An interesting article in today’s Financial Times shows that
while Google takes advertising fraud very seriously and shows deep commitment
in fighting it, digital marketers are far from absolute protection against fake
views by bots, even against the primitive ones.
The article explains how European researchers’ findings “raise
questions about whether Google is doing enough to protect advertisers from
deception”, as an experiment recently showed that Google currently charges
customers for YouTube views generated by a robot. The most striking aspect of
the research is that the bots used in the experiment are not sophisticated at
all. Ruben Cuevas, the lead-researcher in the experiment explains, “It’s not
like we found a weird corner-case vulnerability. Anyone with a little knowledge
of coding could do this kind of thing.”
Google could be the clear market leader now, but this also
implies that Google is the primary target for such abuses. Google’s business model would be under a considerable risk if such researches continue to point
out to similar findings. It will be interesting to see if security and
anti-fraud issues will be a key competitive lever to shift the market dynamics.
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