Ad Banner Question

[mooncancook]

Let's say if you get a penny for each ad banner you display on your web page, what is there to stop you from displaying 1 million of the same ad banner in one page and get paid big money? I assume the ad servers have algorithms to stop this kind of abuse, but I am not certain and I don't know how to explain it to someone. Anyone knows? Thanks in advance.

 

[purbeast0]

because your code that you put to display the ad would be identical in all 1 million spots, and it would probably download the same ad 1 time, and would render it 1 million times.

plus i'm sure that would be against ToS and you would get booted very quickly and receive no money even if it counted as 1 million views.

also, you don't get 1 penny per viewed banner. you typically get paid by the thousands viewed, and that would only be a few cents.

 

[Markbnj]

There are all sorts of ways this could be trivially detected. Just looking at requests for the banner image and the referrer could probably tell you what's going on.

 

[mooncancook]

Each ad is coded with a cache busting random number to prevent caching the same ad image by the browser. I just want to be more definite that the ad server has something in place to prevent abuse so that I can explain to someone I am working with.

Another scenario is that you can write code to refresh and rotate ads dynamically in the same webpage. If you rotate your ads every few seconds then you can get more ad impressions, as opposed to refresh every few minutes. Does ad servers has ways to deal with that too, like if there is any rule on how often you should refresh your ads?

 

[DaveSimmons]

They track the IP addresses of the browser clients that are fetching the ads, so it would be easy to see that you are showing each viewer 10 ads when it should only be 1.

If you steal enough to be worth it, your viewing stats will be abnormal enough to stand out to their automated fraud tools.

Some sample automated checks:

* How many ads per unique IP address
* Average time between ads for IP address
* Min and Max time between ads for IP address
* Ads relative to number of visitors to the site, compared against similar sites

If you stand out, it trips alarms for deeper investigation.

They might also have automated tools to scan the pages server by your site for script code that abuses the ad serving.

If there are know "abuse toolkits" out there then an ad network might have also code to detect them, similar to detecting a virus.

 

[Leros]

The ad content provider probably does deduplication on a per user basis. For example, if they show the same ad to the same user in a 24 hour period, they could only count that once.