According to Solve Media 4 out of 5 web visitors from certain countries are not human traffic. The countries topping the ranks are Estonia (83%), Singapore (79%) and China (77%).
The firm positioning itself as someone focused on solving the bot problem, states that it reviews and average of over 270 million human verifications across more than 7,500 global publishers each month. The company seems to focus on manufacturing and marketing of CAPTCHA based solutions.
The CAPTCHA PROBLEM
I have not seen the CAPTCHA solution Solve Media markets, but it seems fair to assume that it’s not something the Chinese “CAPTCHA sweatshops” have an issue dealing with.
It is also unlikely that it could deal with the old crowd-sourcing trick, where the CAPTCHA farmers match the demand generated by conversion fraudsters with the supply provided by gullible porn site (and who knows what) surfers. Yes, that has been done for as long as there has been CAPTCHAs.
I want to assume that it does deal against attacks that are made using a $100 software like Captcha Sniper, which also have been available on the market as long as the CAPTCHA itself. Basically, as long as there is something to break, someone will find a way to break it. Usually in a way that is more cost-efficient, than preventing it.
How to really solve the problem?
One of the problems in the enterprise ad industry is that very few people really understand what is going on in terms of Fraud. Those that do, are not appropriately motivated to voice their concerns out.
There is also a social factor in play here. The people who make the decisions and have the loudest voices, tend not to be the ones who are technically the savviest.
The individuals who are likely to get (and care about) what’s going on in the fraud scene, are also the ones easily overpowered by the industry suits. The stories about international crime syndicates and such are not helping either, but instead make the problem seem too difficult, or even intimidating to solve.
One of the problems of the ad industry is that even the “right side” of the fence is rid with a plethora of issues. These issues include lack of transparency, mixed incentives and compensation practices ranging from cut-throat commissions to outright corruption.
Question to Solve Media
How do you validate that the 270 million per month are human, and if they are human, it’s the kind of human advertisers are actually interested in?
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COMMENT ON 4th of April 2015: In terms of the size of the conversion fraud problem, I’ve first hand investigated campaign data in China where more than 90% of all conversions were not legit conversions. One campaign in particular, with a US$40 million budget where at least 95% of the conversions were fraudulent regardless of use of Captcha. In this case the stakeholders genuinely thought that Captcha would be enough to protect their investment from fraud. They simply did not consider the possibility of being caught in such a way.