Spambots, strings of letters, numbers and symbol$, read through the code of the Internet and cause mischief, especially in the digital advertising world.

Don’t feel like watching a video, no problem. Here’s the quick read.

What is a bot?

In the sense of the internet, the digital world, a bot is not a physical robot you can touch with your physical hand, like the Bicentennial Man. A bot is software that has been programmed to perform certain tasks across the internet. That task could be along the lines of going into a platform, clicking a button and downloading a picture, and then that picture will be stored in your computer.

However, people took this concept of a bots to a whole new level by doing malicious activities with the bot, and in this sense, that’s what is known as a spambot.

Malicious Bots, a.k.a. Spambots

One example of spambot activity is for a bot to go out across the World Wide Web and find email addresses, so if you’ve ever had your email address published on a public site, or if you’ve given your email address to an organization and they’ve published it publicly, a spambot can go through and search different webpages, different websites and then find all of these email addresses and create a database.

Now, the owner of that spambot, who also owns the database, he or she can sell that database of email addresses to whomever he or she wants. The people that purchase this database can now spam all of the email addresses, so if you’re one of those email accounts, you would receive random emails from whoever purchased the database.

Spambots in Digital Advertising

In the case of advertising, spambots are generating clicks, impressions and views. Clicks impressions and views are what determine the cost of advertising in the digital world, so if you’re an advertiser and you go to a publisher or ad exchange and say, “Here’s my advertisement. I want it to receive at least 100 impressions.” Then the publisher or the ad exchange says, “Okay, it’s $0.05 per impression”, so in total, you would have to pay $5 for your 100 impressions.

But what happens when it turns out half of your 100 impressions are actually generated from spambots? You’re an advertiser and you have an advertising budget; and half of that advertising budget has now just been wasted, because half of it is being spent on fake users; the other half is going towards genuine users.

Transparent Data

At NOIZ, our goal is to make it so 100% of the impressions you receive are genuine. We’re going to filter out all of the spambots, all of their annoying clicks, impressions and views, and we’re going to have genuine, clear, transparent data that we’ll provide to advertisers, publishers and everyone involved in the NOIZ network.

To learn more about how we’re doing this, check out our cognitive ad video.

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