Revealing the behind–the–scenes of a relatively unknown and unaccounted-for world of digital ad fraud, Babis Makridis’s investigative documentary adds yet another point to the ongoing debate on the necessity of antitrust action against Big Tech. Dynamically constructed and relying on multiple experts’ points of view, Unclickable opens up a new area of discussion that until now has escaped public attention even though its approximate losses amount to hundreds of millions of dollars per year, or – on average – at least 20%-30% of the total digital ad budgets of all the world companies, including the very notable cases of multinationals like Uber.
The mechanics of deception
Structured around a digital ad fraud operation, the director carries on with a few collaborators; the film gradually unravels an astonishing scale of the phenomenon facilitated by bots and the self-generating, and in the majority, nonsensical content of the multiple websites. Within a week or two, one can easily launch an internet site by scraping content from other already existing web pages. It is enough to launch several sites and generate traffic (with the bots) to get Google and Facebook ads that, from now on, pay for a site’s functioning. Technologically, it is an easy task, and once activated, a site draws ads from the ad agencies automatically. With a speed of light beyond anyone’s control. The main catch is the number of ad clicks generated by the bots. Noticeable in vast gaps between the numbers of the ad clicks and the actual visits to the web pages’ traffic analytic programmes, like Google Analytics, the bots-generated traffic leaves a significant fissure – the 20%-30% of clicks (on average, and by conservative estimates) are disappearing. Since the laws still do not regulate digital ads, capturing the ads by digitally-generated content sites, and hence the ads’ money, are not theoretically illegal. Once Google or Facebook bans a given site due to its offensive or nonsensical content (which happens rarely), it just closes down, and the next ones appear in its place.
one can easily launch an internet site by scraping content from other already existing web pages.
From clicks to chaos
The crucial importance of the law and government regulations becomes especially visible on the other side of the spectrum of digital ad fraud. To legitimise a site’s traffic (which, after all, also needs some «real people» to cover the bots-generated clicks), apps are encoded to automatically connect to a site and click on the ads once downloaded on an individual’s phone. Examples of people living in countries with loosely regulated mobile phone markets (Brazil, RPA) show how they pay extremely high prices for internet data that, in considerable part, are made of ads. It happens without a phone’s owner’s knowledge or agreement. On the one hand, advertisers (big and small alike) pay for 100% of the clicks on their ads placed on various sites by ad agencies through Google and Facebook (who share the vast majority of the substantial digital ads worldwide market).
On the other hand, individual mobile phone users pay for ads they don’t see due to malicious mobile apps downloaded from Google Play. In all these operations, Big Tech takes its cut off. Since it earns a considerable amount (digital ads make 98-99% of the total Facebook revenue and over 80% of Google’s), it is not interested in checking out or testing the truthfulness of the number of reported clicks.
Beyond the screen
Although seemingly we might not care about the ad spending of the world companies, in the long run, and at such a scale, it does affect the very core of the public space and, hence – democracy at a few levels simultaneously. The overcrowding of the internet by sites bringing in nonsensical, false, or extremist news financed by the ads takes money away from reliable, honest, and socially responsible journalism, as numerous bankrupted local news outlets show. Consequently, there are often no dependable sources of information on local government activities or other significant problems and events. The press’s basic raison d’être, a function of control over other participants in public life, is diminished to the point in which the auto-generated fabrications completely dominate the picture, leaving the most shocking abuses of power without a comment.
Additionally, millions of dollars go to radical, extremist, hate speech sites, further spreading, supporting, and, in a way, legitimising these views. They influence political elections and the choices of people who do not know what to think in a situation of information overload and unreliability. The scale of the digital ad fraud phenomenon has grown in recent years to a vast and alarming extent, and in a split second, in a virtual space far from human eyes and ability to comprehend, it encompasses the whole world escaping the laws of particular, even the most powerful, nation-states. The global spread of these operations circumvents the attention of all the parties involved except Big Tech, who, as the only player, has the tools to trace, control, and regulate the practice. It just apparently does not see a need to do so.
A detailed and wide-ranging journalistic investigation, like Unclickable, is the only way to reconstruct and display a mechanism of fraud crossing borders and law orders and affecting democratic life in many regions of the world, especially as it takes place in a constantly evolving area where digital technologies rule.
