Buzzcity Advertisement Loophole

BuzzCity loophole which publishers are utilizing to make money. Inept system of advertising publishing and fraud detection by the advertiser..

Recently BuzzCity - A mobile publishing and advertising agent, junked its server-to-server request based advertising system. This move by BuzzCity had already been speculated by mobile industry stalwarts as BuzzCity was achieving immense success and profits from its banner advertising (mostly in an deceiving manner). Such a move now allows them to steal loads of traffic from innocent publishers. When no AD shows up for the banner system, traffic gets diverted to its MyGamma Social Portal and this same traffic is resold by BuzzCity to potential advertisers, thus effectively degrading mobile traffic value.


This Singaporean conglomerate by Chinese (no offense to the community) thieves has loads of tricks up its sleeves but it fails to realize that by itself its not a foolproof, nor is its system.

BuzzCity utilizes banner impression data collection by employing a image publishing system which detects the IP and browser string i.e. User Agent details. These details are then matched with the click data to figure out if the click was genuine or fraud. This system of click fraud detection is effective but it also is prone to serious manipulations. The following is the complete lowdown upon the vulnerability of BuzzCity in detecting smart-fraud clicks.

Consider Situation 1:
User ABC visits a mobile page, the user finds a BuzzCity advertisement banner on the page, clicks on it gets redirected to a landing page: All advertisement portals will consider this as genuine click as the loading of the banner allowed for detection of Pone Browser and IP.

Consider Situation2:
User ABC visits a mobile page, finds a banner loaded on the page and clicks some other link and gets redirected to a paid advertisements landing page of BuzzCity. The advertising network will consider the click as a valid one and will even pay accordingly without any hassle if the CTR percentage is maintained below 3. But this click is not a genuine click, the ad link is not placed under the Ad banner. If its hidden behind some lucrative text like Win 100 $ or Claim your Free Gift , then in such a case it is a fraud click.
You will find considerable presence of Situation 2 fraud clicking with BuzzCity.

The network just does not give a hoot about this ongoing rampant fraud. Given the fact that BuzzCity is also benefiting from this system as 80 percent of the time their banner Ads redirect to their MyGamma portal and the publisher does not earn even a cent for that specific click. The actual looser in such a situation isthe honest publisher. The Chinese r known to bring down manufacturing costs and make living better, but BuzzCity is hell bent in making honest web publisher starve and remove the quotient of profitability from mobile web publishing.

The Advertisement loophole of BuzzCity can be exploited by anybody who has minimum knowledge of html tags; the sad part is that no notable organization or person has protested against this cumulative degrading of mobile web. The Cost Per Click of mobile based clicks is falling everyday and it seems that not even Apple can bring profitability back to this sector until BuzzCity is shut down...

Posted in: Hidden secrets Investigation