Google trainee mistakenly launched a yellow box ad campaign with a budget of about $ 10 million

Electronic stock exchanges, where securities trading is conducted, conduct tens of thousands of transactions per second. Successful or not will be bidding, sometimes decide milliseconds. Unfortunately, sometimes the employees of the stock exchanges make mistakes that turn into million losses - this has happened more than once, and probably will continue to happen.

The other day it became known about a similar error made, however, not on the stock exchange, but in the advertising system from Google. A trainee corporation, while undergoing training, accidentally launched an advertising campaign with a modified click price, where a simple yellow rectangle was being promoted as an advertised object. The error cost the company $ 10 million.

Moreover, the advertising campaign was active for only 45 minutes, but during this time many publishers managed to host it. According to representatives of the corporation, Google will not withdraw money from the accounts of those who have placed advertising.

It is worth noting that the erroneous advertising campaign was launched during the trainee's training - besides him, other trainees also launched their own advertising campaigns. But only one person made a mistake, most likely due to an oversight. It went unnoticed for 45 minutes, which is an entire era in systems of this kind.

The mistake was also in the fact that the intern increased the cost of advertising by 10 times compared with the standard indicator. Thus, CPM exceeded $ 25. The average market price of similar advertising is $ 2- $ 4 per thousand impressions.

An intern studied Google's AdX system, it allows you to buy advertising space on thousands of websites and applications in real-time auction format. The problem with this particular advertising campaign was also due to the fact that due to the high cost of buying the place, many of the resources participating in the advertising exchange systems in advertising networks placed it.

Immediately after the end of the advertising campaign, which cost $ 10 million, Google corporation “took measures” to prevent this from happening again.