I came across a pretty gross corner of this Google/IAC interplay a while ago. I was looking into the sources of our worst-quality paid traffic by various performance metrics, and found lots if of it coming through ads served on Google “search partners”, aka other search engines that can serve keyword-based Google ads on their own results pages and get a cut of the revenue. Many of these search engines are total garbage, like the ones that malware/malicious browser extensions will set as your default homepage. You and I might consider the traffic from such “search engines” as much less valuable, but Google enables the checkbox for advertisers to use these search partners by default, and even adds a message underneath saying, in effect, “most users choose to take advantage of our search partner network”, if you uncheck it.
It gets especially shady with IAC in particular, as they run a bunch of these “search engines” (not actually a search engine anyone has ever intended to use without being tricked into it) purely as a venue for PPC arbitrage: they run ads on Google for generic search terms, which link to their own search results pages, which display “search partner” Google ads. These results pages are highly optimized to trick people into clicking the ads, which they then get a cut of revenue on.
The traffic source that originally lead me to this rabbit hole was an IAC-owned Google search partner property, and our ads were running on their results pages. The ads had their full title linked and colored blue, and the “results” only had a tiny arrow link at the very end of the description, the titles were not clickable. Clearly this was sufficient to meet Google’s standards as a search partner.
This system is terrible for both regular internet users and for unsophisticated advertisers. It’s clearly and intentionally manipulative to both parties. I don’t know why I was surprised to learn that Google was not just enabling but actually encouraging this kind of stuff, but it still gives me heartburn. They are very clearly making tons of money from it, and have every incentive to keep the cash flowing.
Stuff like this is so depressing because I find myself wondering if I should just start being an asshole without any ethics. There doesn't seem to be any significant repercussions for that type of behavior and the people doing it are probably multi-millionaires many times over.
It's very little work, very low risk, and has a huge upside if you're "successful" at it. I also wonder if the people doing it think they're clever.
Seriously, bingo. And the idea that Google "didn't know" this is total garbage. Google's advertising business is not a neglected corner of the business.
Given so many sites run google analytics - google can run the metrics from click to dwell time etc.
What's weird - I don't have a phd in data-analytics, and I'm not google analytics expert, but it's pretty clear when some source of traffic is being tricked or the other one I had issues with (paid) to click through. Because they don't convert, and some bounce within a fraction a second.
And google couldn't determine this stuff was low quality?
I don’t sympathize with advertisers much but they must have lost so much money for basically nothing over the years with inflated metrics, malware served DAUs, outright clickfrauds etc. Google and scammers were the only ones who benefited out of it.
And still they don’t have any option other than to surrender to Google and Facebook if they have to reach their audience on web.
Advertisers can make accounts on Reddit and other forums and do product placement there or contact people on Instagram or Tiktok to do product placement.
I assume almost all commercial media is chock full of product placement.
I saw a pretty genius idea recently. I logged into a Bank of America cash rewards credit card account, and under a recent transaction at a pizza place, there was a link to a competing pizza place offering 10% cash back, double my usual cash back if I ate there by a certain date.
It gets especially shady with IAC in particular, as they run a bunch of these “search engines” (not actually a search engine anyone has ever intended to use without being tricked into it) purely as a venue for PPC arbitrage: they run ads on Google for generic search terms, which link to their own search results pages, which display “search partner” Google ads. These results pages are highly optimized to trick people into clicking the ads, which they then get a cut of revenue on.
The traffic source that originally lead me to this rabbit hole was an IAC-owned Google search partner property, and our ads were running on their results pages. The ads had their full title linked and colored blue, and the “results” only had a tiny arrow link at the very end of the description, the titles were not clickable. Clearly this was sufficient to meet Google’s standards as a search partner.
This system is terrible for both regular internet users and for unsophisticated advertisers. It’s clearly and intentionally manipulative to both parties. I don’t know why I was surprised to learn that Google was not just enabling but actually encouraging this kind of stuff, but it still gives me heartburn. They are very clearly making tons of money from it, and have every incentive to keep the cash flowing.