotempestade 3y agoThe way I see it.. 1. Internet ads were supposed to solve the “who’s watching” problem. By letting advertisers target their audiences and display ads on vetted sites. 2. *but* Advertising companies also offer stuff (either browsers or product features) that are on the “bleeding edge” when it comes to protect their users privacy. 3. Marketing departments anywhere from big to small sized companies know and/or deal (kinda..) with advertising fraud cuz they want to “show work”/“good quarterly results”.. 4. Most of the users, just want to freely access content in order to trick their minds into feeling amused when in reality their just bored 5. Only a small fraction of the remaining users (from 4.) are capable of understand and deal with all this.. So.. The Internet is either doomed if this continues, or in the process of becoming an even bigger trash can if “they” get way with this :/ Anyone here up to starting Internet 2.0?! :)
- rachet 3y agoI briefly worked at a company that monetized videos with advertisements. The company would basically bundle many sites and get them video ads that the small sites wouldn’t otherwise get. The company used GVP to provide ads to the site owners. Many of the sites were straight up serving pirated content monetized directly with gvp. The way this was “allowed” was that the company would receive a DMCA request for the pirated content and we’d have to take it down… within 5 days. So we would wait 5 days and take it down. In that delta, everyone made money. For the 5 days everyone made enough to stay in business and still “comply with the law”. Most of the company’s operating capital was sourced through this takedown period. 100’s of thousands a month. It actually made the content more valuable because it introduced scarcity. The content was mostly Indian cricket matches and the only way to watch them online was pirated in this manner. So justify it however you want, gvp and google ads in general are totally trash. Oh and we had frequent issues with advertising metrics being wrong between 5-25%. When I inquired… that’s just how they do it. It’s an “estimate.
- _fat_santa 3y ago> But Adalytics’ reporting, which has not been independently verified by Check My Ads, tells a different story. Take it with a grain of salt
- ocdtrekkie 3y agoAlmost the entirety of Google's business is outright grift. From selling malicious ads, to forcing people to pay to stay on top of search for their own brand name, to tricks like this where ads are dishonestly sold or Google uses its position on both sides of the market to artificially boost prices, nothing about this company is or should be considered legitimate. They simply operate as a taxation on businesses for junk marketing that, at best, treads water with organic results. And that filters down to every price we pay as consumers. When you read stories like this, remember that you are paying more for everything so Google can do this trash.
- changoplatanero 3y agoDon't most advertisers invest in their own methods to tell if the ads they are buying are giving them value or not? I imagine that advertisers should have a pretty good idea of the quality of what they are buying.
- Dopameaner 3y agoThats correct, in my previous company, we had a full internal infrastructure that provides daily or hourly perforamnce of advertisements that hits all major social media APIs.
- specialist 3y agoDid prev company then compare with performance claimed by google, facebook, etc?
- makestuff 3y agoI work in adtech and yeah if there is a discrepancy the advertiser will 100% contact their account manager about it. Same goes for the supply side, publishers maintain what they expect to be paid and will raise any discrepancies as well.
- riku_iki 3y agoand does account manager help sometimes, or just retrieve standard template response?
- makestuff 3y agoUsually it is just a misunderstanding of the metrics, but if there is an issue they will always open a ticket with the engineering teams. They also expect some level of discrepancy since the volume of data is so large.
- ketzo 3y agoSure, if you're a medium-large company with a whole marketing department. But Google has a massive long tail of small businesses who have no chance of doing that kind of analysis.
- password4321 3y agoThe original source article seems to be https://adalytics.io/blog/invalid-google-video-partner-trueview-ads https://adalytics.io/blog/invalid-google-video-partner-truev...
- hmate9 3y agoI feel like this is kind of an open secret and the analytics about an ad that google or facebook give to advertisers must be taken with a grain of salt. That is why every serious advertiser runs their own analytics about how many people visited their site from the ad, return per ad spend etc. Of course this is harder to do on broader, brand awareness campaigns but can still be tracked to an extent.
- muppetman 3y agoOh no the people pumping this fetid garbage at me are being ripped off? Be still my beating heart.
- ocdtrekkie 3y agoYou're also paying for it, indirectly.
- colinsane 3y agoi pay for the effects of questionable ad platform practices far more directly anytime i shop online. Amazon's "sponsored" product listings which forces sellers to compete away all their margins -- but not in the historic "competition leads to lower prices" but "competition leads to a greater take for Amazon" sense -- and makes the actual products i'm looking for arbitrarily harder to find. the fact that the in your face malpractices are so foregranted that people reach for indirection or edge cases when throwing shade at the ad industry just highlights how one-sided the battle's become.
- ocdtrekkie 3y agoThe reason I dislike whataboutism is that it's so easily dismissed: I think we should regulate both bad practices! Both companies are a blight on our society and we should enforce our existing laws to deal with them. However I do feel Google's cost is more universally applicable. Tons of product types aren't commonly procured via Amazon: All business types, whether products or services, end up paying the Google tax.
- colinsane 3y agoi didn't mean to be what-about-ist. from my perspective there's a huge, glaring, impossible thing to miss right in front of us, and you reached specifically to the indirect issue. from my perspective, that's you being what-about-ist (ignoring the blatant bad thing in favor of the more distant bad thing). anyway, i don't disagree with the rest. just feel that being called out for whataboutism here is a bit unfair.
- doctorpangloss 3y agoThis story is complex. If there was an obvious way for CMOs at major brands to distill this issue, such as a metric, they would do it. But instead, if they are brand advertising, they want a CPM that "looks right," and Google delivers that to them with garbage inventory. If they want pure return-on-advertising-spend, Google will show to people it knows will impulse buy, but the ads will be insanely expensive. You can't just arbitrage this as an ad buyer. Anyway, the agencies and media buyers in between the CMO and Google are aligned with Google, because they are paid a budget premium, so it's really their fault that they do not care about fraud. My disclosure is: I make a purely interactive ad product that only appears in first-party inventory like in social media feeds. In my opinion this is a non-issue if you... Make ads people like. Here's an example of a highly successful interactive ad creative: https://appmana.com/watch/virtualtestdrive https://appmana.com/watch/virtualtestdrive - per 1 million visits, the average engagement time was 65s. A typical video ad has a median of 0s of watch time, and 2.1s on average (hence 5s YouTube ads). There's nothing new here. Even John Oliver will talk about ads people like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Kfx2fANELo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Kfx2fANELo. At the end of the day, either you make a good creative or you don't. Everything else is noise.
- totallywrong 3y ago> At the end of the day, either you make a good creative or you don't. Everything else is noise. There used to be great ads. Campaigns on TV and print media that people would talk about. That just doesn't happen online, and every single ad to me is, as you say, noise.
- Dylan16807 3y agoI see a lot of talk about the current mcdonald's campaign. The game boy game got a ton of attention on HN.
- yunohn 3y agoI think HN is one of the least-informed places about ads/marketing. The vast majority of commenters here are reactionary and refuse to understand how things work. They also believe they’re completely immune to marketing, while commenting on a forum dedicated to the startup funnel. Super cool interactive ad BTW!
- a2tech 3y agoGoogle is built on a super shaky basis? I think every serious thinking person on the internet has always known deep down that ads have been massively overhyped
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- anony23 3y agoBig brands don't care. They have massive budgets that they need to spend and are happy to spend them or else they get cut.
- fundad 3y agoUnless you're selling gold bars or boats, nobody want's to overpay to run next to Breitbart.
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- biomcgary 3y agoThe real goal of this post is clear about half way down the page, de-funding disinformation from right-wing sources. My guess is that the group of website that they call out as problematic are actually great for getting ad viewers (older, non-tech savvy, gullible) that don't click skip. I would be less suspicious that this was a submarine article if the sites called out were roughly balanced left-right (by US standards, which are a bit different ;-).
- fundad 3y agoYeah it's wild that Google is trying to help disinformation outlets get around Check My Ads but I guess they need the money.
- katzgrau 3y agoI've personally seen my video ads running muted on partner sites. It kind of makes the analytics useless because there's most more inconsistency in the medium where the ads are displayed (eg, not YouTube) so you never know if fluctuations actually mean anything.
- paxys 3y agoMeh. I read the original report when it was released, and it was a whole lot of nothing. Their claim was basically – "we found some Google video ad fraud!". Well guess what, Google knows and agrees that there is fraud. So do all the advertisers who pay them. The question is really about how much fraud there is. Google says that it actively keeps it under a certain %, and advertisers are generally okay with that number. Now the report makes the usual claims – ads run on shady sites, ads viewed by bots, ads muted or obscured, ads unskippable and against policy etc. When you read through and try to find actual numbers for the severity of these issues, they just skip over it with weasel words. Just read their opening statement: > However, this research report finds that for years, significant quantities of TrueView skippable in-stream ads, purchased by many different brands and media agencies, appear to have been served on hundreds of thousands of websites and apps in which the consumer experience did not meet Google’s stated quality standards. For example, many TrueView in-stream ads were served muted and auto-playing as out-stream video or as obscured video players on independent sites. Often, there was little to no organic video media content between ads, the video units simply played ads only. "significant quantities", "many different brands", "appear to have been served", "many ads were served", "Often"...you can keep reading as long as you like, and will not find a single objective number or percentage. Unless someone can conclusively find that, no one is going to take them seriously.
- codedokode 3y agoIt is obvious to me that third-party sites are motivated to employ every trick to increase ad views. Google cannot show ads to bots, because it will be a fraud, but a third-party site can because they are in a different country and you won't hold them responsible anyway.
- macNchz 3y agoI’ve never run video ads on Google, but I have run a lot of search ads, and if the 3rd party sites where they show the videos are anything like the “search partners” network, you’re correct, the sites are total trash. Several years ago I looked through our referrers and immediately disabled search partners for all of our ads when I saw the actual sites. Many were just clones of the Google search results UI but with ads indistinguishable from search results. Their play is to buy ads on Google themselves, while showing partner network ads on their own confusing “search results” page. They arbitrage traffic by buying ads on cheaper keywords and then getting visitors to click a more expensive ad they serve by being in the partner network. From what I saw, I can only imagine the vast majority of human clicks through these pages are totally unintentional or confused.
- codedokode 3y agoAs I understand, the problem here is that Google wants to run your ads on third-party sites (to earn more), but you don't want to run ads there because third-party sites employ every trick possible to generate impressions even if real user never sees the ads. If you care about money spent, you should calculate ROI for each third-party site and filter out those which give low returns. And not expect that Google will do that for you.
- makestuff 3y agoI would be surprised if there wasn’t some SAAS offering that did this for you.
- spondylosaurus 3y agoThere's a whole cottage industry of ad quality/anti-fraud filtering tools. Some better than others.
- Animats 3y agoWell, no one can complain that the right wing is being censored: RussiaToday.com Pravda.ru WND.com Zerohedge.com Breitbart.com Newsmax.com Whatfinger.com TheBlaze.com TheFederalist.com Hannity.com Half of those guys were kicked off Fox News.
- shitlord 3y agoAt least one of the authors of this article is a political activist with an axe to grind. The original report is more informative and worth the read.