zlacker

The article is just straight out wrong about "Google’s ad network charges per impression". The author clearly doesn't know anything about the area, made up some shit on how things could work, and just wrote it into their article with no fact checking.

You're right that attribution and measuring ROI is way harder and less precise for ads sold by impression than by click. That's why they're not the common form of advertising, especially on these kinds of ad networks. But for cases where the ads are per impression, the concerns about fraud would be exactly the same. It's not about a crawler accidentally generating impressions, it's about bots deliberately doing so.