Reddit has been running ads for over a decade. If they are this far in and not doing basic fraud mitigation, something is wrong.

That depends on the scale though right? Reddit ads were for a long time very poor. They've become a lot more feasible for many companies in the last few years, as Reddit has also become a lot more mainstream.

Also we don't know if they are doing basic fraud mitigation. It's possible they are doing plenty of fraud mitigation, but that it's just not advanced enough.

Did you look at the link? The detection methods used, and the discussion of mitigation in the thread, make it clear that if they are doing any mitigation at all they are neglecting obvious red flags.

Every business is obliged to be ethical, vigilant against deception, and not blatantly lie, no matter what size they are. Even if you could make an argument like this, reddit was already pretty big ten years ago. That's why they started running ads.

I wish they would actually address this issue in the OP's link. None of the reddit ad reps have responded to this and it's quite a shame they haven't yet...

Their ad "platform", i mean the page where you go to buy an ad was a joke until very recently. broken images and stuff. a kid could do better.

Not that they need to change, i like the simplicty of their ads

Do you mean spider.io? I believe the internal team at Google had egg on their face when they had to admit they hadn't built anything and had to instead buy this company. But yeah it's definitely a sign that a network is maturing -- both facing and stopping this problem

Edit: Fun fact, one often undiscussed use for click-fraud was money laundering schemes, where people would own shitty landing pages with ads, and pay bot-net operators to click ads on their pages to legitimize money as "ad revenue"

Yep spider.io. Many years ago I knew someone who worked there. I believe he's still at Google.

The issue though is the complete lack of transparency with the major online ad networks. We're relying on the fox to guard the hen house. They get paid whether the click is valid or not. I don't think we should reasonably expect the Google's and Facebook's of the ad world to spend money preventing fraud when that generates less profit overall. Until we start regulating the industry, no ad company is going to spend money to lose money, especially when there's no real repercussions to begin with.

> Until we start regulating the industry, no ad company is going to spend money to lose money

Google made 113 BILLION dollars from advertising last year. The majority of companies spending that are sophisticated enough to tell if they're getting value from their 0.1 trillion dollars.

Ditto even reddit advertisers -- attribution to reddit is table stakes for buying ads. The buyers are getting value or they quit spending on reddit.

edit: In fact, if you understand ads, fraud on reddit is a problem for reddit because it causes advertisers to transfer ad spend off of reddit.

Almost all bidding on FB is oCPM and Google is tCPM, which means that clicks don't really matter at all in terms of Google/FB's ability to monetize. Transparency shouldn't matter for people bidding for conversions. The only transparency you need is to know where the visitors are coming from.

If anything fraud (really misclicks for FB and Google search since there is no fraud incentive) is also bad for them as well as it provides false signal of intent to their algorithms.

>which means that clicks don't really matter at all in terms of Google/FB's ability to monetize

What? They get paid for the clicks, not the impressions. Serving ad impressions costs money, the clicks make money. I don't quite follow your line of reasoning here.

>Transparency shouldn't matter for people bidding for conversions

Why wouldn't it? How do we know the bidding process is fair and the clicks we're paying for are valid? We don't and that's the problem. We wouldn't tolerate this type of behavior from companies in other industries. We need to quit giving tech companies a free pass and start holding them accountable.

>If anything fraud (really misclicks for FB and Google search since there is no fraud incentive) is also bad for them as well as it provides false signal of intent to their algorithms.

It only has to be good enough to convince people to keep using it. There's no financial incentive to eliminate fraud completely, or even try, without regulation.

Google gets paid for clicks but most (or at least many) people bid on conversions, for those people it doesn't matter if google delivers 100 clicks at $2 per click, or 4 clicks at $50 per click as long as they get the same number of conversions, so to this extent the CPC doesn't matter. Similarly, I could care less if 50% of the clicks are fraudulent. As a buyer what I'm judging at the end of the day is if I got the value I wanted for the price I paid. Clicks don't map to value very well, conversion actions do.

Plus, it's not like if there was no click fraud that the auction becomes magically transparent, it's still as opaque as it was before, so really this is the only rational way to purchase ads (off of some basis other than "did the # of clicks meet my expectations?")

Disclosure: I used to work on the pipelines counting this stuff at Google.

> What? They get paid for the clicks, not the impressions. Serving ad impressions costs money, the clicks make money. I don't quite follow your line of reasoning here.

Google has display ads (nee double-click) and search ads (adwords). Display ads can be pay per click or pay per impression (https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/2454058?hl=en). Search ads are pay per click.

> Why wouldn't it? How do we know the bidding process is fair and the clicks we're paying for are valid? We don't and that's the problem. We wouldn't tolerate this type of behavior from companies in other industries. We need to quit giving tech companies a free pass and start holding them accountable.

For cost per click there's an economic argument that the auction is fair. Google has limited ad slots and leaves money on the table if it serves low bid or low quality ads instead of higher-bid or higher-quality ads, and if Google pretended low-quality ads were high quality the advertiser would see it as an insanely high cost per conversion. Click validity is also easy to measure; count how many clicks you're charged for and compare that with how many referrals with gclid from google.com show up in your logs (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/35813737/matching-google...).

Impression ads are trickier which is why there are fancy cross-device conversion/attribution metrics to correlate purchases with impressions, but ultimately that is the problem with pay-per-impression in general.

> It only has to be good enough to convince people to keep using it. There's no financial incentive to eliminate fraud completely, or even try, without regulation.

Here I mostly agree; I was pretty disappointed to find out Google was serving those stupid "Download Now"-button ads on various software distribution sites. I think that particular insanity has been fixed now, but "not against the rules" was the answer for most of the time I was there.

Trust is also a financial incentive and is the primary incentive to prevent outright fraud. Ad-blockers or moving to another ad network are the proper responses to indicate lowered trust.

Shouldn't ad buyers just assume that the high fraud rates are baked into the price? If Reddit gets rid of fraudulent clicks (whatever that means), then the ad price will probably go up.

Yep, reddit ads CPC is 2-5x cheaper than FB / Google. So assuming half of it is real fraud, the likely outcome of removing the fraud is just that CPC would double. Still better as misleading metrics are bad, but likely no real net change in cost per real return.

that's a terrible way to run a business...they should just own it or fix the problem and charge whatever is fair. Tricking the users will bite them in the ass

> I get the impression that Reddit's ad network is just immature.

I get more the impression that Reddit's advertiser community is just immature. ;-)

> We're finding that Reddit ads perform well and are cheap, suggesting that there isn't much competition for clicks.

Also reinforcing my perception.

> More mature ad networks such as Google's and Facebook's are better at reducing spam clicks. Google bought a company focused on this about 10 years ago, I'm sure Facebook put similar effort in.

I doubt either of us know that either of their ad networks does a better job. They certainly have invested more money in it, but they also run much bigger ad networks that are likely much more aggressively targeted for fraud (particularly because of their revenue models). So they may have more of the clicks that get through being fraud than Reddit.

> I'm sure this is something they'll work to improve over time as their ad network gains traction.

Yeah, but what I think is needed right now is a more mature perspective on click fraud. For starters, the underlying subtext that "click fraud" means that the ad network is profiting at the advertiser's expense fails to appreciate the context. If there was no fraud, the clicks would cost proportionately more (likely more than proportionately more), so the advertiser would save no money and Reddit would not lose any revenue.

More than that though, the poster doesn't seem to appreciate that what they are describing as obviously fraudulent is likely filled with a lot of false positives (I'd speculate that they are labeling at least a third of their real traffic as fraud using this heuristic). They also do not seem to understand that just because they are using a technique to detect fraud that Reddit isn't employing the same technique on their side; click fraudsters have a strong incentive to fool ad network detection mechanisms, but no incentive to fool the landing pages. They might follow redirects, load images, use unique IPs, etc. on the ad network, but they have no incentive to fool the operator of the site the ad is sending traffic to (in fact, sometimes their objective is to convince the advertiser that the ad network isn't providing quality traffic).

Can u share any approx pricing/click-through rate ?

We are considering driving some traffic into very basic sites. We dont really intent to monetize, so cheap trashy visitors are ok

"We are considering driving some traffic into very basic sites. We dont really intent to monetize, so cheap trashy visitors are ok"

Doing God's own work there, I see ...