| This is a daily column written by Lowell Heddings, the founder and owner of How-To Geek. If you prefer, you can read this column in a web browser instead.
The Fake Traffic Schemes That Are Rotting the Internet Late that year he and a half-dozen or so colleagues gathered in a New York conference room for a presentation on the performance of the online ads. They were stunned. Digital's return on investment was around 2 to 1, a $2 increase in revenue for every $1 of ad spending, compared with at least 6 to 1 for TV. The most startling finding: Only 20 percent of the campaign's "ad impressions"—ads that appear on a computer or smartphone screen—were even seen by actual people. … Increasingly, digital ad viewers aren't human. A study done last year in conjunction with the Association of National Advertisers embedded billions of digital ads with code designed to determine who or what was seeing them. Eleven percent of display ads and almost a quarter of video ads were "viewed" by software, not people. According to the ANA study, which was conducted by the security firm White Ops and is titled The Bot Baseline: Fraud In Digital Advertising, fake traffic will cost advertisers $6.3 billion this year.
The level of fraud online is just absolutely staggering. Even the largest websites from the biggest household name publishers that you can imagine are often supplementing their numbers with low-quality or completely fake traffic — everything from clickbait to click scams that open the wrong thing, to malware-controlled botnets that are browsing the web pretending to be humans. If Skynet ever becomes real, it will probably evolve out of the online advertising system and enslave humanity to make them watch ads. We spoke to a security researcher that investigates malware for ad fraud research, and he told us that tons of publishers are buying traffic from middle-men — low quality marketing agencies that promise they can help you get visitors to your site for a very small amount of money. You might pay $1 for 1000 visitors, and as long as you can make more than $1 from ads, you can just crank up the funnel to make even more — if you could get $5 for every thousand “visitors”, you’re making $4 for every $1 you spend. It’s not hard to see how this can be attractive to publishers that lack integrity. The problem, he said, is that many of these middle-men are then buying traffic on the underground from botnet operators, who pay other people to get their malware installed on people’s computers so they can control tens or hundreds of millions of computers. The botnets are specially designed for ad fraud — they open a hidden browser in a sandbox and even hijack your sound card drivers to allow them to mute the sound from their hidden browser while making it look like your computer isn’t doing anything. Many of the publishers that are paying for this traffic are just running junky websites for arbitrage that nobody in their right mind would ever view, but a whole lot more of them are using the botnet for fraud to solve a different problem entirely: readers that always click to skip video ads. Most adult websites these days have video ads that pay a lot of money, and almost every adult website is very popular — but nobody wants to sit through the high-paying video ads. So the people that operate these sites pay the middle-men who pay the botnet operators to have malware pretend to be a reader and browse around their sites without skipping the video ads. So they can collect more money. As I mentioned the other day, online advertising is slowly dying, and all of the automation is one of the reasons why. When robots determine which ads get shown to which visitors, the only people seeing the ads will be the robots. | 
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