There's not enough humans on earth to generate the quantities of ad impressions

Curious to hear from folks who actually work in the online ad industry: I've repeatedly heard the author's claim (and other similar claims) repeated in multiple forums and chats about online advertising, i.e., 70% of ad impressions are bogus and driven by bots. I'm curious to know whether this is an actual problem and if so how the ad industry is handling this.

I am sure there is fraud, but a single Google page can show 10 advertisements and those all count as impression..

Musing: Japan has a lot of &quot;useless jobs&quot;, but these are basically social help in disguise: they keep money flowing to a lot of the population, including the elderly.<p>I wonder if the ad industry is a version of that: advertisers pay a lot of money and that money flows to overpaid programmers (us) making the latest JavaScript framework to, who knows what &quot;world-critical&quot; function.<p>Hollywood also has the strange accounting that most of a movie&#x27;s profits is spent in advertising it, i.e. the money flows into the studio&#x27;s subsidiary that pockets the money and spends a fraction of it to print and put up posters. I wonder if these subsidiaries are in tax havens...

15 trillion bid requests isn&#x27;t the best metric to use.<p>The SSP I used to work for had 150ish DSPs attached, of course not all of them received bid requests for a given incoming impression, no point sending a banner bid req to someone only interested in video.<p>But yeah, bid requests are more of a function of auction participants rather than unique impressions.<p>And we all know how ad infested websites can be these days, if you have say 10 ad spaces on a page, and 100 DSPs want to bid, you&#x27;re looking at up to 1000 bid requests generated from a single page view.<p>(OpenRTB has support for sending multiple impressions in a request, but when I was there, very few of our DSPs had implemented it).

Stupid is as stupid does.<p>As long as business is willing to throw big bucks at online advertising, there will be people looking to tap into the money stream and siphon it off. And by most accounts, they are pretty successful at it.<p>In most of the world, ad fraud is not even illegal. It&#x27;s like the perfect crime --- zero risk, all reward.<p>Instead of trying to prevent the fraud, the ad brokers running the auctions and networks are accused of being one of the participants. This is part of the multi-state antitrust case filed against Google.

classic dotcom bust logic.

aliens...