Disclosure: I also work for a company that specializes in fighting advertising fraud.
I think this is either willful ignorance or a complete misunderstanding of the fraud ecosystem. It's not about click through rates by a long shot.
But since the OP's main argument seems to be how the bigger ecosystem of online advertising already accounts for fraud, let's take that further. With this attitude, he's effectively saying that:
- They're okay with indirectly sponsoring the spread of viruses and trojans (rationale being: it's cheap!)
- They're okay with paying some dudes with some smart scripts (eg. the fraud mechanisms) the same amount of money as hard-working content creators and publishers
- And they don't care enough about the budget either. Accountability is apparently a fairy tale in this context?
The industry is under heavy fire regarding this subject as it is, and I'm not sure whether this attitude is going to further the conversation.
I've worked with quite a few pieces of security software that rely on user tracking, and the referrer information was only used (if at all) to tie-in with other parts of the system (ie. which marketing channel brought the user in).
While the concern for user privacy is certainly understandable, abolishing the HTTP referer does not solve the issue. In fact it can be argued that it could do harm than good - basically every web based business relies on it in one way or another (customer acquisition channels, news mentions, backlinks, attribution, etc).
The referrer itself is not at all used in tracking the user - as the visitor data is usually aggregated by referring source. Fingerprinting and evercookies are much more common ways of tracking individual users, and you can bet that there are even more advanced methods available for government agencies with service-level access.
The problem with that, and "native" advertising in general is that it's a form of affiliate marketing, where the brand has little to no control over how obnoxious and spammed the delivery will be.
Not to mention the fact that brand advertisers are really picky on where they are being promoted. They're dipping their toes in real time bidding platforms, but that's a whole different beast to tackle.
Most of these bots seem human by traditional tracking systems (Google, Facebook) because they posses the same browser cookies as the human user who's machine is infected.
Branded campaigns for example have no such easy way to measure conversions - and since multiple advertisers at the same time get hit by a fraud operation at different rates, the loss is not evenly distributed, not easy to track, etc.
Add to that the fact that a lot of companies only care if the ROI is positive, no matter the cost, with the middlemen making money both on bot generated and human generated impressions, and you've got a whole messy business on your hands.
Source: our company just won 500k in investment at Slush to battle this specific problem.
I think this is either willful ignorance or a complete misunderstanding of the fraud ecosystem. It's not about click through rates by a long shot.
But since the OP's main argument seems to be how the bigger ecosystem of online advertising already accounts for fraud, let's take that further. With this attitude, he's effectively saying that:
- They're okay with indirectly sponsoring the spread of viruses and trojans (rationale being: it's cheap!)
- They're okay with paying some dudes with some smart scripts (eg. the fraud mechanisms) the same amount of money as hard-working content creators and publishers
- And they don't care enough about the budget either. Accountability is apparently a fairy tale in this context?
The industry is under heavy fire regarding this subject as it is, and I'm not sure whether this attitude is going to further the conversation.