As most of you know to your sorrow, I really, really hate adtech and frequently rail against it. The harm they do to ordinary users like you and me is manifest. They invade our privacy, follow us around the Internet, accumulate dossiers on us and sell them to anyone willing to pay.
But, it turns out, they’re shafting the advertisers too. Not just little white lie exaggerations but outright criminal fraud. Nandini Jammi has an startling thread that tells the story of how Uber lost over $100M from their advertising budget due to adtech fraud. The \$100M represents \(2/3\) of their advertising budget so it’s a significant amount.
The TL;DR is that one of the Twitter tongs was after Uber to stop advertising with a site they were politically opposed to and when Uber complied by canceling \$15M of advertising, they noticed no difference in their results. Unlike many advertisers, Uber actually has some technical prowess, so they started looking at logs to see what was happening. What they discovered was flat out click fraud. As a result, they canceled all their adtech advertising—over \$100M worth—and found that it still didn’t make any difference in their results.
As the thread says, most executives in charge of booking these advertisements have no idea how to monitor the results or tell if they’re being defrauded. If you’re not employed by adtech, your interests are aligned with those who wish to end it once and for all. There are plenty of problems with having the government trying to fix this but the whole thing would collapse in an instant if the advertisers just told them to go away. In the meantime, you and I can help by blocking as many tracking scripts as we can.