Advertising impression and click fraud is a major problem faced by all ad networks large and small, with a small minority of fraudulent publishers inflating their ad views with a botnet.

Hackers infect a series of home and office computers by offering infected files from file sharing sites or targeting security vulnerabilities in older browsers. Once the computers have been infected, the hackers group the computers together into a network or botnet, which they then use for a variety of illegal activities.

Botnets are commonly used for bringing down websites with distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, sending spam, finding new machines to infect, and in this case generating fraudulent clicks and impressions.

In this video, the team from Forensiq isolated a particularly malicious bot and infected a virtual computer to become part of the botnet to show how billions of fraudulent impressions are generated per day by such activity.

There is a reason for advertising networks delaying payment for a short period to obtain payments from brands and advertising agencies, but many networks including Casale Media, Valueclick Media, and Google AdSense manage to pay their publishers NET 30 or better.

NET 45 or NET 60 are not uncommon, but pushing towards NET 120 is a worrying sign that SAY Media is struggling may be struggling cash-flow. The company has traditionally paid NET 90 which is quite rare in itself, but struggling with that time frame is a concern to publishers that rely on them for ad sales.

The network has offered publishers the chance to pay a fee to be paid earlier, but this will do little allay publisher’s issues with the change in terms.

In a message sent to publishers, SAY Media said:

To our valued publisher partners

As you are probably aware, the last year has seen an escalation of brands, agencies and networks taking longer to pay. This has impacted companies across the advertising landscape, including Say Media. Like many others, we have to adjust our payment terms in an effort to combat this trend. Therefore, effective April 1, Say Media is moving to net 120-day payment terms for all publishers.

We recognize that many of you would like accelerated payments so we have partnered with FastPay, the industry leader in advanced payment solutions, to offer more flexibility in payments. Through FastPay, you have the option to accelerate payments to Net 30, 60 or 90-day terms for a small fee. Through this partnership, all payments, regardless of payment terms, will be processed by FastPay.

The Financial Times Group has been one of the best to adapt from the print to digital worlds, with 55% of revenues now coming from digital and services.

Their 652,000 print an digital subscriptions now account for 63% of revenues, compared to 48% in 2008, but that growth has been at the expense of advertising revenues that have fallen from 52% in 2008 to 37% today.

In their financial figures published earlier this week, the FT described advertising sales as “short term and generally weak”, but also said they have grown market share with luxury and financial sectors that have shown good growth in digital.

The FT has also developed an technological solution for matching advertisers’ content to relevant FT.com articles in real-time using semantic profiling called FT Smart Match, although the figures from this source were not split out in the figures.

Say Media is on track to become profitable in the second half of this year according to CEO and co-founder Matt Sanchez, with the company focusing on the verticals in which Say Media has already established a footing such as technology and entertainment.

Here’s the message that Sanchez sent out to Say Media employees:

Sayers,

This morning we had to say goodbye to some really talented Say Media employees and it was tough. It’s been a difficult day for all of us, and I know that many of you are feeling the absence of our colleagues and friends. We did not make these decisions lightly; each person that left today has contributed to our mission and will be missed.

Two and a half years ago, we set out on a course to build the media company of the future. We knew it wouldn’t be easy, and along the way the media landscape has continued to shift. We’ve navigated from ad network to media company while the transactional display market has commoditized on exchanges as predicted. We’ve invested heavily in this transformation, and are coming out the other side with a solid foundation for the future.

We have built out a world-class publishing platform, transformed our sales team, evolved our offering to content-led marketing programs and filled out our brand portfolio with talent and brands we are all very proud of. Our focus on Point-of-View content is working. Our brands are deeply engaging, growing communities of readers. The publishing platform on which these brands sit boasts a pipeline of new products that are poised to change the media landscape. And our advertising solutions are impressive and working hard for our marketing partners.

That said, the time is right for us to transition aggressively to continued growth with profitability. To that end, we’ve made a set of hard decisions aimed at right-sizing our business with a greater focus on supporting our strong content brands, growing sales and building innovative publishing and advertising products — while at the same time achieving profitability in the second half of this year.

Each and every one of you is incredibly important to what we are building at Say. Your passion, intelligence, energy and loyalty are what make this company and our culture so special. Today’s actions were painful but necessary for us to move forward, and I am confident we are on the right path to creating the media company of the future.

We’ll get together tomorrow for an All Hands, and I’ll share more detail about this action and our plans for the year. As always, please reach out to me if you have any questions.

Thanks,
Matt

Twitter first announced its advertising offering in April 2010, and since then has developed “Promoted Tweets” and “Promoted Accounts” which allow businesses to pay and get their updates seen and their profiles followed on the 140-character social networking service. They then opened up a “self-serve” advertising tools for advertisers in March last year, and followed that with an “Ads API” for large-scale programmatic buying of advertising campaigns.

It took the company until last week to announce that ads could finally be targeted based on keywords tweeted or user engagement with tweets, something many hoped the company would have released sooner to compete with Google’s AdWords.

It is now all ready to go, however, with Twitter’s Senior Director of Product for Revenue Kevin Weil announcing:

“We’re ending our invite-only period and opening signups for our self-serve ad platform to all users in the U.S.”

This roll-out means that Twitter can finally start competing with the likes of Facebook and LinkedIn for advertising dollars, with some imagaining the company to be pushing nearly $1 billion in revenues, largely from ads, in 2014, with an IPO likely soon to follow.

It appears the company is still losing advertisers to competitors Google and Facebook, and these sales fell below analysts’ expectations.

Advertisers continue to shun Yahoo’s traditional content niche-targeted banner offerings in favour of the lower priced and contextually targeted advertisements offered by Google and the huge reach and demographic targeting of Facebook.

Though net income soared 36% in the first quarter, Yahoo reported that sales of display ads decreased 11% and search revenue, excluding sales passed to partner sites, dropped 10% to $425 million.

Yahoo, the biggest U.S. Web portal, also forecast sales that fell short of analysts’ estimates as it continued to lose advertisers to Google and Facebook. As a result, eMarketer is predicting that Yahoo’s share of the U.S. market will shrink to 7.7% this year, from 9% in 2012.

The adverts will only be targeted to four groups of users, men under 30, women under 30, mean over 30 and women over 30, but Facebook is apparently charging $1 million per group per day. That’s a cool $4 million per day.

Facebook has been focusing on generating more income since its IPO last year, with outcries from various groups from organisations being upset about being charged to reach more of their page subscribers, to users angered by the continual changes to Facebook’s privacy terms and settings.

Huge auto-playing video ads may prove popular with advertisers for the sheer reach of the campaigns, but they are likely to be very distracting to users, and if they also auto-play audio and some fear then they will cause an uproar from the sites’ billion users.

As the vast majority of Google’s advertising revenues come from CPC and CPM advertising, Performics, which later became Google Affiliate Network, never really integrated into Google’s business. Their also never matched those of the other established brands in the affiliate/CPA space such as LinkShare (UK), Commission Junction, and Trade Doubler, and this has resulted in its closure.

In an email to Google Affiliate network publishers, the statement read:

Our goal with Google Affiliate Network has been to help advertisers and publishers improve their performance across the affiliate ecosystem. Cost-per-action (CPA) marketing has rapidly evolved in the last few years, and we constantly evaluate our products to ensure that we’re focused on the services that will have the biggest impact for our advertisers and publishers. To that end, we’ve made the difficult decision to retire the Google Affiliate Network and focus on other products that are driving great results for clients.

Publishers can continue to earn revenue through the AdSense network. And marketers can take advantage of other CPA-oriented Google tools like Product Listing Ads, remarketing and Conversion Optimizer to drive valuable online sales and conversions. These areas are growing rapidly and we continue to invest significantly in them.

We’ll continue to support our customers as we wind down the product over the next few months. While we will no longer be adding new product functionality, we will maintain the platform during the transition period. We plan to disable publisher relationships from advertiser programs on July 31, 2013. Publisher payments will be disbursed for network activity generated through this date. We will continue to make certain functionality available through October 31, 2013 for retrieving reports, reconciling orders, and processing payments.

A huge thanks to all our advertisers, publishers and the team that has worked tirelessly on Google Affiliate Network over the past few years. We look forward to helping you grow your business in the future.

If you have any questions, please contact us.

Sincerely,
The Google Affiliate Network Team

In a message to its publishers and advertisers, the adBrite team said:

Over the last few weeks, adBrite and its management have been evaluating the go-forward plan for the business. Given market conditions and certain financial liabilities, in working with our lenders, we have decided to cease operations on Feb 1, 2013.

This is a difficult decision for all of us at adBrite. However, after much deliberation this seems to be the best course of action despite the impact it will have on all the employees, clients and partners who helped build this business. There will be a team in place as needed to assist with winding down your campaign, and final reporting and invoicing.

Thank you for being part of the adBrite community.

The adBrite Team

It was well known that the company was looking for a buyer, and CEO Hardeep Bindra had said that progress was being made in this regard, but that deal fell through “a couple of weeks ago”.

Whilst some people found success with AdBrite, some we never recommended them here on AdBalance because we found their rates very low and ads of poor quality. We have also heard from a number of advertisers that the traffic was pretty much junk. Both of these factors likely helped push the company towards ceasing operations.

If you are a publisher looking to replace your adBrite, we recommend Casale Media and ValueClick Media.

Google’s AdSense is bar far the widest used advertising network on the web at the moment, as they offer the widest number and variation of advertisers, with the ads contextually matched to the text content on the page. The contextual matching is a clever piece of technology, that combined with Google’s own huge reach with advertisers has meant that AdSense is a very profitable business for the search giant. But how will Facebook fare?

Before Google launched AdSense they were already very successful in selling ads across Google search results pages, where the ads were targeted to what people are searching for – a very lucrative proposition for advertisers. This meant that a vast array of advertisers were already on board before they moved into the ad network business.

Facebook, by contrast, has had a tough time selling advertising across its own social network. Facebook has access to more personal data and people’s likes and dislikes than anyone else, but they just have not been very successful in turning this into advertising profits. Large brand advertisers have commented on how poor the results they were getting from Facebook campaigns were, and this has been a major issue for the company. With the launch of their own external ad network, Facebook is hoping that the lack of performance on ads on Facebook.com will not put advertisers off and will not be repeated on the wider web. Is it possible that Facebook.com advertising’s poor performance is down to how users interact with Facebook? Maybe, but I won’t be celebrating an AdSense competitor for a while yet.