Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots
When I worked in adtech, I proposed a simple solution to ad fraud on our platform - assume any UA coming from an IP range owned by a cloud provider was a bot and don't show them ads, don't count their impressions.<p>Worst case, people using a VPN hosted on EC2 might not see an ad, but I was certain they'd cope. Best case, higher quality traffic increases yields.<p>The business team vetoed that, it would adversely impact their numbers in the current quarter, and well, a significant proportion of their total comp was bonuses tied to those numbers. Also, the shareholders seemed to be of the mindset that has infected cryptocurrency speculators where no matter what, the spice must flow, wait, I mean, the number go up.<p>Then there were all the "bonuses" and "incentives" negotiated with big advertisers or publishers. We just referred to them as kickbacks, because they totally are, but labeling something in code as kickbackPercentage was verboten. Just in case.<p>Advertising has always been corrupt. Bots just corrupt it a little further.