Reverse-engineering Google’s "Skip Button Guarantee" (opens in new tab)

Meh. I read the original report when it was released, and it was a whole lot of nothing.

Their claim was basically – "we found some Google video ad fraud!". Well guess what, Google knows and agrees that there is fraud. So do all the advertisers who pay them. The question is really about how much fraud there is. Google says that it actively keeps it under a certain %, and advertisers are generally okay with that number.

Now the report makes the usual claims – ads run on shady sites, ads viewed by bots, ads muted or obscured, ads unskippable and against policy etc. When you read through and try to find actual numbers for the severity of these issues, they just skip over it with weasel words. Just read their opening statement:

> However, this research report finds that for years, significant quantities of TrueView skippable in-stream ads, purchased by many different brands and media agencies, appear to have been served on hundreds of thousands of websites and apps in which the consumer experience did not meet Google’s stated quality standards. For example, many TrueView in-stream ads were served muted and auto-playing as out-stream video or as obscured video players on independent sites. Often, there was little to no organic video media content between ads, the video units simply played ads only.

"significant quantities", "many different brands", "appear to have been served", "many ads were served", "Often"...you can keep reading as long as you like, and will not find a single objective number or percentage. Unless someone can conclusively find that, no one is going to take them seriously.

The internet feels like a desolate waste ground to me at the moment. I give up pretty quickly these days "surfing the web", as I just get fed up with the constant never ending search results filled with blogspam, news sites that constantly pester you with modal dialogs from the microsecond you land on them, every site begging you for money, your email address or moaning at you because you're running an adblocker. Or sites just plain not loading, because you forgot you're still connected to a VPN, or using Apples private relay.

I occasionally like to look at the DailyMail but when it complains and blocks me for using an adblocker I just nope out. I've seen what that site looks like without serious adblocking and I'm astounded any sane person could ever endure that experience. It's bad enough with adblocking.

The only places I really visit now are small forums, a few Reddits, HN obviously and not much else.

As an example of just how broken and manipulative it all is. Open Google. Search for apples.

It tells me it found 8,540,000,000 results (0.38 seconds). Wow. Big DATA! Click to page 10. Click to page 11. That's the last page for me now and it now says at the top: Page 11 of about 103 results (0.70 seconds).

That seems pretty broken to me for the biggest search engine on the internet. Oh and forget trying to manipulate the query string like the good old days, it's now just a big old long list of encrypted garbage.

Google is a 1.5 trillion dollar advertising company. There simply isn't enough content in the world to monetize to keep Google growing YoY. All companies reach this point. Some glide to a natural equilibrium point (McDonalds, Subway), some cook the books and implode spectacularly (Enron), some oversteer in the other direction and fall down in chunky movements (Meta).

Google has done the exact same thing with Google Search Partners for 15+ years. They never disclose who these search partners are, but are opted-in by default. Their performance is always around 5-10% of Google Search-- because they are random spam-search-type sites whose sole purpose is to serve ads.

Oh no the people pumping this fetid garbage at me are being ripped off? Be still my beating heart.

Don't most advertisers invest in their own methods to tell if the ads they are buying are giving them value or not? I imagine that advertisers should have a pretty good idea of the quality of what they are buying.

The original source article seems to be https://adalytics.io/blog/invalid-google-video-partner-truev...

I feel like this is kind of an open secret and the analytics about an ad that google or facebook give to advertisers must be taken with a grain of salt.

That is why every serious advertiser runs their own analytics about how many people visited their site from the ad, return per ad spend etc.

Of course this is harder to do on broader, brand awareness campaigns but can still be tracked to an extent.

> But Adalytics’ reporting, which has not been independently verified by Check My Ads, tells a different story.

Take it with a grain of salt

This story is complex. If there was an obvious way for CMOs at major brands to distill this issue, such as a metric, they would do it. But instead, if they are brand advertising, they want a CPM that "looks right," and Google delivers that to them with garbage inventory. If they want pure return-on-advertising-spend, Google will show to people it knows will impulse buy, but the ads will be insanely expensive. You can't just arbitrage this as an ad buyer. Anyway, the agencies and media buyers in between the CMO and Google are aligned with Google, because they are paid a budget premium, so it's really their fault that they do not care about fraud.

My disclosure is: I make a purely interactive ad product that only appears in first-party inventory like in social media feeds. In my opinion this is a non-issue if you... Make ads people like.

Here's an example of a highly successful interactive ad creative: https://appmana.com/watch/virtualtestdrive - per 1 million visits, the average engagement time was 65s. A typical video ad has a median of 0s of watch time, and 2.1s on average (hence 5s YouTube ads).

There's nothing new here. Even John Oliver will talk about ads people like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Kfx2fANELo.

At the end of the day, either you make a good creative or you don't. Everything else is noise.

As I understand, the problem here is that Google wants to run your ads on third-party sites (to earn more), but you don't want to run ads there because third-party sites employ every trick possible to generate impressions even if real user never sees the ads.

If you care about money spent, you should calculate ROI for each third-party site and filter out those which give low returns. And not expect that Google will do that for you.

I briefly worked at a company that monetized videos with advertisements. The company would basically bundle many sites and get them video ads that the small sites wouldn’t otherwise get.

The company used GVP to provide ads to the site owners. Many of the sites were straight up serving pirated content monetized directly with gvp.

The way this was “allowed” was that the company would receive a DMCA request for the pirated content and we’d have to take it down… within 5 days. So we would wait 5 days and take it down.

In that delta, everyone made money. For the 5 days everyone made enough to stay in business and still “comply with the law”. Most of the company’s operating capital was sourced through this takedown period. 100’s of thousands a month.

It actually made the content more valuable because it introduced scarcity. The content was mostly Indian cricket matches and the only way to watch them online was pirated in this manner.

So justify it however you want, gvp and google ads in general are totally trash. Oh and we had frequent issues with advertising metrics being wrong between 5-25%. When I inquired… that’s just how they do it. It’s an “estimate.

Well, no one can complain that the right wing is being censored:

    RussiaToday.com
    Pravda.ru  
    WND.com  
    Zerohedge.com  
    Breitbart.com  
    Newsmax.com  
    Whatfinger.com  
    TheBlaze.com  
    TheFederalist.com
    Hannity.com

Half of those guys were kicked off Fox News.

Google is built on a super shaky basis? I think every serious thinking person on the internet has always known deep down that ads have been massively overhyped

Big brands don't care. They have massive budgets that they need to spend and are happy to spend them or else they get cut.

I've personally seen my video ads running muted on partner sites.

It kind of makes the analytics useless because there's most more inconsistency in the medium where the ads are displayed (eg, not YouTube) so you never know if fluctuations actually mean anything.

The way I see it..

1. Internet ads were supposed to solve the “who’s watching” problem. By letting advertisers target their audiences and display ads on vetted sites.

2. *but* Advertising companies also offer stuff (either browsers or product features) that are on the “bleeding edge” when it comes to protect their users privacy.

3. Marketing departments anywhere from big to small sized companies know and/or deal (kinda..) with advertising fraud cuz they want to “show work”/“good quarterly results”..

4. Most of the users, just want to freely access content in order to trick their minds into feeling amused when in reality their just bored

5. Only a small fraction of the remaining users (from 4.) are capable of understand and deal with all this..

So.. The Internet is either doomed if this continues, or in the process of becoming an even bigger trash can if “they” get way with this :/

Anyone here up to starting Internet 2.0?! :)

The real goal of this post is clear about half way down the page, de-funding disinformation from right-wing sources. My guess is that the group of website that they call out as problematic are actually great for getting ad viewers (older, non-tech savvy, gullible) that don't click skip. I would be less suspicious that this was a submarine article if the sites called out were roughly balanced left-right (by US standards, which are a bit different ;-).

Almost the entirety of Google's business is outright grift. From selling malicious ads, to forcing people to pay to stay on top of search for their own brand name, to tricks like this where ads are dishonestly sold or Google uses its position on both sides of the market to artificially boost prices, nothing about this company is or should be considered legitimate.

They simply operate as a taxation on businesses for junk marketing that, at best, treads water with organic results. And that filters down to every price we pay as consumers.

When you read stories like this, remember that you are paying more for everything so Google can do this trash.