Flutterby™! : Facebook ads and bots 2012-07-30 21:55:55.188483+00

Facebook ads and bots

2012-07-30 21:55:55.188483+00 by Dan Lyke 3 comments

Limited Run (formerly Limited Pressing) announces their retirement from Facebook because they suspect ads are being bot clicked:

What's important here is that in all of our years of experience, only about 1-2% of people coming to us have JavaScript disabled, not 80% like these clicks coming from Facebook. So we did what any good developers would do. We built a page logger. Any time a page was loaded, we'd keep track of it. You know what we found? The 80% of clicks we were paying for were from bots. That's correct. Bots were loading pages and driving up our advertising costs. So we tried contacting Facebook about this. Unfortunately, they wouldn't reply.

Yeah, in their case (and I'm sorry their announcement is gone, I'll try to find a copy) it wasn't about identities that looked bogus because of attributes of the account, it was about the attributes of the resulting traffic.

On the "hiding on the web", I was recently amazed to discover that a Tumblr I follow is an anonymous identity of an old school blogger I've followed for a while in other forms and forums. In fact I'm pretty amazed at just how much that sort of clustering occurs; in a world of billions of people, I keep finding myself rediscovering the same core groups. I think that trait is what makes anonymity difficult.

Not everybody who uses FaceBook for it's ostensibly intended purpose uses a "real name", or allows or makes "friends." Not that I don't doubt many, or even the majority, of hits are bogus. But just because an obvious pseudonym is used in an account, that doesn't mean it comes from a bot.

While I realize that it is almost impossible to truly hide one's self on the web, it can be made somewhat time consuming, therefore expensive to find out who stands behind a webname. This makes it likely that no one outside of law enforcement will violate one's privacy -- it just isn't worth the cost.