Fraudulent ‘popunder’ Google Ad campaign generated millions of dollars Scammers using Google Ads, stolen blog articles, and a "popunder" ad scheme on adult websites pulled in more than $275,000 a month by generating millions of ad impressions every month. So say researchers at cybersecurity vendor Malwarebytes, who assert the fraudsters were able to use people visiting high-traffic adult websites …
By definition, a popunder is claiming an ad impression that doesn't exist, because the purported viewer doesn't see it.
Usually it doesn't even get rendered at all, users either close the entire browser window (so all the popunder tabs are gone and never rendered), or they open something else - possibly generating another popunder tab.
The only case they're even theoretically visible is if the viewer closes the tab they wanted. They'll then close the popunder as fast as they possibly can.
Anything "below the fold" is never even rendered for a single frame.
So they're always fraudulent, by design.
You need to factor in the Ad blindness. Many people develop ability to not see adverts. Their brain simply does not register their presence.
As a side effect they also don't see normal content that "looks like ad". Often it results in funny and confusing things when people ask support how to do something on the site as they don't see an option to do it and then only when support shows where that option is - often literally in front of them - and then it clicks in their brain "Aaaahaaaa I thought it was an ad!"
Not for everyone I was using Brave on my Win7 machine but after the last update they announced that they were no longer supporting Win7. Sucks. I'm gonna miss them for a short time.
I've had my Win7 machine for something like 10 years but it's starting to fail physically now. The mouse button no longer registers unless I hit it just right and the lid has to be held together to open and close it. It's not that I'm cheap, I just really like my little laptop and I'm gonna miss it.
Originally online advertising was relevant to what we were reading, but that feature has been removed to help make it very profitable and universal - advertising is now fraudulent everywhere just making the posting profitable, but not the items advertised. Advertising will be heading to the graveyard.
We all have our preferred way of starting the workday. Some like to grab a coffee and quick chat in the break-room. Other people like to post mindless rubbish in the El Reg comments section. Still others like to spend 7 minutes and 45 seconds 'minding their own business' in the other tab whilst speed-reading 51 articles and also uncovering a multi-million dollar fraud network. I know which guy I'd hire.
They won't because those metrics don't exist. Google will only ever give them metrics that make it look like Google is doing a good job. Ad impressions served != ads viewed by people. Google have always known that which is why they don't publish those numbers (thought to be fair it's pretty impossible to actually do that).
Heh. Wanna bet?
I worked for G a few years back. During a talk, a member of their ads team mentioned that recently, someone trying to do the right thing suggested tracking ROI for their ad customers. The answer swiftly came back, "NO!". It seems that the analysis had been done years earlier, and was known to be << 1. Not the sort of thing you want your suckers customers to know.
>Because their customers (ie the companies buying ads) might realise that most of what they're paying for is worthless.
Nobody can say that out loud. If people realized just how hated and ineffective online advertising was then an entire technological ecosystem would collapse. After all, the reason why we need faster and faster multicore processors and more and more memory just to read Internet content isn't because the content is more complex, its just to support the advertising ecosystem. So the result is a conspiracy of silence -- everyone pretends its all hunky dory because they all know in the back of their minds that if word got out that they're part of the largest pyramid scheme in history millions of jobs would vanish, revenues would collapse, investments would be worthless -- it would literally be "The End Of The World As We Know It".
So like that well known planet builder "We'd far rather be happy than right".
Is this saying that the tech has been developed so that it detects clicks on pages that aren't actually even seen? And that this is considered a legitimate part of the fundamental underlying code that was developed by whoever it is who wrote this technology in the first place. i.e some developers thought "Lets include some code that says a page has been viewed when it hasn't because it's underneath another page?
Or have I misunderstood?
I have to confess that it annoys me to no end that it's not "WHO'S SCREWING WHOM?".
I know usage changes over time and the objective inflection of that pronoun is disappearing, but still, if I'd been in the industry and seen that advertisement, I would have immediately felt hostile to the message.
"The average cost per thousand impressions (CMP) can be as low as five cents."
What are these things called "cents"?
Over here we in the advertising industry abbreviate cost per thousand impressions to CPT. As you would.
For some reason over there they also talk about cost per thousand but write CPM (not CMP), for "cost per mille". As you undoubtedly wouldn't. I have no idea why.
-A.
I knew how to do this. I'd stop after my first million bucks, I promise! I mean, if I can't live off 2 million there must be something wrong with me so, 5 million, then I turn it off. Why would anyone need more than 10 million anyway? I'm already debt free, so if 20 million won't cut the mustard nothing will.
Face it, I'd run the crap out of it morning noon and night because I really want a Bell 222 parked in a hangar next to my house and them things ain't cheap! And no, I would not feel bad about screwing an ad slinger. As far as I'm concerned anyone screwing an ad jockey out of their cash has the moral high ground.
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