Well, the original title is: 50% of the online ads are never seen by Panos Ipeirotis.
About my title: The purpose of ads is to sell you something. Whatever the consequences may be for you. A lesson well taught by US Tobacco, Big Pharma and the corn lobby (think of all the unnatural fructose products in your food).
That said, the post by Panos is a remarkable piece about investigation and data analysis.
From the post:
Almost a year back, I was involved in an advertising fraud case, as part of my involvement with AdSafe Media. (See the related Wall Street Journal story.) Long story short, it was a sophisticated scheme for generating user traffic to websites that were displaying ads to real users but these users could never see these ads, as they were never visible to the user. While we were able to uncover the scheme, what triggered our investigation was almost an accident: our adult-content classifier seemed to detect porn in websites that had absolutely nothing suspicious. While it was a great investigative success, we could not overlook the fact that this was not a systematic method for discovering such attempts for fraud. As part of this effort to make more systematic, the following idea came up:
Let’s monitor the duration for which a user can actually see an ad?
After a few months of development to get this feature to work, it became possible to measure the exact amount of time an was visible to a user. While this feature could easily now detect any fraud attempt that delivers ads to users that never see them, this was now almost secondary. It was the first time that we could monitor the amount of time that users get exposed to ads.
50% of the Ads are (almost) Never Seen.
By measuring the statistics of more than 1.5 billion ad impressions per day, it was possible to understand deeply how different websites perform. Some of the high level results:
- 38% of the ads are never in view to a user
- 50% of the ads are in view for less than 0.5 seconds
- 56% of the ads are in view for less than 5 seconds
Personally, I found these numbers impressive. 50% of the delivered ads are never seen for more than 0.5 seconds! I wanted to check myself whether 0.5 seconds is sufficient to understand the ad. Apparently, the guys at AdSafe thought about that as well, so here is their experiment:
A “pull” advertising model avoids this type of fraud because advertisers could deliver directly to pre-qualified consumers. Better use of funds for psycho-sexual manipulation of pre-qualified consumers, rather than scatter-shot across demographics.
If you are tired of wasting money on “push” advertising (with the hazards and dangers of fraud), consider a different model. Consider topic maps.