If you have their IP addresses in your dashboard, go to Google Ads > Admin > Account Settings > IP Exclusions. Then, add the entire network/data center range there (i.e. 123.4.5.*). In 99% of cases, these bot networks are not run from residential providers. You can confirm IPs at https://ipgeolocation.io/
After running Google Ads for a couple of years, our current exclusion list has over 4000 networks just in the US.
This is one of the primary reasons why fraud actors purchase residential proxies in bulk now. Google "residential proxies for sale" for the tip of a huge grey/black market iceberg.
You know all those trojan infected smart TVs and home routers and such? That's one of the things they're doing.
also why hyperscalers are paying folks to host gpu clusters in their homes. its to get at tgeir IP, it has nothing to do with space, cooling, etc.
Which hyperscalers are doing that? I've heard of one startup trying this, XFRA, currently in early pilot phases. But I'd be pretty surprised to hear that AWS or Google are paying people to host GPU clusters in their home.
No that makes no sense. They only need a tiny device to act as a proxy. It makes no sense to colocate the expensive GPUs
Yeah, the usual approach here is to offer a free VPN service, and then piggyback traffic over the user’s internet provider. Much, much more scalable and cheaper than offering to put GPUs at a user’s home.
It makes sense when someone else is paying for the power. The AI capabilities of mobile cpus is for pushing cloud based AI to your device. You pay the power bill while retaining the same lack of privacy as cloud hosted AI.
I'm pretty sure the company that owns the compute is the one paying for the power. Who would agree to have an ugly noisy cube in their property that they have to pay maintenance for? What would they get out of that deal?
>also why hyperscalers are paying folks to host gpu clusters in their homes
Source? There's definitely shady people paying people to host proxies, but hyperscalers doing it would be surprising.
My understanding of it so far is that it is at most, 50 or 100 houses as a test... It's a startup that wants to make it wide scale but hasn't got there yet.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=span+resi...
Calling them a "hyperscaler" is a stretch. By all accounts it's some renewables startup that's trying to pivot into AI because obviously AI = $$$, and calling themselves a "hyperscaler" in the process. Calling them a "hyperscaler" makes as much sense as some guy who runs a homelab in his basement as a "datacenter".
https://www.span.io/blog/span-announces-xfra-a-distributed-d...
My thoughts exactly. In the current environment you could slap "AI" on a potato and get $$$ for it.
Yep.
And the pay for these things is "access to 500+ TB Jellyfin-like movie services for free"
Of course, it's all pirated out of country. And the pay is being a residential proxy.
And piracy being the only way to actually own, I'm not imaging this will stop anytime soon.
Residential proxies are achieved in many, many ways. The most common is simply people installing software and leaving some checkbox checked, or agreeing to it unknowingly. In the same way that smart TV downloadable apps and games tend to include them.
Wait, so I can have free movies and subvert the adtech business model at the same time? What's the catch?
One downside is that some websites will mysteriously stop working for you with no appeals process. Either because they flagged fraud attempts from your IP previously (like credential stuffing or using a stolen credit card), or because a risk assessor proactively flagged your IP as being rentable from a residential proxy dealer (e.g.: https://scamalytics.com/ip/64.178.177.226 - "Is this IP address part of a residential proxy network?").
Enabling the credential stuffing and stolen credit cards are also bad on their own. No sympathy for the ad companies, though.
Anyone can buy traffic on the proxy, not just click fraud, but cc fraud et al as well. Caveat emptor, it’s really not worth it compared to setting up a 3 USD per month Hetzner proxy box yourself, if you’re looking to pirate movies.
For some more context: We run a business based on data scraping and metered residential proxies have never been cheaper. Countries that used to be 10 USD/GB just ten years ago are down to 1 USD.
Exactly my thought. For, say, $50/month I can get a second ISP to my house, host the proxy (and only that) on that link, and enjoy free movies. It is cheaper than having 2-3 streaming service subscriptions.
Or for $5/mo you could have a mullvad subscription and a vpn-aware bittorrent client that knows how to pause if the vpn drops.
True but that option got a lot worse when they disabled port forwarding.
ehh, subvert is a stretch. But yes, you too can be a minor accessory to scams run by thieves to rob advertisers, with enriching the world's largest ad company as a side-effect. Not exactly a Robin Hood situation given that tons of the advertisers being robbed are just normal small developers trying to get their apps out there.
These residential proxies are also used by scrapers. From scraping stores to scalp merchandise, to scrapers of data for AI training.
Sounds awesome, what's the catch?
You also get to run credit card fraud purchases through your home internet connection, such fun times we live in.
[dead]
Grey? There's multiple conferences that "ethically sourced" proxy providers feature at now (ex: extractsummit.io)
Web scraping (for LLM inference / training) I guess has transformed "residential proxies" into a giant industry.
Isn't this the sort of thing Google is supposed to be doing for us?
What incentive do they have to do that kind of work? They get paid anyway and they've basically got no competition
Why would you expect the water company to check your water for poison?
I agree but that will eliminate a big cash cow for them.
Why can’t Google do this? Surely their data is better than yours.
They get paid for adverts to bots don’t they? Unrelated?
Nobody wants to admit just how bad the bot problem is, because it starts to dig into the fact that advertising isn't nearly as effective as advertisers let on
> advertising isn't nearly as effective as advertisers let on
Most marketers should know exactly how effective their ads are by measuring to the end of the funnel. This is standard for most business and while bots are a problem, if you're judging online advertising at the front end of the funnel that's to a large part on them for a bad setup and/or optimisation.
If the marketer is an employee or a consultant, is it in their interest to show that the ad-spend they are controlling is high ROI, or low ROI.
Maybe this is a cynical take, but, if they get to the bottom of things, and show their boss/client that the ad-spend is not returning so much, it seems it would portend bad things for the marketer.
I really don't know, and it seems like a very hard problem.
Maybe this is the time for that Upton Sinclair quote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it,"
Let the Google Ads account run dry, discover your Analytics never actually goes down. It was just donating to multibillionaires the whole time.
Taking a blind guess here because I have never worked at Google, but I would assume there is one organization that has the data, and another organization that can block IPs from clicking on the ads and consuming the spend. There is a byzantine process preventing that second org from getting the data along with a lack of motivation because it would decrease ad-spend, which is one of their key metrics. Org2 which deals with people clicking the ads is a bad place to work and no one who is actually good sticks around long enough to navigate the process and implement this, so the can gets perpetually kicked down the road.
Tends to be how it goes once you reach a certain size.
Google's AdSpam/fraud/bot-prevention team was, when I worked there, world class and fairly well funded, took their job seriously, and had access to all the data. It's an existential threat to the ad business, because if Google gets a reputation for being full of bots/spam, then the advertisers will bid lower per click/conversion to compensate, which means that legitimate website publishers will get paid less and go to other networks, which is a feedback loop that leads to the entire market collapsing (see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons). It's absolutely worth refunding/zero-rating huge amounts of advertiser spend to avoid that situation, and they do.
It's not that they're not trying, it's just a very hard problem.
Fair, I retract my cynical conjecture
Problem 1: Buyers cannot tell if a product is good or bad, so they offer less money and good sellers may leave.
Suppose 50% of used laptops are good and worth $1,000, while 50% are bad and worth $400. Since you cannot tell which one you are buying, the average value is 0.5x1000 + 0.5x400 = $700, so you will not want to pay more than about $700.
But owners of good laptops may refuse to sell for $700, so more good laptops leave the market and the chance of buying a bad one increases. And the only guy selling for $700 is the lemons.
Problem 2: The theory assumes buyers already know how many bad products are in the market, but in real life they often do not.
Its obvious this market for lemons can’t be true
Just to be clear, this is different to the problem of Google ads that link to malware and fake banking websites and promotion of cryptocurrency scams isn't it?
it's also just flat-out unsexy from a product/MBA-brained perspective to push for something that will negatively impact metrics for your users. I ran into this when I was advocating for onboarding a third-party provider that would filter out automated/spambot email clicks thus decreasing the north star metrics our users had for engagement (even though it was truthier and would provide more accurate targeting and some of our most senior people had been advocating for for years)
the only reason I got the go-ahead for the effort was because one of our upstart competitors who was handily eating our lunch had implemented this years ago, started advertising based on it, literally pointed to the fact that we didn't do this yet, and then this was followed quickly by all of our other competitors implementing this, too. at this point we were well inducted into the illustrious halls of companies who stopped giving a shit about their core product with leadership blaming everyone but themselves for the fact that we were churning faster than we were net-new-ing
and even then it was a half-assed, resource-starved implementation that got dumped on regularly. have left the org since and couldn't be happier
also observe that Musk did the opposite, counting any attention whatsoever on a tweet as a view, such as a 1 pixel sliver appearing at the bottom of the viewport as you scroll, boosting numbers and all the Twitter posting addicts praised him for it when he did it
Alphabet has claimed to be fighting ad fraud for many many years.
That is not how an organization fighting ad fraud would structure itself.
Alphabet does not have an abundance of technical incompetence. But it does have the strongest of incentives to ensure ad budgets get spent quickly and no meaningful disincentives.
I mean what’s the OP going to do, go to Google’s competition?
You mean, Instagram and TikTok, and now, ChatGPT? Absolutely. Depends on your product but Google ain't the only game in town.
Google is also competent enough to know that taking spam & fraud seriously is incentive-aligned in the medium term. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons.
I mean if you could show Google know they're charging people for ads they're knowingly showing to robots then a few €Billion of fines for fraud should be following.
Because doing this would reduce their profits.
Admitting in public how bad the bot and fraud problem would be, metaphorically speaking, shooting their primary revenue source in the dick.
Is there an open database of this?
There is https://knock-knock.net/, which is similar
Yeah if there's a DB that would be helpful - I'm not currently capturing the IP, but I'll see if I can add it in a future release.
+1
Couldn't you just give up on the main business and sell this list as a service?
That should be an RPZ feed!
I suggest that Google should be doing that job for you.
It is absolutely ridiculous that you have been either victim shamed, blamed or simply neglected by Google into doing it yourself.
In a mall, you expect to see mall cops ... where are they?
Why Google can't detect it by themselves?
Why doesn't Google do this automatically? /s
[flagged]