Thursday, September 24, 2015

The Financial Times accuses Google: charges advertisers also the false views of bots on Youtube – Primaonline.it

      


  
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September 24, 2015 | 13:27

The Financial Times accuses Google: charges advertisers also the false views of bots on Youtube

(Corriere.it) In the cutthroat world of online advertising unit of measurement that determines how much you earn and how much content producers must pay the advertiser is the number of views. The tricks abound: there are bots, automation software that simulate user behavior and alter the number of page views. And one of the priority objectives of the platforms that manage the advertising is to identify and block fake clicks. Now a consortium of European researchers has identified a flaw in the system Fraud YouTube, owned by the absolute ruler of online advertising: Google. According to the study, reported by the Financial Times, the Mountain View giant applies a double standard, which seems to be to his advantage: it is most severe in the reading of the number of views on YouTube (where the false ones are discarded) and is slightly more forgiving on the platform AdWords, which manages advertising on the video site online and that also identifies as true the click of automated software. This means that anyone who publishes content on YouTube is not remunerated (as it should) for viewing by the bot, while the advertising listings will have to pay anyway. As noted by the British newspaper, this raises many problems: Google is doing enough to protect advertisers, who are shifting more and more towards online investment?

Larry Page

Larry Page , CEO of Google

It is the first time you tried something. After uploading some videos on Youtube, the researchers bought advertising through the Google AdWords platform. Finally, they created some automated software to defraud the system. This allowed us to see how the views Bigg is bogus. Scholars have instructed the bots to see 150 times two of their movies. And here identified the difference in treatment: the public counter YouTube scored 25 displays real, while for AdWords, it’s as if the video had been seen by 91 people, charging the corresponding figure account of researchers. That is, a part of the ecosystem of Mountain View has spotted the scam, while the management system of advertising (the main source of income for the company of Mountain View) was more forgiving. We contacted Stefano Traverso, the Italian researcher who worked on the study. He tells the BBC that the quality manager of advertising Google has considered the study “useful to improve the effectiveness of the algorithms,” and urged the team to provide more results. Also informs us that, before the appearance of the article in the Financial Times, Big G was not aware of the research.

Google has now made clear that “it takes a lot seriously the issue of trafficking is not valid “and that the company has focused heavily on technology and personnel that deals with” take out of the system most of the traffic is not valid, that is filtered even before being charged to inserizionisti ” . Also from Mountain View do know that soon will discuss the results of the research with the authors, who come from four different institutions: Polytechnic of Turin, the University Carlos III of Madrid, IMDEA and NEC Labs Europe. Rubén Cuevas, Associate Professor at the UC3M and first author of the study, noted that the bots used in the experiment are not very sophisticated and their “is not an extreme case, anyone with a minimum of programming knowledge can create similar software. ” But noted that countermeasures Google are still more sophisticated than those of rival Dailymotion, owned the French publisher Vivendi. The researchers are hoping for a greater commitment on the part of Big G to reduce the risks to which exposed appear to advertisers on Youtube. According to the study, so far the investments related mostly to the antifraud traditional advertising on the web, such as banners, while little has been done to the video.

That the sellers of advertising fraud is flourishing economy. It is not hard to find services that offer tens of thousands of false views on Youtube for $ 5. And last January was discovered Tubrosa, a malicious program which aims to launch movies running unbeknownst to users. It’s a trick used to allow those charged content to gain because, as we mentioned, the remuneration scheme of the platform is based on the number of views. White Oops, a company specializing in detecting online fraud, in 2014 found that about a quarter of all online videos were seen by bots and scams involve increasingly the video portal of Big G because it is one of the largest markets with the biggest growth in online advertising. Revenues of Youtube are over 4 billion dollars a year.

In the last month the scenario of online advertising has been shaken several times. IOS9, the new operating system for iPhone and iPad, has begun to support programs that block ads, as we said. And this software, ad-blocker, are still growing on desktop computers (used by an estimated 6% of Internet users). Resulting in damage to the digital publishers and the first player on the market, Google. Facebook, meanwhile, is working on increasingly sophisticated systems to make profits through its platform for ads. Starting in October, it will use the buttons to share, present on most web pages, to gather information for marketing purposes. The data will be taken even by users who do not click on these buttons, and who are not enrolled. Today is the second bad news for Mountain View, which could benefit Facebook. Many companies now consider a page on the social network a substitute to their site. And investments on advertising on the web, one space where the ads run by Google dominate, could be channeled back to the social network. But there’s more: as announced at the conference Disrupt, the company Mark Zuckerberg could soon launch “click to message”, a new kind of offer that allows users to get in touch with companies opening a chat session to request information or book products. In this way, the company seems to have managed to find a way to earn through Messenger, its solution for the exchange of messages so far without precise source of introditi.

 

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