It’s easy to forget sometimes that a lot of the web still operates on an advertising system that compensates for impressions and clicks. Advertisers place ads on websites of all kinds and then compensate the website for any views or clicks of ads.
The payment of huge sums of money through ad placement and clicks has attracted an army of scammers who have found ways to cash in the automated nature of the advertising environment. The scams are collectively referred to as artificially inflated traffic (AIT).
A lot of AIT fraud starts with domain spoofing. This is where a scam company will set up websites that look real enough to convince advertisers to place ads. The fake websites often mimic versions of well-known websites. The goal of these sites is not necessarily to attract real people to the site, just advertisers. The sites often have no content other than the ads. The spammers then generate traffic to the sites and bill the advertisers for the clicks and impressions. This can be incredibly lucrative even if a fake website is only in existence for a short time.
One of the most common ways to generate fake web hits is by using a bot network. Bots are most commonly fake accounts established on places like social media sites. This gives a bot the cover to seem like a real user. Bots are adept at making clicks on ads, can be created for a small investment, can work 24/7, and can appear to be initiated from anywhere in the world. Bots can inflate advertising hits quickly, and it’s a real challenge for advertisers to distinguish bot hits from real hits on an ad.
Some scammers have remained old school by using real people in low-wage parts of the world to click on websites all day. Real people are harder to detect than bots since they can do things like complete captchas. These folks use a variety of devices like smartphones, tablets, and computers to simulate a diverse set of users. The real people also occasionally put in fake orders for merchandise, which generates even better compensation. It’s not hard to understand the benefit of using people as scammers when advertising hits on a quality website by a major corporation can easily be as much as one dollar per click-through.
A similar kind of fraud is done through text message hits on advertisements that are often done in collaboration with unscrupulous wireless carriers. The nature of the communications network today allows texts from anywhere in the world, particularly if the originating nature of the text has been disguised.
The ad industry has always fought back against this kind of fraud. For example, it has gotten fairly easy to identify bot farms due to the way that bots operate, which is far more regular and predictable than humans. But advertising fraud is a major cost for the ad industry and can result in big bills for the companies doing the advertising, without the offsetting sales that are expected from placing ads.
Artificial intelligence is posing a huge threat to the advertising ecosystem. AI bots can be trained to mimic the actions of real people, making them harder to spot. AI can be used to create realistic bot armies with almost no human direction or intervention.
There has been talk for years about finding ways to replace advertising based on clicks on ads. Companies have tried other avenues such as marketing using customer referrals or companies collaborating to only advertise on each other’s sites. But none of these alternatives has the same impact as ads spread throughout web using blogs, news sites, social media, etc. As hard as it is to imagine the alternative, the ad industry might be forced to find a new model if indistinguishable AI hits flood the advertising market.
The average user might think it would be a good thing if web advertising disappears, but a large percentage of the website and apps that people like are supported by advertising revenues. Unfortunately, a web without advertising might quickly become a very boring place.