Otherwise, I can’t explain why they don’t take it more seriously to stand up to bots. Even more so with meta and their eagerness to put in more accounts pretending to be human to “cover the friend market”.
Besides, what’s to stop them? They are the ones who control the information and surely they know perfectly well which accounts are authentic and which are bots. Maybe even several of those accounts are controlled directly by them and they use them to inflate the statistics to charge advertisers even more.
Or maybe I’m jut tripping…
They are one hundred percent ripping off their advertisers.
Consider how advertising on any of those platforms looks compared to five or ten years ago.
Never liked ads, but have experienced a sharp drop in my tolerance, based exclusively on the nonstop ratcheting up of ad delivery.
In their defense, they were probably lying before the advent of so-called AI as well.
Wouldn’t shock me. But from memory advertising is paid based on clicks per view ratio.
If one were the size of google, and lacked ethics, they could bot the clicks as well as the views.
Also the incentives of this setup are pretty screwed up. The advertising agency gets money as long as they are able to convince the advertiser that their services are worth it. But how do you really measure that? Sure, we have lots of fancy tracking technology, but not all consumers click ads to buy stuff. Whats the role of those purchases? Who knows. The agency will undoubtedly claim that all the sales were a direct result of an advertising company, and they have every incentive to say that. Do they really have any incentive to be completely honest about the effectiveness of their ads. I doubt it.
It’s just that, the way the market is run, there is no incentive to be honest with the data. If the line has to go up, it has to go up, even if it’s an imaginary rise.
