Fighting Online Click-Fraud Using Bluff Ads

Online advertising is currently the greatest source of revenue for many Internet giants. The increased number of specialized websites and modern profiling techniques, have all contributed to an explosion of the income of ad brokers from online advertising. The single biggest threat to this growth, is however, click-fraud. Trained botnets and even individuals are hired by click-fraud specialists in order to maximize the revenue of certain users from the ads they publish on their websites, or to launch an attack between competing businesses. In this note we wish to raise the awareness of the networking research community on potential research areas within this emerging field. As an example strategy, we present Bluff ads; a class of ads that join forces in order to increase the effort level for click-fraud spammers. Bluff ads are either targeted ads, with irrelevant display text, or highly relevant display text, with irrelevant targeting information. They act as a litmus test for the legitimacy of the individual clicking on the ads. Together with standard threshold-based methods, fake ads help to decrease click-fraud levels.Comment: Draf

Sale the seven Cs: Teaching/training aid for the (e-)retail mix

The ‘4Ps’ of the marketing mix have long been popular with students, tutors, trainers and practitioners as a learning and teaching aid. The purpose of this paper is to present an equivalent tool for retail and e-retail: ‘Sale the 7Cs’. The approach is by reference to other authors’ versions of the marketing, retail and e-retail mixes, distilled into a simplified framework: C1 Convenience; C2 Customer value and benefit; C3 Cost to the customer; C4 Computing and category management; C5 Customer franchise; C6 Customer care and service; C7 Communication and customer relationships. This simplified mnemonic is new for (e-)retail. Mini case examples are used to illustrate the applicability. These have a practical value for trainers and educators as specimen answers to activity exercises. Retailers may find the convenient 7Cs structure useful when planning strategies and tactics

Inefficiencies in Digital Advertising Markets

Digital advertising markets are growing and attracting increased scrutiny. This article explores four market inefficiencies that remain poorly understood: ad effect measurement, frictions between and within advertising channel members, ad blocking, and ad fraud. Although these topics are not unique to digital advertising, each manifests in unique ways in markets for digital ads. The authors identify relevant findings in the academic literature, recent developments in practice, and promising topics for future research

FraudDroid: Automated Ad Fraud Detection for Android Apps

Although mobile ad frauds have been widespread, state-of-the-art approaches in the literature have mainly focused on detecting the so-called static placement frauds, where only a single UI state is involved and can be identified based on static information such as the size or location of ad views. Other types of fraud exist that involve multiple UI states and are performed dynamically while users interact with the app. Such dynamic interaction frauds, although now widely spread in apps, have not yet been explored nor addressed in the literature. In this work, we investigate a wide range of mobile ad frauds to provide a comprehensive taxonomy to the research community. We then propose, FraudDroid, a novel hybrid approach to detect ad frauds in mobile Android apps. FraudDroid analyses apps dynamically to build UI state transition graphs and collects their associated runtime network traffics, which are then leveraged to check against a set of heuristic-based rules for identifying ad fraudulent behaviours. We show empirically that FraudDroid detects ad frauds with a high precision (93%) and recall (92%). Experimental results further show that FraudDroid is capable of detecting ad frauds across the spectrum of fraud types. By analysing 12,000 ad-supported Android apps, FraudDroid identified 335 cases of fraud associated with 20 ad networks that are further confirmed to be true positive results and are shared with our fellow researchers to promote advanced ad fraud detectionComment: 12 pages, 10 figure

Understanding the Detection of View Fraud in Video Content Portals

While substantial effort has been devoted to understand fraudulent activity in traditional online advertising (search and banner), more recent forms such as video ads have received little attention. The understanding and identification of fraudulent activity (i.e., fake views) in video ads for advertisers, is complicated as they rely exclusively on the detection mechanisms deployed by video hosting portals. In this context, the development of independent tools able to monitor and audit the fidelity of these systems are missing today and needed by both industry and regulators. In this paper we present a first set of tools to serve this purpose. Using our tools, we evaluate the performance of the audit systems of five major online video portals. Our results reveal that YouTube's detection system significantly outperforms all the others. Despite this, a systematic evaluation indicates that it may still be susceptible to simple attacks. Furthermore, we find that YouTube penalizes its videos' public and monetized view counters differently, the former being more aggressive. This means that views identified as fake and discounted from the public view counter are still monetized. We speculate that even though YouTube's policy puts in lots of effort to compensate users after an attack is discovered, this practice places the burden of the risk on the advertisers, who pay to get their ads displayed.Comment: To appear in WWW 2016, Montr\'eal, Qu\'ebec, Canada. Please cite the conference version of this pape

Pay-per-click advertising: A literature review

Digital marketing is being widely employed to efficiently and effectively market products/services to achieve increased sales and generate higher revenues. It allows businesses to effectively communicate desired content to their consumers. Pay-per-click (PPC) is one such form of digital marketing. PPC is often acknowledged for the different advantages it offers, and at the same time, it is notably criticised for fraud and other issues associated with its use. The literature on this subject, although limited, has invested considerable efforts in unveiling the pros and cons of employing PPC as a marketing/advertising strategy. This paper reviews 50 publications on PPC advertising to synthesise their findings and arrive at a common ground for understanding the digital presence and impact of this form of marketing. Alongside discussing the findings, observed limitations and opportunities for future research have been identified and reported