Reliably detecting humans on the Internet

1/ There’s ONE big unsolved problem for anyone who’s interested: detecting humans on the Internet.

It has potential to unlock billions of dollars of value. Here’s how.

2/ Today, some of the biggest tech companies (Google, Facebook, Twitter) make billions of dollars by monetising human attention.

Digital ad industry is total of $280Bn.

3/ The reason Facebook, Google make this amount of money is because their algorithms for detecting bots are closed source.

There’s a continual arms race between click-farms / bot-makers and bot detecting algorithms at these companies.

4/ Even then the problem of fake clicks in digital is massive. P&G recently pulled out of FB

Many other companies are following the suit.

5/ In the offline world, the cost of viewing an advertisement is high. To claim higher TV advertising rates, a TV channel will have to purchase millions of TVs, keep them ON and then somehow convince advertisers that those are genuine watchers.

6/ In the digital world, since ad viewing is happening on the Internet: it’s hard to convince whether at the other end, there’s a person who watched an ad or a bot.

7/ This problem worsens significantly in the blockchain world. Imagine that your bot-detecting code is open source, it’ll be trivial to beat it and claim advertising money.

8/ Reliably detecting human attention seems one of the positives going for centralised, closed source systems like FB/Google.

9/ Users will not prefer to pay for content directly as they’ve been used to free content, so advertisers are an important party in our digital economy.

10/ I’m not sure how this can get solved. An obvious answer is captchas but they get broken constantly (and isn’t a great user interface).

11/ Anyone who is able to detect humans reliably on the Internet will create billions of dollars worth of value in our economy.

Any takers? Your opinion?

Join 150k+ followers